Printable Version of Topic

Posted by: RDH(Ghost In The Machine)

Well this has been an exciting week at castle Wikivania.
First Jimbozo is forced to clip his founder's wings, and now Wizardman (who owes his seat to him) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitration_Committee/Noticeboard&diff=360854035&oldid=360788033#Notice_of_Resignation

Given how much he craves petty-power and enjoys the game, I'm somewhat skeptical about the above. Ex-ArbCons really don't have much influence and no power, unlike under the Fred Bauder court. There has to be more going on here.

Speculation?
(Comicals are always welcome!)

Anyone with inside info?
(Please PM me, if you don't wish to post it here;)

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

No great loss.



Money on the table that he is going to be outed as a sock of a "banned" user.

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

Ahhh yes... the ArbCom. They were big back in the day. What ever happened to those guys?

Posted by: EricBarbour

Would not be surprised. He's already been caught violating COI, and trying to http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=27930 the evidence.

(And please don't try to tell me he isn't Dan Tylicki, former Baldwin-Wallace College student. Too much proof.
He even http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_Baldwin_(educator)&dir=prev&action=history about the college's founder.)


Don't know, don't care, please don't encourage them to "do something"......

Posted by: MZMcBride

Or what? This site would have something to discuss?

Posted by: gomi

Oh, between Wiki-Porn, Larry Sanger, "malamanteau" words, Jimbo's founder bits, and the like, we've had plenty to discuss lately. Boring old ArbCom would simply be a distraction. Try to keep up, McBride.

Posted by: RDH(Ghost In The Machine)

(Warned you I'd nick that pic Cedric

Or he knowingly covered for someone else's sock.
I place 500 Quatloos on each contingency.




True.
But too often in the midst of the big stories the http://wikitruth.info/index.php?title=A_Broken_Heart http://community.livejournal.com/wp_fnord/22062.html.

Posted by: Ottava

I'm surprised no one mentioned that he was busily approving Theleftorium's blatantly plagiarised GANs to help him get through the WikiCup and, when pointed out that there were major plagiarism concerns he just shrugged his shoulders and continued to pass pages with blatant plagiarism without any care.

This was while sitting on the ArbCom, after all. I could also point out that he started the whole Persian Empire war and I was involved in it mostly to defend his reputation, and then he bailed on me during the ArbCom trial (funny how the major incident leading up to the matter isn't mentioned at all).

Posted by: everyking

Or maybe it's just like he said, maybe he's preoccupied with writing content and doesn't want to hang onto an ArbCom seat when he's not doing any of the work. Maybe?

Posted by: everyking

Interestingly, Hersfold http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration_Committee/Noticeboard#Resignation. That leaves 11 active arbitrators. Aren't there supposed to be 18? Maybe someday people will listen to the two simple reforms I've been proposing: full annual elections, and filling vacancies by promoting the next ranking candidate from the last election.

Posted by: EricBarbour

That would require "reform", silly boy. It won't happen. The whole thing will collapse first.

Posted by: everyking

Actually, there was an RfC on the process last year, and surprisingly enough the community's preferences were adopted. So it's really not an issue of inertia, corruption, or anything like that: it's just bad decision-making. There was a vote on the full annual election proposal, and it was resoundingly rejected. People want "institutional memory", I suppose. I say if someone has a memory worth preserving, they should be re-elected every year. Personally I think the ArbCom would be better off forgetting absolutely everything it did before 2009 (except perhaps for the purposes of "truth and reconciliation"...), and even for the period since then some selective amnesia would be beneficial.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

No great loss, either.

Who do you think is the next to go?

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

SirFozzie.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Personally, I can see Mailer Diablo bowing out...in terms of temperament, he doesn't really fit in with the others.

Posted by: SirFozzie

If someone gives you good odds on that, let me know. I could make a fortune.

No, seriously, have no reason to, not burned out, still find things a challenge.. and still learning things (Alastair 2 was my first draft decision), for example

Posted by: Cla68

I think you guys may start getting snowed-under without Wizardman, Hersfold, and the others who have left to help share the load. Why not have an out-of-cycle election in a couple of months? You can say that you're doing it because it was suggested on Wikipedia Review.

Posted by: everyking

Why have an out-of-cycle election? Just go down the list--much simpler.

Posted by: EricBarbour

It won't happen. And you know damned well why---it would be "out of process", or
"unauthorized", or whatever flaky term Wikilawyers use to keep anything from changing.

If you like, I'll loan you a dollar. So you can buy yourself a clue.

Posted by: SirFozzie

My personal thoughts... The committee has ducked below 11 before, in the past few years.. this is why they bumped the committee up to 18.. to have this bit of a cushion. We'll be back up to 13 shortly (MD is back, and Cool Hand Luke has stated that he will be returning shortly), so I don't really see a need.

Also, other reasons:

1) Elections are a pain in the ass to set up and to administer. Trust me, we're learning that right now with the CU/OS elections.

2) We already have a CU/OS election running till the end of May, I think even trying to have a quick election would be time consuming (quick meaning, what, 2 weeks to nominate, 2 weeks for questions, 2 weeks for voting? That'd take us to Mid July, and then 2 more weeks to get everyone identified to the foundation and up to speed with the various mailing lists and the like.. August.. and then there's another election starting three months from then?

Also, here's something to consider.. the Committee's workload is, quite frankly, not that big right now. We may or may not be opening the A Nobody case that was held in abeyance, but right now, we have no case requests (the first time in a very long time I can remember there isn't at least one request), We have one case already in voting (Transcendental Meditation) and one about to hit voting (Russavia-Biophys).. but.. that's really it.

So as things stand right now, we'd be electing someone for a short term where there's not much to do.

Posted by: Cla68

Okay, it just seems that the cases you all have right now are taking awhile to get resolved. The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Transcendental_Meditation_movement/Proposed_decision case, for example, is finally starting to get some action on the proposed decision, and it opened 12 weeks ago.

Posted by: SirFozzie

While I'd really not like to broadcast my thoughts publicly, a lot of that is due to discussion delays.. there are allegations all over the place of plagarism, coordinated editing in a meat/sockpuppet manner, non-NPOV, etcetera etcetera etcetera. Trying to write an arbitration finding that solves each of these things is not easy..

What we're trying to do is write a decision that gets people back to editing harmoniously within Wiki's principles. The reaction that the PD got (on the talk page, for example), made at least some of us realize that what we have probably will not do that. We're trying to rectify that.

Posted by: gomi

Is there any chance that this is because ArbCom is held in universally low esteem?

Posted by: SirFozzie

*shrugs* I do not know, doubt it, but you can think so if you want.

Probably a more accurate reason (at least to me), is that we're wrapping up the school year in a lot of areas, and with warmer weather as we get closer to summer, people find better things to do then to argue on Wikipedia?

Posted by: Subtle Bee

I wonder if it would be possible to get that mentioned in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming article?

Face it though, for a significant demographic, the only meaning summer has is a glare on the monitor.

Posted by: everyking

So go down the list. Or at least explain why you think that would be a bad idea.

Posted by: SirFozzie

Ok, I can do that...

Right now, we would need four replacement arbs (we started at 18, we have 12, and two inactives). If we went down the list, we would have two people who fell just short (AGK and RUslik0), with around 56-57% support.. but if we went any further, we'd be getting people who got 51-52%. Do you think the community would really be supportive if there were new members of the committee who BARELY got a majority of support?

Posted by: everyking

I can't imagine why they wouldn't be. In order to be properly representative and reasonably productive (by ArbCom standards, at least), the ArbCom should be A) composed of the people who got the highest number of votes in the last election and B) fully staffed. If some arbitrators decide they don't want to do the job anymore, then the results of the last election need to be reconfigured to reassign the seats that have been vacated.

Posted by: Emperor

This whole paragraph sounds really silly.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Of course, there is always the option of actually paying for professional editorial management of the site, as opposed to expecting telephone help desk operators, law school students or hospital risk managers to be able to handle tasks for which they have no educational or occupational training.

Yes, it involves spending money -- but in the long run, it makes more sense to have three or four trained professionals versus 18 clueless amateurs.

Posted by: Moulton

I suppose if ArbCom is really bored, they could take up cases they shied away from before (like Moulton vs. IDCab). Not because I have any great desire to be vindicated or readmitted, but because there were so many unresolved fundamental issues in that case that are not particular to me (or to IDCab), but recur in many similar cases.

Posted by: MZMcBride

Sounds like ArbCom, not the cases it hears.

Posted by: Milton Roe

You're going to buy cows when milk is free?

Posted by: EricBarbour

Dealing with AN would be a good way to help improve Arbcom's public reputation.
Well, maybe. No guarantees. But doing anything is better than being "on hiatus".

If nothing will be done, then please explain to us all why AN gets away with http://list.wikia.com/wiki/Special:BlockList.


If the "free" milk is lumpy and smells bad, yes.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Yes. For starters, Arbcom can explain how they awarded themselves subpoena power when there is no such authority spelled out for them in WP policy. They can also explain why they disabled the account of an editor who, in no way whatsoever, violated the clearly-defined policies of WP:BLOCK. And since it appears that AN is under observation for alleged "socking" via IP edits, perhaps old lady arbitrator Risker would care to identify the "socks" that she allows to participate on WP, as per her astonishing acknowledgment during last September's Law/The_Undertow debacle, with a compare-and-contrast regarding why those "socks" can play on WP but AN cannot?

Posted by: SirFozzie

Well, one could conceivably claim that we have no authority over list.wikia.com. But I do agree that it.. does not show A Nobody in a good light.. let's say. He's made a comment over on the Arbs meta pages.. but I think we'll be handling this in an expedited manner, either by a motion or a case.

Posted by: Ottava

http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Roger_Davies&curid=134581&diff=1976058&oldid=1120787: "I have logged out of Wikipedia permanently and disabled my email after throwing out my password which can be confirmed per [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:EmailUser/A_Nobody this]. I have not only disabled it from Wikipedia, Wikia, and here, I also deactivated it from Yahoo to be sure that I can never re-log into Wikipedia under my old username."

So, whatever you do will be moot. That seems to be par for ArbCom, though.

Posted by: SirFozzie

Considering he's still editing as an IP, I hardly think it's moot, Ottava.

Posted by: Milton Roe

You still don't get it. You're not the one drinking the milk. Who the hell cares what kind of a court and police system you have, if you yourself never have to worry about being judged by it? The Lords of the Shire are never arrested by the Reeve in a feudal system. They're above all that. So who the *&%$ cares if the Reeve (sheriff) is crappy and occasionally hangs the wrong person? It will be a peasant, whoever it is.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Actually, this quote is the money shot: "I have nothing to really feel bad about anymore." Good for him -- getting all of that bad blood out his system is the best news. More power to ya, AN -- a lot of the Wikipediots could learn from that.



Don't be too harsh -- for some of the arbitrators, this is the most important thing that they'll ever accomplish in their lives.

Posted by: thekohser

That Wikia wiki needs a list:

* List of women with whom Jimmy Wales has been intimately linked

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Intimately linked??? How about Jimbo, Risker and Orlady in a remake of "The Human Centipede"?

Posted by: EricBarbour

Stick SV on the end of that, and you've got my $12.50.

Posted by: everyking

That is exactly the kind of nonsense that will alienate anyone who supports you. Even though I think he's been unfairly treated for a long time, it's impossible for me to muster any sympathy for people who pull stunts like that.

Posted by: Ottava

I will assume the "you" means A Nobody. I don't think he cares about any future support if he is disconnecting himself from his past. He is probably going to just join the long line of blatantly obvious restarts that no one can pin down who they are (they should be dubbed "Aitians" or some similar word).

Posted by: everyking

Maybe he thinks he's disconnecting himself from his past, but he's not. I imagine his new account will be detected very quickly, as soon as he pops up on AfD. It's sad.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Don't bet on it, toots.

Posted by: EricBarbour

What's even more sad, is when you post clueless nonsense like that---
with a straight face.

AN is ALREADY socking. He never stopped socking. And you'll probably never know what
his sock accounts are---until and unless someone here points them out.

Posted by: everyking

Get real. He always does the same thing. This has been going on for a long time. The problem with socking is that everyone edits for a reason, and if you sock, you either have to find a new reason to edit, or you get caught.

Posted by: Cla68

Notice that no one answered my question http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk%3AArbitration%2FRequests%2FCase%2FTranscendental_Meditation_movement%2FProposed_decision&action=historysubmit&diff=362746856&oldid=362742222. Either they don't feel the question merits a response or else there is no good answer to it.

Posted by: Moulton

It's a very good question, and it's pretty obvious that blocking and banning is rather idiotic on a site where any anonymous IP can edit. After Jimbo site-banned me, I just began editing as an IP, but manually signing my edits with my well-known username.

If memory serves, someone recently posted a link to an old IRC log where Jimbo tells one of his sycophants to use a sock-puppet as necessary to get around roadblocks.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

No one also answered my question regarding a too-obvious "sock" -- Shadowjams. Any thoughts on who this guy is/was?




The only reasons that he would get caught is (1) stupid people who hate him are looking out for him because they don't want him in their playpen, or (2) the checkusers blatantly violate policy and go on "fishing" expeditions to proactively look for "socks."

Posted by: thekohser

I must be an outlier with my several paid-editing socks. They all have one purpose (to satisfy the content needs of a paying client). They (typically) do not get caught.

You keep dreaming the dream, though, Everyking. It's actually better for my business.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

And he's wrong about the other thing, too.

But at least he's consistent.

Jon

Posted by: MZMcBride

You're not an outlier, you're just (deliberately) misinterpreting the word "reason" (changed by you to "purpose"). The purpose of the socks is to insert specific content for a specific client. If you were using a single account to insert content for multiple clients, you would probably be caught. If you were using multiple accounts to insert the same content for a client, you would probably be caught. Everyking is right about that.

But, uh, congrats, Mr. Kohs, on finally beating Wikipedia? Must feel great.

Posted by: Cla68

My question was in response to Durova's comment that it wouldn't have been prudent to topic ban everyone involved with the Prem Rawat topic because some would have honored their bans and some wouldn't, and it would have been difficult to prevent the ones who wouldn't from succeeding in their ban evasions, and thus that "side" would have won the POV war. I think my follow up question was the obvious response to that statement.

If Wikipedia has no fairly fool-proof enforcement mechanisms, then why bother with trying to establish a process, of which ArbCom is supposed to be the final step, to regulate editor behavior? What an exercise in futility. What this really means is that Wikipedia's administrators are basically hamsters running in wheels, spending a lot of time looking like they're doing something, but actually having no true effect on what's going on around them. Please, someone, explain to me why my observation isn't accurate.

Posted by: SB_Johnny

The master of the lab probably has them hooked up to some mysterious machine, but even if I knew what it did, I couldn't tell you. Well, I could, but I'd have to kill you afterward.

Posted by: thekohser

Yeeaaaaah. You've nailed it, MZ. I've never, ever used a single account to insert content for multiple clients. Yep. And I've never, ever used multiple accounts to insert the same content for a client. You're right about those things right there. Everyking is right about that. Shur' nuf. Yup. You betcha.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Wikipediot Premiss 1 — One Customer To A Purpose (WP:OCTAP)

Wikipediot Premiss 2 — One Purpose To A Customer (WP:OPTAC)

Poor Wiki-Poissons — they're swimming in an ocean full of false negatives and false positives both — and they can't even see the water.

Jon

Posted by: EricBarbour

I won't, because it is.

Posted by: Zoloft

It fails on two counts. Hamsters are cute and can be trained to poop in a designated corner.

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

The basic working theory of why wikis are suppose to be self-improving is that each discrete edit whether vandalism or an accurate summing up of a reliable source, contains information that improves what is available for whoever makes the next edit. This is exactly the same mechanism that is suppose to permit markets to make wise decisions about prices. Each discrete transaction between buyers and sellers not only settles the slate for the parties to that transaction but contains information that helps make the parties to the next transaction make better decisions. This is how the "invisible hand" is suppose to work. But it doesn't. Not in the economic market place and even less so with wikis.

If this mechanism actually worked you would need no discussion pages, notice boards, patrols, RfC or dispute resolution. There would be no Admins and no ArbCom. The very existence of these things proves that the basic underlying mechanism is not working. The cumbersome lumbering weight and the level of coercion needed for their application indicates just how very messed up things are. If it was basically working but with imperfections you might have discussion pages and maybe notice boards. But that it needs to be propped up continuously with endless unproductive discussion, protections, blocks, bans, and the edicts of ArbCom shows that the problems are not cosmetic around the edges but systemic and in the very heart.

Posted by: Cla68

I think you are describing one of the fundamental flaws with the Wikipedia model. I think there are ways to, if not completely fix it, at least mitigate it to some degree. I don't think, however, that Wikipedia will do so under the current management.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

Hamsters don't plagiarize, either. You can't say that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Steve_Smith#Statement_on_plagiarism

Posted by: RDH(Ghost In The Machine)

Yes, replace resigning arbs with the previous election's runners up, and have them hold the seats only until the next election would be the way to go. This would have the added benefit of phasing out the outdated and unnecessary tranches as well.

That would be the helpful and sensible thing to do.
But unfortunately Wikiland doesn't do helpful or sensible if it can avoid it and as long as Jimbozo is running the circus it will always be thus.
I think the AC, for all its faults, might be the last, best hope...even if only a forlorn hope. But before that can happen King clown's role in it must be reduced to nil.
Until it asserts itself as a truly independent, elected body, its influence and importance will continue to wane.

On the subject of Arb resignations, how long do y'all think it'll be till Steve Smith takes the long walk into the scorched earth?