QUOTE(Lar @ Tue 25th May 2010, 10:35pm)
[to Moulton]
Given that you're blocked indef in many places either your model doesn't work to predict things accurately enough to stay out of the soup, or being able to edit freely wasn't actually your final goal...
Lar, please consider this well, I think you will. Anyone who has, as a final goal, "being able to edit freely" has a conflict with the goal of the project, and will be unable to confront systemic abuse. This goal, in fact, has prevented many Wikipedians who could see what was going on from speaking up or from pursuing dispute resolution. If you have a dispute with an administrator, and you are not an administrator and don't have a dedicated ally among the administrators, willing to risk his or her own position for the welfare of the project, and you pursue the dispute, you are almost always dead meat.
I'm not speaking for Moulton, but very early on, I abandoned the goal of maintaining my right to edit, because I saw the danger. This meant giving up any sort of idea that I was essential to my special projects, with, say, voting systems, or, later, cold fusion. (I was completely neutral on cold fusion when I encountered admin abuse being used to maintain the article in a non-neutral condition, with only token material from the positive side, far below the balance from peer-reviewed publication. But I became very interested later. I'm now actually COI, but that wouldn't stop the abusive admins from acting to ban. Pcarbonn returned after his year ban, edited on Talk, as I recall, was moderate and civil, and was banned at AN by instigation of JzG, who did not disclose his extensive history in acting improperly, even confirmed by ArbComm. The cabal piled in. I was unable to intervene, in spite of my extensive familiarity with the issues and history, because of my MYOB ban, which, in spite of many claims, I really did try to follow. GoRight saw this, and pointed out the obvious. For his trouble, ultimately, he was indeffed, and remains so, with utterly inadequate reason for it. Ultimately, the reason is that he's seen as having a "fringe POV," and because the cabal does not want that fairly represented, they had been trying to ban him for two years. That, in fact, is how I discovered the cabal, with RfC/GoRight. It was bloomin' obvious, once I collected the evidence. But how would it look to someone who hasn't seen the evidence? Like it looked to you, Lar.
Banning me from cold fusion did not hurt me, but it definitely hurt the project. I've personally benefited. I don't need Wikipedia, but Wikipedia needs editors who are dedicated to neutrality, as I was and remain, but who also actually understand the subject. Some of these will be COI, is inevitable, but COI editors should not be banned! They should be behaviorally restrained, and that's easy to do, and when it is properly done, it doesn't create bias and conflict.
But Wikipedia built up an operating core of administrators who didn't understand how to do this and who, too often, weren't interested in it. Some of them were and are actively hostile to the idea of consensus process, as if it would mean turning over scientific articles to a mob that doesn't understand them. Wrong. The opposite, actually. The "mob" idea relates to how people are when there is no good process for finding consensus. Most people, in fact, want the project to be neutral and thoroughly informative, and where it cannot cover a subject completely, it would refer to other sources for more research.
What was the action I first saw that alerted me to a problem with JzG and Cold fusion? JzG unilaterally blackisted
http://lenr-canr.org, which is a project run to collect in one place, as many primary and secondary sources relating to cold fusion. It works with a project that is a bibliography on cold fusion maintained by a cold fusion skeptic. Why was it blacklisted? Well, that's a huge story, but this action made it indirectly into RfAr/Abd and JzG. It was blacklisted because it was "fringe," bottom line, and ArbComm ruled that this wasn't proper. Sure, there were other excuses advanced. These were gone over one by one, in
Talk:Martin Fleischmann and rejected by consensus. The alleged "linkspam" that was later asserted to get a global blacklisting was simply that Jed Rothwell, the site librarian, had signed his IP edits with "Jed Rothwell, librarian, lenr-canr.org." They weren't links! And occcasionally, when it was relevant, Jed had put up a link to a published paper.
Still globally blacklisted. I did the groundwork to get that removed, by requesting a pile of whitelisted links, which were approved (in spite of cabal pile-in to try to prevent it). But I haven't gone back to meta to get the global blacklisting undone. Frankly, I'm tired of being the Defender of the Wiki, because there were far too few people willing to stand up and ...
risk their right to edit. Look what happened to GoRight. And he effing cared about his right to edit, he was simply brave in spite of it.
Lar, your action against the cabal, or the whatchamacalllit -- I made it clear that I was using "cabal" to mean a collection of mutually-involved editors, cooperating, without necessarily improper off-wiki coordination or other necessarily reprehensible action -- was a long time coming. The foundations had been laid long before, it's not like this had never come up. But there were too many administrators and editors willing to say "not my conflict."
It is not that they should have jumped in to defend misbehavior. In RfC/GoRight, I noted GoRight's misbehavior. But I also showed the context in which it happened, GoRight was faced with a cabal, not shy about using admin tools, including blocking, checkuser (the Scibaby affair), and the ability to protect, unprotect, and edit under protection, and not shy about using tag-team reversion, to promote its agenda, which was very much a POV on Global Warming, and openly expressed as this.
This post has been edited by Abd: