We didn't bump. It was entirely coincidental. I think I was editing it because he'd just died and I had followed his work somewhat in the 1980s. Unfortunately, a rather mean-spirited edit made by Slim was falsely attributed to me thanks to Jayjg's oversighting. Seems it's ok to oversight so that someone doesn't think you made a malicious edit but ok if by oversighting you attribute the malice to someone else.



Cla, can you ask CoolHandLuke on wiki since he suggested that he'd explain why Jayjg originally lost his oversight bit if asked there?

This is true. I remember seeing it a couple of years ago when it was first discovered. Most of this edit was actually a series of edits made by Slim Virgin. When the diffs were removed by Jayjg in June 2006, they became attributed to "Heat" (who had by that point changed his name to Formeruser).

I don't think it was malicious on Jayjg's part. It was purely to protect Slim Virgin's real life identity (for obvious reasons given the content) when Daniel Brandt was in full flow investigating Slim for starting his bio. It was accidental that Formeruser became the recipient. To be fair to Jayjg, he went to pains to protect the identity of "Heat" as well so it wasn't an example of favouritism.

Rootology beat me to it.

Jeez. Obviously, he wasn't particularly concerned about protecting Salinger's reputation. Fortunately, the most recent version of the bio shows significant improvement.

Hey, next time ask me a hard one!

I'm not sure what to do with the question about his admin status. All his admin actions are transparently reviewable by anyone, so if there was a case to be made for overt misuse of admin tools, someone would have made it by now, or added it to the recent case. This case is, as far as I can remember, the first time someone has been sanctioned for misuse of the aura of the administrator position. I think that is a good development, and I think we are moving toward eventually being able to desysop people for "conduct unbecoming an admin", even if we aren't quite there yet. And, to be completely honest, all the Arab/Israel/Palestine/Etc drama bores me, so I have not followed it and could not give you a coherent opinion of Jayjg's editing practices.

Regarding checkuser and oversight, there has definitely been a lack of transparency in reviewing complaints against them, and not only with respect to Jayjg. I think there was a feeling that since checkuser and oversight can generally not be publicly discussed, that there should also not be public discussion of checkusers and oversighters.

And there is really no way to know what sort of internal discussions were held regarding checkuser, oversight, or even admin, because there was no transparency.

I think these things are changing, primarily because the people on Arbcom now seem to have a different relationship to the project, and to each other, than the Arbcoms of 3 and 4 years ago did. I think it is possible to have a reasonably well-informed discussion of checkuser and oversight issues without disclosing the actual confidential matters, at least in many cases.

I don't think his oversight of SV's edits was informed by malicious intent towards me - I think he just didn't think, or care, about the possible consequences of his actions.

They are some of the earliest uses of the oversight tool. It would be hard for anyone at that point to have a real grasp of the problem of misattribution.

scratch that

Do you have a working definition for these terms or is it all covered by WP:POTTERSTEWART?