Re: Wikibook User Arbitration

>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.

After the initial moderation, Panic brought the fight to Johnny, not the 
other way around. Panic is petulant, something he's admitted to several 
times before. Johnny became a moderator at Panic's request, and when Panic 
didn't get what he wanted, he started a new argument with a new target. The 
fact that the target of Panic's aggression changed (from Darklama to Johnny) 
doesnt change Johnny's initial ruling in the moderation case, nor does it 
excuse Panic from the results of that moderation. It was decided that Panic 
could not continue to behave the way he had been, and when he did, Johnny 
blocked him.

Consider a parallel with you involved. If Panic loses this round of 
arbitration, he is going to start a fight with you as well. Is somebody 
going to jump in and say "Let's overturn Rob's decision, because he was 
engaged in a personal fight with Panic"? You may not care about your 
membership at wikibooks, but I for one would feel the loss if you stopped 
contributing all together (blocked or pushed out).

>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.

The edit war wasn't the main rationale for the block anyway. Panic has a 
long history of biting newbies, being uncivil, and starting fights. 
Somewhere you have to draw the line and realize that wikibooks is about 
collaboratively authoring textbooks, not about dealing with Panic's 
particular brand of bullshit on a daily basis. We are all just volunteers 
trying to write textbooks, and people who can't follow the rules shouldnt be 
here in the first place.

>As far as appealing up the food chain, so to say, that has always been
>an option.

My point was that it's a bad option. In general, I would prefer for 
wikibook's problems to be solved by wikibookians. Look at what happens when 
people from outside wikibooks try to "help" us: The portal is moved to meta 
where it's broken and unfixable, the logo is changed to something we dont 
need or want, etc. Look also at what has happened in the past when Jimbo has 
come in to mandate something or another: I would hardly say his ruling on 
the videogame guides was "absolute". If panic raises a big enough stink to 
these people, they will come in and take action (not likely in panic's 
benefit), but that can't be a good thing for our project in any way.

>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.

Not what Johnny thought either, and look at him now. This whole situation is 
poison in the water, and we risk losing some genuinely helpful people. What 
I dont want to see is Wikibooks get hurt any more then it needs to. Helpful 
and friendly contributors are the only thing that we have, and the numbers 
are preciously small.

--Andrew Whitworth (Whiteknight)

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