Arbcom goes after Betacommand, Another victory for the Free Kulture crowd Options

[-DS-]

The Arbitrary Committee is now going after Betacommand/Δ for doing NFCC enforcement, and it looks like he'll be sanctioned this time.

I think there's a lesson to be learned here folks: just because people complain about something, it doesn't automatically become bad.

[Gandoman]

Everyone who knows Betacommand's past history will see that this case fundamentally does not have anything to do with enforcement of non-free images. The reason Betacommand is once again in trouble is, frankly speaking, that he behaves like a prick. He has carried out the exact same behaviour in relation to lots of other areas, such as username policy enforcement, external link cleanup, article categorisation etc. Look at his very first arbcom case, where he was desysopped, for examples.

The problem is always the same, that he makes extensive, rapid edits to enforce his view of a certain policy. And he may actually be in line with policy, but he does it with a rigid, no-common-sense approach that invariably draws complaints. He then gets on his high horse, says he is right according to the letter of the policy, and gets into edit-wars and insults those who have legitimate questions because they do not understand Betacommand's rigid view of policies.

It does not help when people like Hammersoft point out that Betacommand is acting "well within image policy", and fail to understand that the basic problem has nothing to do with images, it is his lack of people skills. This gives Betacommand a signal hat he is "doing the right thing", and he then continues his bad behaviour with even more confIdence.

My prediction now that Betacommand is banned from image policy enforcement: the image policy will continue to be enforced, even better than now because it will be done by people with common sense and who will be able to respond to queries by confused users in an adequate way. Betacommand will find some other aspect of policy that he will mechanically enforce with the same lack of common sense, and the same belligerent attitude when someone dares question his actions. I expect another huge ANI thread about Betacommand in a few weeks' time, and it will eventually go all the way to another Arbcom action. The problem will continue until it is recognised that Betacommand is fundamentally incapable of working in a collaborative environment like Wikipedia, and he is banned for good.