Re: Wikibook User Arbitration

Andrew Whitworth wrote:

>What I don't like, (and what Johnny has been pointing out), is that Johnny 
>himself served as a moderator in this situation (between Darklama and 
>Panic). Panic asked Johnny (and myself) to come in and moderate the 
>discussion. Johnny's decision was that Panic was in the wrong, and his 
>continued bad behavior warranted a block.
>
>What this arbitration hearing is doing, is essentially punishing (or 
>threatening to punish) Johnny for acting as a volunteer moderator for Panic 
>in the first place. Panic didn't like the outcome, but that's tough beans: 
>He asked for a moderator because he wanted to maintain unilateral control 
>over his book, but what he got was a punishment instead. We're creating a 
>precedent where moderation and arbitration can be appealed ad infinitum 
>until everybody gives up or storms off. Somewhere we need to say "A decision 
>has already been made on this issue, and we need to stand by our decisions". 
>Don't think for an instant that if you agree with Johnny and have panic 
>blocked, that  he won't appeal higher up the chain (WMF intervention?) to 
>have you de-admined as well. Maybe he won't succeed, but tell me having your 
>adminship on the line over this won't upset you pretty badly as well?
>
>--Andrew Whitworth
>  
>
The problem as I see it is that Johnny became a party to the fight, even 
if that was not his intention.  And he engaged directly with Panic to 
argue on fine points.

I will conceed that Darklama seems to have taken the brunt of most of 
the attention by Panic, and that Johnny was trying to step in and help 
resolve the issue.  It was a valiant effort, but it also blew up and 
went out of control as well.  The main thing I wanted to do here is to 
avoid the same sort of mistakes that Johnny made, particularly as I 
don't think doing a user block is necessarily the best course of action 
when dealing with an edit war, except perhaps to cool things down a bit 
and make people pause to think for a moment.  A content freeze would 
have been almost as effective to do the same thing, and there are other 
options available that may not have been nearly as controvercial.

As far as appealing up the food chain, so to say, that has always been 
an option.  And Jimbo has indeed come into Wikibooks on a number of 
occasions and tried to establish policy based on promptings from some 
users trying to resolve one sort of fight or another.  The problem with 
appealing to Jimbo or the WMF, is that once the decision is made it is 
absolutely final.  Besides, they don't have the time to have to review 
every little petty user edit war that blows up with Wikimedia projects, 
which is why it is important to have some trusted users to be able to 
sit in between the foundation and users in this situation.

My long experience in dealing with stewards is that they don't want to 
get involved with these sort of disputes either.  It isn't so much that 
they can't do this, but it is more an apathy regarding projects they are 
not generally involved with on a more regular basis.  Both that and for 
a steward to get into the dirty details of a project they aren't 
familiar with is likely to get them into a mess that just causes more 
problems where they are likely to be drawn into the fight.

As far as appealing this "ad infinitum", that would imply that after I'm 
done that he could appeal to another Wikibooks admin.  Because of the 
way that I've structured this, I highly doubt that any other Wikibooks 
admin is going to touch this issue at all, so Panic has no other 
realistic avenues of appeal left in that regard.  At best all he can do 
after this is to appeal to the stewards (appeal 1) and then directly to 
the WMF (appeal 2).  That doesn't sound like an infinite number of 
appeals to me.  Besides, with the way that all of this is structured, it 
will be easy for a steward to review this matter quite quickly and be 
able to see if the actions taken were justified.  And he can't keep 
appealing from one steward to another, as they will be pretty much 
unified once a decision has been made here as well.

I will note, however, that because this is available for appeal, it 
keeps any power that either I or any administrator acting in the future 
with a similar situation in check.  Administrators simply will never 
have absolute power.  I also think it is very important to remember that 
admins are not infallible, and that mistakes can and do happen.  You 
should feel as comfortable questioning the actions of an administrator 
as you do questioning an edit.

BTW, no, I don't think that my being involved here is going to have my 
adminship challenged if I recommend that Panic's account be reblocked, 
or set up some other sort of set of "probationary" conditions for him. 
 I'm not directly challenging the content itself, and I'm trying very 
hard to stay out of this fight.  I don't want to be a party in it.

If I have a concern, it is that the rest of the admins might think I'm 
supporting Panic and get into a wheel war fight with me instead, with me 
being deadmined and my account being blocked.  As far as maintaining my 
adminship on Wikibooks, I really could care less.  My purpose in being 
as a human has no relationship to my status on Wikimedia projects, and I 
don't want to game the process.  I have a desire to genuinely help out, 
fight vandalism, and assist to help grow Wikibooks by using some of the 
tools available to administrators, that is all.

What I do love is the ideas behind Wikibooks, providing free as in 
freedom books (aka GFDL and FOSS philosophies), and I have very much 
enjoyed being able to participate in the development of much of that 
content.  If all I am able to do is simply write in those books as an 
anonymous user, then I'll be fine with that as well.  Oh, I might be 
grumpy about having to go to that extreme situation, but it wouldn't be 
the end of the world for me.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning