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

[MZMcBride]

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.

I enjoyed this post quite a bit. I'm not so sure about the last paragraph, but the other paragraphs are spot-on.

Something that you didn't touch on, but that I find interesting: there was also an element of "necessity," as it were, with some of Beta's past tools/scripts/etc. In my view, he was able to not be banned because he ran certain "indispensable" bots/scripts/tools. The attitude toward him and his toys seems to have changed over time as well.

[-DS-]

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...799#User:.CE.94



Clearly, MickMacNee won't be pleased by anything short of Delta's head on his wall.

This post has been edited by -DS-: Sun 17th July 2011, 9:57am

[Gandoman]

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...799#User:.CE.94



Clearly, MickMacNee won't be pleased by anything short of Delta's head on his wall.

Well, that arbitration request shows that Betacommand referred to his restrictions on image policy enforcement (which were wholly appropriate) as getting "ArbFucked", and implying that he wouldn't follow them. He then started making mass automated "reference cleanup" edits which broke reference lists in several articles, and when informed about this, deleted the complaints with an abusive edit summary. Sounds like good ol' Betacommand behaviour. Of course, it doesn't really help that the plaintiff is MickMacNee, who has a long-lasting feud with Betacommand, but this complaint is perfectly valid. Remember that the only reason Betacommand isn't banned right now is that he got an "absolutely and totally final last chance, and this time we really mean it" after repeating this same behaviour over and over.

[Maetu]

It also seems like a great number of Arbs are missing the point with that request as well. They think it's being covered in the MMN case because Delta is named there, well this one isn't exactly fully about Delta, so much as it includes the giant time sinks who spent years defending him. Anyone who questioned Delta basically had no end to the people who'd line up to spit in their face for even daring to doubt their lord and master.