QUOTE(A Horse With No Name @ Wed 11th November 2009, 9:02pm)
I I like how Manning rewrites history: "For the record, ArbCom did not officially desysop him. He admin bit was temporarily removed for the duration of the case (a standard procedure whever an admin is a central subject of a case)."
For the record, that is not standard procedure - Piotrus was actually involved in a similar situation last year and his adminship was not removed, a point that he cited early in this debacle. There have been countless cases of admins in the center of controversies whose tools were not immediately yanked away at the start of an investigation - the most recent being the Law/TU case where three Arbcom members (Casliber, John V and Luke) were cited as having advance knowledge of the Law/TU charade, but none of them lost their tools while the investigation was underway.
Yeah, definitely not standard. My two little cases, JzG was using tools while blatantly involved, didn't lose tools pending nor did he lose them at all. WMC was edit warring during the case, on the case pages, and threatening to use his tools. When I called his bluff, he did block me, and he didn't lose his tools then. Had he said "Sorry," he wouldn't have lost them even later.
I think Piotrus resigned because he wasn't using the tools much and he hoped that it would help quiet the controversy. Fat chance. But he tried.
QUOTE
It should also be pointed out that adminship was removed from Piotrus (1) without due process or any advance consultation with him regarding these charges, (2) without any evidence that he abused adminship, and (3) in the first edit of this case, which gave the immediate - and blatantly incorrect - impression that he was guilty of something.
Okay, this is what happened. The posts on the mailing list
looked bad. It's as if a bunch of Wikipedia editors met in a bar and talked up a storm, commiserated about meat puppetry and sock puppets and other battleground stuff. And someone recorded it and a transcript was put up. It could sound awful. But did the editor, in this case Piotrus, actually do anything sanctionable?
In all the stuff I looked at, and including Coren's "evidence" -- which was pathetic, and if an editor cited sources like Coren cited the mailing list, precedent would be a topic ban for the editor or maybe a site ban -- the worst thing Piotrus did was to semiprotect an article that was under revert warring by a newly registered editor later identified as a meat puppet, literally recruited from a Russian web site. At least that's what the EEML editors think. The edit warring continued with a confirmed editor, whom the meat puppet had been supporting, and that editor was then blocked by a neutral admin, but the admin then reversed that decision and full protected the article.
Technically, Piotrus shouldn't have touched the article because of possible conflict of interest, except that these kinds of conflicts happen all the time. Admins do each other, and their friends, favors. In my case I argued that there was a problem from "mutual involvement" of editors and administrators, but I wouldn't have dreamed of asking that an admin be desysopped for making a reasonable decision to help a friend, unless it was repeated after clear warning by ArbComm or the community. ArbComm rejected my argument about involvement, that was the core of my "cabal" issue, and a big reason I was banned was that I claimed there was a cabal. Like, duh!
Of course, here ArbComm landed what it thought was a real cabal, with PROOF! Maybe it was a real cabal, though it seems to have been quite tame. My view is that there is nothing wrong with cabals. But they should be disclosed, that's all, or, if not, identified from behavior. Not from spying on private communications. There would be ways to encourage disclosure of cabals, which I call "caucuses."
What's really going on is that Coren is seeking to "make an example" of the mailing list. That's why harsh penalties were proposed for minor offenses. The biggest offense was one member putting his wp password on the mailing list. Apparently list members privately chastised him for that, and there is no sign that anyone actually used the account. But it's the thought that counts.
Off-wiki communication is what could dethrone the oligarchy, they are not about to allow anyone but them engage in it. They can't stop it, but they can try.
Some of the members of the list, indeed, had a pretty strong us vs. them POV, battleground mentality. But WP *is* a battleground, and looking at what's been happening with these editors, they were right, in that there are editors out to get them banned. It's not a friendly place.
Dirty tricks cabal or just idle talk?
