QUOTE(Mr. Mystery @ Wed 13th May 2009, 3:39am)
I always did admire your fortitude after Jay casually used CU tools to torpedo your RFA. His CU access should have been removed then, in my opinion.
Well I didn't want to say anything that might be construed as an attempt to influence the outcome of this case, because as far as I knew it had nothing to do with the 2007 [1] allegations of checkuser apartheid.
In response to certain recent arbcom decisions one often hears such post-modern aphorisms as "well, they finally got Capone for tax evasion" which really begs the question regarding the ethical basis of prohibition (or income tax for that matter) but I digress.
QUOTE(trenton @ Wed 13th May 2009, 11:49pm)
according to
this, while Mr. Jayjg has not been editing, he seems to have been pretty active on the oversight front....
Perhaps this is part of the hypothetical laundered evidence to which I alluded above. That is, if citing specific examples of abuse is verboten, if some kind of policy or non-disclosure agreement governing cloak'n'dagger access levels prohibits this, arbcom might feel the need to issue this type of sanction ex nihilo or for unrelated reasons [2]. But I'm not really sure about that as there are no previous similar decisions to compare this to, as I understand this is the first time such access has been involuntarily removed [3].
I doubt they're still worked up over the torpedo incident, in fact I hope they aren't. They did mention my name but as context for his "avoid generating drama" sanction. I had half a mind to reach in there and prune that crap from Jayjg's arbcomography as enumerated in FoF #8, mostly because it's meaningless and fuck-all to do with Israel, Palestine, beer, or the price of firewalls in the PRC.
I mean sure I was devastated at the time, but I don't think it has adversely affected me in the long-term and once again I didn't want to be seen as being "petty and vindictive", contributing to his demise, etc. On the other hand I remembered that hardly anybody reads the FoFs before concocting sanctions anyway so I'd only be drawing more attention to it (Streisand effect?).
While I'd suppose that the result was probably in the community's best interest I cannot be entirely sure how and why it came about. Thus I don't certainly don't see the "transparency in arbcom" panacea reaching its hyped and heralded level of fruition.
Jay is not my worst enemy on Wikipedia (though he may be his own), but even if he was he'd still deserve a fair trial, and this lacks the appearance of that. I don't dispute the presence of evidence supporting a topic ban of some scope or duration, but if you read the rest it says his super-user bits were removed due to conduct which was "unbecoming of his position [as oversight and checkuser]" even while unrelated to it.[2]
At face value this makes me uneasy as I've always felt users should be sanctioned in no other capacity than the one in which they misbehaved. Anything beyond that would actually reduce accountability by encouraging the exclusive use of top-secret incognito accounts for non-"custodial" tasks (content editing in particular) once the perceived risk of being desysopped (or whatever) for no pertinent reason becomes too great.
However I'm not prepared to take this at face value, as experienced readers will recall prior situations in which he used both checkuser and oversight inappropriately, plus there seems to be some evidence that he had continued to use these tools despite no longer editing. I guess if the wheel's still spinning but the hamster's dead, the CSCWEM precedent could reasonably apply, and this strongly would suggest he is/was using a new account pursuant to the previous paragraph.
Good for him, maybe he can edit something uncontroversial yet still within his areas of interest, such as
Crash,
Empire of the Sun, and new articles about every synagogue in the western hemisphere, etc. In fact I wish him well, but still I implore the committee to refactor this case so that it reflects/clarifies the actual reasons for their rather landmark decision, lest anyone draw naïve conclusions.[2]
[1] The year, not the number of... never mind...
[2] such as garden-variety edit-warring or a rhetorical fixation with beer.
[3] well, on the English Wikipedia anyway.
This post has been edited by CharlotteWebb: 
New Israel/Palestine ArbCom case, Jayjg is one of the parties? No way!
