The TimidGuy case, aye, there's the rub Options

[Herschelkrustofsky]

TimidGuy is appealing his ban, which was executed by Jimbo in a GodKingly fashion at the request of Will Beback, who sent Jimbo a private email in which he alleged that TG was a paid advocate for the Transcendental Meditators. This situation raises numerous questions.

1. TG and WB have been going at if for a while as WP:ADVOCATES on opposing sides of the Transcendental Meditation issue. For argument's sake, let's assume that Will's allegations are correct, and TG is a paid advocate for TM. Does that make his editing more disruptive than that of Will, acting as an unpaid advocate against TM? Will's fanaticism on the topic is well known, and that fact that he is presumably doing it without compensation makes him possibly the more disruptive of the two, because he is so consumed with zeal to expose and discredit the meditators (misusing Wikipedia as a soapbox for that purpose), that he does it for free.

2. If Will has in fact acquired private information about TG's pay stubs and what not, is that not WP:WIKIHOUNDING?

3. How does WP:COI come into play when allegations are made based on evidence that is not in the public domain? Doesn't such an allegation axiomatically violate WP:OUTING?

The Arbs are already neck-deep in conundra over this. It should be interesting to see how it plays out. My personal take on it causes me to ask this: why is Will Beback still allowed to be editor, let alone an admin?

[It's the blimp, Frank]

And the bigger is, why is POV-pushing from someone with identifiable COI any worse than POV-pushing by a free-lancer?

[Abd]

And the bigger is, why is POV-pushing from someone with identifiable COI any worse than POV-pushing by a free-lancer?

Indeed. Reviewing the case, I found this telling:

Reviewing editors not content

The unresolved status of paid editing, existence of anonymous editing, outing and harassment policies, and difficulties in verifying real life circumstances mean that investigating, sanctioning and/or exonerating editors on the basis of who they are or what they do in real life is highly vexed and controversial. Furthermore, there is no consensus for the degree to which editors may edit subjects they may have personal involvement in (apart from extreme cases). Hence review must by necessity focus on editing patterns of editors in whom problems are claimed.

Let me see if I get this straight. I read it like this: "We are unable to resolve the issues of paid editing, etc., and there is no consensus about what is best, what is permitted, and what is discouraged or prohibited. Therefore we will not establish or state principles in this area.

Instead, we will examine the behavior of editors and judge it independently of established standards, we will decide what is Good and what is Bad, and we will sanction accordingly.

It does make sense, given an impossibility of setting standards. But it's not impossible, merely difficult or controversial. Until standards are set and actually enjoy consensus, behavior will always violate this or that faction's idea of what's not allowed. If the sanctions were limited to future behavior, if they clearly specified the behaviors to be avoided (and what is allowed), then this would, indeed, be a sane approach, at least at the beginning. However, in practice, ArbComm does punish. It doesn't recognize that editors have not been properly warned, against specific behaviors, which they may well believe are allowed (either by specific guidelijnes, prior ArbComm restrictions, or, even failing that, under IAR.) It issues topic bans and site bans, which become arbitrary restrictions, since the guiding behavioral principles are not established.

Sad to see Cla68 going a bit overboard in this case. Cla68, have you ever attempted to communicate and establish rapport with Jmh643, i.e., Doc James? He's a real doctor and generally knows what he's talking about. Contrary to one submission to this case, he's not an administrator, and has not, in my experience, been aligned with a cabal. But, to be sure, I haven't reviewed much of his behavior with respect to this case.

Wikipedia's reaction to paid editing is similar to its real reaction to experts. Topic experts are frequently SPAs, and tend to have and "push" strong points of view. Paid editors, if they are worth their salt, will seek consensus. There are potential problems with paid editing, almost all of them dissolved if actual practice encouraged and protected paid editors who dislosed the COI and followed COI guidelines. Most of the discussion of this assumes that paid editors conceal their status unless outed, and assumes that problem editing is editing of articles, not the making of suggestions on Talk, with actual article editing limited to what is reasonably expected not to be controversial (having disclosed the COI).

That an editor is paid is probably a sign of competence, other things being equal. The idea that paid editors want to bias the article is based, perhaps, on experience with naive COI editors, not with true professional editors. Professional editors, serving their clients, would want to create a stable article, which requires a reasonable approach to neutrality.

Given the dysfunctional community, however, paid editors are motivated to conceal their COI, and are restrained only by the possibility of blow-back, where an article which has been biased, outrageously, by stupid COI editing is then flipped to an opposite condition. It's a bit like some AfDs, where the existence of excessive non-reliable source citations can result in deletion, where a less-sourced stub might survive for improvement. Wikipedia punishes. Dysfunctional communities punish, it's quite human, but ordinary human communities don't create neutral encyclopedias, it would take innovative process to do that with any reliability.

Neutrality cannot be measured if factions are excluded from the process.

(Most Wikipedians, I think, assume that neutrality is an attribute of text, whereas it is much better understood as a relationship between text and the whole human community. When text is maximally neutral, a maximal number of informed people will agree that it's neutral, and those people may well be from opposing factions. Wikipedia, so accustomed to being a battleground while it denies being a battleground, tends to assume that "POV warriors" will never agree with anything short of blatant and biased statement of their own POV. It has a generic, overall, ABF position with respect to "POV-pushers."

The result is that experts, or "amateur experts," who tend to have points of view different from the general public, it would be an "expert point of view," are effectively excluded. I'd argue that topic experts shouldn't be making the decisions on articles, period. However, they should be actively consulted, asked for advice and criticism, and, with that, the stupendous blunders that are sometimes found in articles on difficult subjects could be avoided. Experts tend to know the literature far better than the ordinary editor. Wikipedia harnessed crowd-sourcing, but discarded the best of it, because the project came to be dominated by "general purpose editors," those fired up by the idea of the project, but without expertise in the topics they often ended up controlling, and often unwilling to listen to experts who held different opinions from them.

Since those editors disagreed with them, they assumed those editors were "POV-pushers," out to pull the wool over their eyes, pretending to know more.

Sometimes an expert knows stuff that isn't easy to find in reliable source. Wikipedia must be based on what is verifiable, that's in the design, and it's not a bad idea at all. However, there is lots of room in how the verifiable material is presented, to accommodate what experts will tell the community. Part of the trick would be to seek and solicit comment from experts with differing opinions, and seek to facilitate consensus among experts. The role of actual article editors as consensus facilitators has not been sufficiently appreciated.

Instead, a "neutral editor," in practice, is someone who knows little about the topic. With scientific topics, where one may need background to be able to understand the sources, this can lead to major misunderstandings.