Connolley starts to worm his way out of his ban Options

[Cla68]

I was reading an ArbComm case from 2006, Blu Aardvark, and there were all these references to Wikipediareview.com where they had munged the URL because, I'm sure, at that time the blacklist prohibited adding any links to wikipediareview.com....

The whole read was thoroughly depressing. Raul654 at this point was being dinged for unblocking Blu Aardvark. Was this the Raul654 that I knew? WTF? Is nothing sacred?

The love/hate relationship between WP and WR has been one of the most interesting and long-running sagas in WP's history.

By the way, SirFozzie, as you're discovering, you can't reason with fanatics. Since they feel their cause is just and righteous, they can't tolerate contrary opinions and they hate to lose arguments.

This post has been edited by Cla68: Thu 28th October 2010, 1:29am

[ATren]

Now, they are openly talking about setting up a private mailing list among themselves or a private wiki in order to coordinate their activity since they can't track William's contrib history.

Take a look at that thread, and you will find a "who's who" of editors whom the committee refused to sanction despite ample evidence presented of disruption: Boris, Guettarda, ScienceApologist, Stephan Schulz. All joking about their intention to meat-puppet to get around the sanctions.

Many of these same editors have crusaded against any new editor who happened to oppose them in their Wiki-activism, usually starting with Scibaby sock accusations, and when that failed, calling them meat-puppets. How hypocritical of them.

But they don't care, and the committee doesn't care, because dammit, these editors are using Wikipedia to push a noble cause! Screw policy, screw reliable sources, we have a planet to save! Think of the children!


(And BTW, I am not skeptical of science change; I believe it is a genuine concern, but turning Wikipedia into a group blog, where you trash political opponents and act like arrogant buffoons, is not at all helpful to conveying that concern. They throw gasoline on the fire and then wonder why they're feeling so much heat. But don't tell that to the activists, they're too busy saving the world by digging up dirt on people.)

This post has been edited by ATren: Thu 28th October 2010, 1:27am

[Abd]

Once upon a time, I'd have intervened to argue that WMC should not be blocked for pointing to issues on his own talk page. Bad idea. If someone "takes orders from him" then that person can and should be sanctioned, if what they do is improper. However, WMC and his friends managed to get an MYOB ban for me. I'd be blocked for intervening.

It's delicious, in fact. Yeah, bad policy, poor ArbComm decisions, shallow solutions, etc. But if it's going to be bad, at least Bad is an equal opportunity employer. What they sow, they reap. Turnabout is fair play, etc.

Meanwhile, wolves that were previously identified are roaming free, eating the chickens while everyone is paying attention to WMC, who has been defanged.

Wikipedia. The most visited time-waster on the planet. Somewhat useful if you don't try to edit it.

[ATren]

By the way, SirFozzie, as you're discovering, you can't reason with fanatics. Since they feel their cause is just and righteous, they can't tolerate contrary opinions and they hate to lose arguments.

Indeed, Boris has been quite agitated since they removed his bestest buddy. Of course, in a rational decision, Boris would have been removed too, but the activist arbs (Shell and Roger, mainly) would have none of that. Someone had to remain to do WMC's dirty work.

[Cla68]

But they don't care, and the committee doesn't care, because dammit, these editors are using Wikipedia to push a noble cause! Screw policy, screw reliable sources, we have a planet to save! Think of the children!

Actually, I believe the Committee topic banned the editors who argued the most with each other on the case talk pages or got caught up in edit wars while the case was ongoing. That would definitely include me, as I had a little fun conducting a couple of experiments showing the Committee during the case exactly what it was like trying to edit a CC article being guarded by dedicated activists. I think the Committee is already starting to realize that they probably should have added a few more names to the topic banned list, but it doesn't matter, I guess, as long as the biting newbies and BLP abuses stop.

This post has been edited by Cla68: Thu 28th October 2010, 1:44am

[ATren]

The whole read was thoroughly depressing. Raul654 at this point was being dinged for unblocking Blu Aardvark. Was this the Raul654 that I knew? WTF? Is nothing sacred?

Raul654 was like Jeckyll and Hyde: outside of political and environmental topics he was pretty reasonable, but get him near a climate change article and he turned into a foaming-at-the-mouth activist. I can remember in an arb case (he was an arb at one time, imagine that!) he cited Ralph Nader's opinion as unqualified fact. It was pretty shocking to see that coming from an arb during a case.

[Abd]

Take a look at that thread, and you will find a "who's who" of editors whom the committee refused to sanction despite ample evidence presented of disruption: Boris, Guettarda, ScienceApologist, Stephan Schulz. All joking about their intention to meat-puppet to get around the sanctions.

These are roughly the same group as I confronted as the "cabal" in RfAr/Abd-William M. Connolley. Notice Crohnie. Why did I include her in my cabal list? If anyone looked at the cabal evidence, they'd see. Serious attempts were made to delete that evidence, by the way, some of it continued until recently, by Verbal.

ArbComm refused to accept it when I said that asserting cabal affiliation was not an accusation of misbehavior, in itself. They insisted on mind-reading me, and then sanctioning me for what they imagined I meant. I meant what I wrote, and I was explicit, and I substantiated what I wrote.

What an effing waste of time! I've got several crackerjack ArbComm cases to raise, and I find it difficult to care enough.

But my point here is that the community abandoned me at that point. Support for sane investigation and report disappeared. Too much trouble to read it. Someone who does that much work is not to be trusted.

Many of these same editors have crusaded against any new editor who happened to oppose them in their Wiki-activism, usually starting with Scibaby sock accusations, and when that failed, calling them meat-puppets. How hypocritical of them.

You mean that when the tables are turned, they act like the people they condemned? How shocking!

But they don't care, and the committee doesn't care, because dammit, these editors are using Wikipedia to push a noble cause! Screw policy, screw reliable sources, we have a planet to save! Think of the children!

And if we don't keep those fringe lunatics out, generations of people will be misled. They will start buying homeopathic remedies. They will buy a gas-guzzler. They will spend their life savings on developing cold fusion research kits. We have to protect them from themselves, by making sure that everything they read is Cabal Approved.

If we could, we'd burn them at the stake, For Their Own Good.

(And BTW, I am not skeptical of science change; I believe it is a genuine concern, but turning Wikipedia into a group blog, where you trash political opponents and act like arrogant buffoons, is not at all helpful to conveying that concern. They throw gasoline on the fire and then wonder why they're feeling so much heat. But don't tell that to the activists, they're too busy saving the world by digging up dirt on people.)

Atren was one of the sane voices at RfC/GoRight, which is where I first confronted the cabal.

What I saw was that he always held back, didn't fully commit, was a moderate. But it finally became too much, he couldn't remain as silent as he'd been. It all became entirely too obvious to him.

He can, I'm sure, tell his own story better than I. But all of this was years too late.

The early Wikipedians punted, apparently believing that the community would be able to resolve the process difficulties later, ad hoc, as they came up. Nope. Instead of building process and precedent, various synonyms for "let's not talk about this, it's too hard" became common wisdom, and, gradually, the tumbrels come for those previously in power, as they offend the mob. It's an old story. Democracy without deliberation and all the protections developed over the centuries, judgment without wisdom, management without depth.

[thegoodlocust]

Actually, I believe the Committee topic banned the editors who argued the most with each other on the case talk pages or got caught up in edit wars while the case was ongoing.

No, I don't think that is quite accurate. Viriditas, for example, was easily the most argumentative person on the PD page and was quite shrill at times. ScienceApologist has several examples of rather atrocious behavior and statements - including stating the unstated policy of the climate cabal, which was that they intentionally engage in turborevisionism in the hope that their opponents will mess up and break 3rr.

My personal opinion is that ArbCom read tea leaves to determine sanctions when a ouija board would've been much more accurate.

[ATren]

Actually, I believe the Committee topic banned the editors who argued the most with each other on the case talk pages or got caught up in edit wars while the case was ongoing.

Actually, no, not in my case. I hardly edited the case pages, and the only "edit war" I got involved in was a blatant BLP violation, and I had one revert in that "war". That was the one where NuclearWarfare blocked Marknutley for removing a BLP link to a smear job some professor posted on his university web page.

In fact, I had been almost completely inactive in the topic area and on the arb case page for at least 1-2 months when they posted my findings.

I guess it was my fault for taking the arbs at their word. At the beginning of the case they asked editors to step back, and I did so because I (naively) believed they would act responsibly. But no: in my absence, they went digging for marginally disruptive diffs from 6 months earlier, completely ignored their contexts, and used them to manufacture an absurdly weak finding against me, which got rubber-stamped by everyone but Newyorkbrad. Then when I confronted them with clear evidence that my actions were justified, they ignored me. I have no respect for any of them anymore (not including CHL, NYB or SF).

Not their finest hour. But then, I guess they don't have many fine hours... ;-)

This post has been edited by ATren: Thu 28th October 2010, 4:19am

[Abd]

I guess it was my fault for taking the arbs at their word. At the beginning of the case they asked editors to step back, and I did so because I (naively) believed they would act responsibly. But no: in my absence, they went digging for marginally disruptive diffs from 6 months earlier, completely ignored their contexts, and used them to manufacture an absurdly weak finding against me, which got rubber-stamped by everyone but Newyorkbrad. Then when I confronted them with clear evidence that my actions were justified, they ignored me. I have no respect for any of them anymore (not including CHL, NYB or SF).

Not their finest hour. But then, I guess they don't have many fine hours... ;-)

It's the system, Atren. I fosters and encourages poor decision-making. I'm tired of writing about it. The system does not seek self-improvement.

When I came across RfC/GoRight, I saw GoRight trying to wikilawyer the RfC into being deleted. He was technically correct, but substance was being ignored. So I fixed it, allowing time to fix Raul654's oversight -- he'd failed to certify the RfC before a break.

Then I read the thing and was horrifed. It was clearly a POV hit job. I investigated and reported my results, and possibly saved GoRight from an early wiki demise.

I was unusual. I'd investigate a situation in depth and report, even though I had no dog in the race, and, in fact, on general POV, I was more with the cabal. That general agreement, across the editorial population and especially the administrative population, combined with a too-common lack of understanding of the importance of consensus -- genuine consensus -- to neutrality, is part of what allowed the cabal to get away with their crap for so long.

Where are those investigators? The system seems to depend on POV-pushers to bring problems to light. Who else has the patience to negotiate the labyrinth? Long ago, I suggested that ArbComm appoint *investigators.* Give them admin tools, to be used only for investigation (these investigators would be directly responsible to ArbComm, and possibly they might be responsible to individual arbitrators, i.e., arbs would individually create them.

There are many possible proposals that could be developed. But the system resists change, it is hostile to it. Off-wiki collaboration is another possible solution. For that to work would require a series of changes in how decisions are made. Supposedly votes don't count, what counts is arguments. If that were true, one would want to make sure that the best arguments are found and presented. How is that supposed to happen without "canvassing"? If votes didn't count, why is it that canvassing is even an issue?

Because votes count. Wikipedia has a series of self-deceptions enshrined in the guidelines.

Without genuine consensus process the fundamental goal of neutrality is unattainable, because the only reliable sign of neutrality is genuine consensus. Perfect consensus may not be reachable, so we may never be certain of neutrality, but when Jimbo wrote on neutrality and consensus in the early days, he did understand that neutral text would be satisfactory to people of all points of view. If not to people who don't want neutrality, who want to use the project to promote their ideas and to exclude other ideas.

The only way to detect these people for sure is to have true consensus process. In that process, it becomes obvious who isn't interested in a neutral conclusion. But it takes care, and it takes skill, so, I've also recommended the identification and training of a class of facilitators, who would actively assist the negotiation of consensus. These facilitators, if a conflict cannot be resolved, would have created a record of the negotiations that would be usable in higher-level decision-making process.

ArbComm supposedly attempts to avoid making content decisions, but they effectively do it all the time. If it seems to them that an editor is promoting a fringe POV, they will sanction that editor before they will sanction someone who seems to be "defending" the majority POV. And they will judge the majority POV by their own POV.

I've seen this up close and personal in my own case, but it's common in others. It's a mess, and I see no signs of a solution developing. ArbComm could have addressed the problem of a "faction" in my case, instead, they sanctioned me for raising the issue. Same people, basically, as the global warming cabal. The main evidence I presented re WMC and the cabal was about his ownership, with his use of the first person plural, with regard to the Global warming article.

And these people have, in plenty of cases, spat on ArbComm decisions, they clearly had no respect for ArbComm. But they were -- and most remain -- administrators. Openly defying ArbComm, and ArbComm doesn't do a thing about it unless someone raises a case. And what's it like to raise a case against one of these admins, if you aren't an admin? Care to ask me?

I *won.* I was right. I proved it. They desysopped WMC. And ... I was still banned. ArbComm has a profound distrust of anyone who would put in so much work. The person must be imbalanced. If they weren't imbalanced, they would just go away, why the big fuss? I know how these people think, I've seen this on-line for over twenty years. There are only a few exceptions. And they seem to be getting rarer, as they realize what an effing waste of time the whole thing is.

Basic lesson for future generations working in Wikipedia II: make sure it's efficient. Pushing boulders up the mountain over and over, which the present system design requires, is guaranteed to fail, long-term. Build content, and build consensus. Real consensus process is always open to revision, it merely creates a kind of inertia once consensus is established. A documented consensus process creates paths for the revision of consensus. And I've explained this so many times it's silly. The cabal opposed the very idea of consensus, they considered it preposterous, and they opposed recusal policy, openly. On the ArbComm pages. When I saw that happening with no comment or response from ArbComm, I knew that the chances of any sane process from ArbComm was about nil.

Bottom line, they are hostage to the concept of the administrative core as "essential volunteers," not to be offended. For a long time, Raul654 was considered essential as a checkuser because who else knew so much about Scibaby? That Raul654 had *created* the Scibaby affair, with WMC, simply was not on their radar, all they knew was that Scibaby had created many hundreds of sock puppets, and that was Bad, and Must Be Stopped.

But it can't be stopped! When you abuse people, some of them will hate you so much that they will spend years tweaking your nose. Some level of this might happen with legitimate protection of the project, but ... they made it much worse than it needed to be.

To favor the administrative core, they abandoned the general editors. Even highly productive editors, like PHG, Per Honor et Gloria now, were dinged and harassed if they came into conflict with an Administrator. God forbid that such an editor, with 50,000 edits, might make a mistake and not properly represent what was in a source.

I see all the time misrepresentation of sources from editors favored and coddled by the cabal.... nothing is done about it, in most cases.

[The Wordsmith]

By the way, SirFozzie, as you're discovering, you can't reason with fanatics. Since they feel their cause is just and righteous, they can't tolerate contrary opinions and they hate to lose arguments.

Indeed, Boris has been quite agitated since they removed his bestest buddy. Of course, in a rational decision, Boris would have been removed too, but the activist arbs (Shell and Roger, mainly) would have none of that. Someone had to remain to do WMC's dirty work.

Boris seems to be the most reasonable member of GWCabal; I've compromised with him fruitfully more than once. A few others probably should have been dinged, and they will eventually get caught up in discretionary sanctions.

The community has become fed up, and given a clear mandate to the Arbcom Enforcement bunch to be as tough and draconian as necessary. To quote from the Durova decision, "In cases where all reasonable attempts to control disruption have failed, the Committee may be forced to adopt seemingly Draconian measures as a last resort for preventing further damage to the project."

[Doc glasgow]

To quote from the Durova decision, "In cases where all reasonable attempts to control disruption have failed, the Committee may be forced to adopt seemingly Draconian measures as a last resort for preventing further damage to the project."

The problem is that others believe:

"In cases where all reasonable attempts to control despoliation have failed, the Campaigners may be forced to adopt seemingly Draconian measures as a last resort for preventing further damage to the planet."

[Cla68]

To quote from the Durova decision, "In cases where all reasonable attempts to control disruption have failed, the Committee may be forced to adopt seemingly Draconian measures as a last resort for preventing further damage to the project."

The problem is that others believe:

"In cases where all reasonable attempts to control despoliation have failed, the Campaigners may be forced to adopt seemingly Draconian measures as a last resort for preventing further damage to the planet."

Well...

[JohnA]

Just when I think Bill Connelley can't get any worse, he promptly gets even worse.

He really, really can't help himself. The urge to control history (or at least his purblind view of it) is much too strong.

[Abd]

J. Johnson added an accurate comment to WMC talk.

Again and again, I've seen ArbComm sanction an editor, based on BS, ArbComm misunderstanding, and then when the editor, big surprise, is not contrite, they then throw the book at the editor for not reforming. It happens on all sides, it's a systemic defect, ArbComm strongly dislikes re-examining old decisions, it is as if they were written in stone.

That could be fixed, it actually would not be difficult. Any arbitrator could move reconsideration (short term) or rescind, and, if seconded, that could be discussed. Standard deliberative process. I won't describe the standard rules, but they are designed to avoid beating dead horses, while still allowing errors to be corrected.

WMC, as far as I've seen, has not gotten worse. I'd been watching his Talk since sometime in 2008. One of the things I liked about WMC was that he was frank and open. He did not understand the long-term consequences of what he was doing, but that's an entirely different problem. The cabal loved him for what he was doing then, and for what he has continued to do. They egged him on, and acted vigorously to stop any effort to restrain him.

It was all visible before, to anyone who actually took the time to look. Very few do that, and especially very few arbitrators: they wait for someone else to digest the evidence for them and to spit it out, and they follow the evidence that they like the most. In RfAr/Abd-William M. Connolly, the arbitrators accepted -- and cited as the reason for my topic ban -- some evidence presented against me that actually was not about me at all; it was the presenting editors statement to ArbComm in RfAr/Fringe science, in which the editor argued for the exact opposite of the ultimate ruling on that case. This was before I ever became involved.

And what was argued there was blatantly misleading, to boot.

I pointed this out before the case closed. ArbComm paid no attention at all, I don't think a single arbitrator responded to the comment.

WMC is getting a raw deal; however, on the other hand, he helped to serve up a raw deal to many, many editors over the years.

Wiki traditions? They were thrown in the trash long ago. Wikipedia punishes.

[Milton Roe]

Wiki traditions? They were thrown in the trash long ago. Wikipedia punishes.

I saw somebody not long ago asserting that ArbComm just arbitrates, they don't judge. And don't punish. I think these things both need to be added to WP:NOT, that long list of incredibly ridiculous lies that the WP:FAITHFUL are all supposed to pay lip service to.

[Doc glasgow]

Wiki traditions? They were thrown in the trash long ago. Wikipedia punishes.

I saw somebody not long ago asserting that ArbComm just arbitrates, they don't judge. And don't punish. I think these things both need to be added to WP:NOT, that long list of incredibly ridiculous lies that the WP:FAITHFUL are all supposed to pay lip service to.

Arbcom is inaptly named. It adjudicates by necessity - indeed it is set up as a classic disciplinary body.

[Kelly Martin]

Arbcom is inaptly named. It adjudicates by necessity - indeed it is set up as a classic disciplinary body.

Except that disciplinary bodies classically conduct their business in private, to avoid unduly spreading scandal.

[Lar]

Boris seems to be the most reasonable member of GWCabal;

Hmm. I'd hate to see the less reasonable folk ...

I've compromised with him fruitfully more than once.

But ya, he does sometimes act reasonably.

[ATren]

The problem is that others believe:

"In cases where all reasonable attempts to control despoliation have failed, the Campaigners may be forced to adopt seemingly Draconian measures as a last resort for preventing further damage to the planet."

Do you now understand why nobody tries to oppose this faction? Within minutes of your action, you're attacked by the same 4 or 5 editors who have been defending each other for years, including 2 whom arbcom refused to sanction despite the fact that they attacked Lar for months.

Welcome to the climate change topic, where arbs had an opportunity to take out the real offenders but instead wimped out and just removed people like me, JWB and Cla68 who were trying to help. But at least it's for a good cause, right?