OK, we've taken a crack at a more accurate headline. If anyone can find representative language from the article that would make for a suitable title, let us know. We prefer that, but somewhat unusually I couldn't find any candidates in this one.
What indications are there of toxic behavior? Rude, as in a lack of kindness, is not necessarily an indicator of toxic behavior. Toxic implies harm. I completely understand that some people have big tears and when water spout engages at maximum velocity the world has temporarily ended in a dark pit of epic oblivion, but in the real world disagreements are a natural thing that can result in beneficial outcomes.
How do you get from "a reputation for almost always being right on the underlying merits in a dispute, but going about it in a fairly obnoxious way" and "arguably the best admin in Wikipedia's history" to "toxic"?
"WP editor gets unprecedented temp ban, community taken aback" would be rather factual IMO.
"Incivil style" can mean anything. To be snarky, this is coming from people who just give out an unprecedented temp ban and say they can't talk about what it's for, and probably consider that civil, too. So who knows, I'd rather see the comments in question than a description of them.
As for that description of an accusation, anyone who naively created stub articles ("this is what I know, hopefully others will add to it", I've been there) might know how quickly having stuff deleted and being berated on your talk page can go. That can "feel" like all sorts of things, but if there was really something undue going on, I would like to hear it from more than one person, because this is more about patterns in the data of WP in contrast to other data on WP (e.g. how admins normally behave), not how it feels for a WP newbie.
> Endorse with an additional request: if and when an editor with an instance of problematic editing such as WP:CopyVio is identified, en-WP admins and editors – including Fram – may scrutinize other edits of that editor. WMFOffice accepts that this is neither stalking nor evidence of hostility or harassment, rather such efforts are in good faith and necessary to maintain or improve the "Quality and Reliability" of the en-WP.
> he would not be misracing a black person by calling them the n-word, only being racist
How is that not true, technically? I mean, without the context of the actual dispute, this is the weirdest form of gossip. from the same WP page:
> I came here after reading some quotes which show a surreal level of straw men and evidence fabrication against Fram: a post where he said writing the n-word is unacceptable was labeled a racial slur! (I hope I dreamed that.)
so I clicked on the link there, and finally found the orginal:
Reading comment and the discussion before it... to say this was "an ugly claim" is silly to me, and it only "culminated" in that because the other party didn't respond. Too much spooky language, no meat.
Merriam-Webster defines toxic as "extremely harsh, malicious, or harmful", and I think the disconnect is that in my mind, I associate "toxic" with malicious and harmful, not with "extremely harsh". I mean, was George Carlin a toxic comedian? He certainly was extremely harsh, but he meant well, he actually had a point, and so on. Of course, he wasn't always harsh.
I simply don't know if it's true for said admin, but if he was just a dick to everyone, the community would be relieved, not upset, and the charges wouldn't need to get trumped up like this, how it "culminated in an ugly claim", as if that was him being toxic, rather than being treated in a toxic manner, which would be my reading. Right at the beginning of that thread Fram said:
> The repeated statements you made that people "misgendered" you, that they "declared that they personally hate" you, and so on, from those discussions, are much worse personal attacks than what you are now trying to raise here. As far as I can see, no one adressed you with "Peh" in those discussions either. While yo may prefer "they" and it would be more courteous if people used this, there is no misgendering happening if they instead use "xe", which is explicitly intended to be gender-neutral. Your consta...
If toxic but productive isn’t a reasonable characterisation of a reputation for almost always being right on the underlying merits in a dispute, but going about it in a fairly obnoxious way then what is?
"fairly obnoxious" itself is a characterisation, if they had meant "toxic" they would have said that. And "almost always right about the underlying merits in a dispute" is not just "productive", unless that means more than raw output, but something like "constructive", which also doesn't seem very compatible with "toxic". A toxic person may be mean or or super friendly, but both as a means to lead away from the underlying merits in a dispute, prolonging rather than resolving it. Otherwise, what meaning does that word even have?
When I see "almost always being right on the underlying merits in a dispute, but going about it in a fairly obnoxious way" with regard to an editor I imagine things like finding someone doing something in violation of the policy then systematically going around and reverting them (instead of fixing the edits) and leaving them impersonal meat-bot "Your edits are bad and you should feel bad" notes, then when target flips out and starts accusing the correcting-editor of a vendetta, instead of backing off and bringing in help they just cite policy chapter and verse, escalating what could have been an education into an argument-- not because they get off on arguments, but because they suck at interacting with other humans online... Stuff like that.
There is a super wide range for potentially less than great behavior on Wikipedia much of which doesn't overlap with what you'd otherwise consider unprofessional or uncivil conduct.
For me toxic means unpleasant and harmful. It's slightly a stronger term that obnoxious (although I read "fairly obnoxious" in the British reading of the work "fairly", meaning "extremely"), but it's definitely on the same continuum.
Both mean rude, difficult to work with and likely to be harmful to the community because people leave rather than deal with them.
He appears to not be very progressive - the "culture war" bit being that, if he was, this may have played out differently. Similar things happen on Twitter for example. Doxing is ban-worthy when done by one person, but not when done by others with the difference being the political side these persons are on.
The culture war bit is about the fact that a small number of white het cis men dominate wikipedia to the disadvantage of the project. They drive away new editors, they fail to take action on clear harassment, and it skews articles in weird directions.
From reading the article, the bans handed out by the Foundation appear to have been permanent and targeted at less high-profile members of the community. It also suggests that the bans were targeted at obviously illegal activities, e.g. child pornography. I'm not sure how verifiable what the bans were for is, but it seems to be the widely held view.
This is an intervention that realistically should have been dealt with by the community. If he had posted "Fuck Wikimedia" as well, there could have been another perceived conflict of interest. Sooner or later you run out of conflicted groups of people and what happens then?
> obviously illegal activities, e.g. child pornography.
Right.
There was another recent incident which generated some drama due to the lack of transparency by Wikimedia, but it ultimately fizzled because the banned user in question was silent and so absent any alternative people assumed that the ban was well justified.
In this case, the banned user has written a calm and clear description of events from their perspective, including paraphrasing the communication they received from Wikimedia.
This discussion has essentially foreclosed the possibility that it was something like child pornography in question-- and, in fact, the specific citation of a rude remark towards arbcom stands out in particular because arbcom apparently had no involvement in the ban.
I realized later that "another recent incident" was actually just the start of this incident before the banned user and the arbcom requests for clarification went inadequately answered.
I absolutely agree that if someone was as abrasive and toxic as has been suggested then they should have been dealt with long ago. However, if Wikimedia feel that the community has failed to do so, then why not seek to address that failing to fix this case and others in the future rather than taking unilateral action? It doesn't make long term sense unless the message is that Wikimedia will be taking a larger role in moderating the community.
No, but if you say "fuck the church" while you're staying at the podium people will probably show you the door. Wikipedia is a private organisation and can handle disputes how they see fit. You don't have legal rights to wikipedia editing.
That doesn’t really apply here. There was no rule before about temp bans prior to this. Of course it was in poor taste, but it should have not have resulted in temp banning since there were no prior rules in place.
In your situation what if I now had misspoke and when expecting a temp ban, somehow get perms banned due to new rules? Their was no due process and the wikimedia foundation is no better than an authoritarian government.
To my knowledge my chess club has no formal rules about insults either, but I know that if I started to say "fuck you" to the owner, he'd throw me out.
If the person in question needs formal rules to not behave anti-social, maybe staying a year off wikipedia is a good opportunity to figure that out.
Seriously we're dealing with adults here, not children. Which actually goes to the root of the problem, the type of personality that spends so much time on editing the website seems to have a problem with very basic civility.
Well I personally don’t like the self censorship approach. You must come from a more authoritarian culture. In the US, there is the 1st amendment of free speech (something that other countries can not stomach). This includes the ability to criticize and insult our government, country, and president.
The purpose of free speech is to speak without free of being reprimanded for saying the wrong thing in order to communicate more effectively.
Only insecure organizations ban dedicated community members for speaking out of line. In a more open and democratic organization, the governing committee should just acknowledge statement and move on with the shared goals of the community. Especially with Wikipedia where controversy is expected, admins should not self censor with fear of being reprimanded for “thinking/talking” out of line.
And with regards to your chess club, that is your insecurity speaking - your chess club leader may welcome the feedback and try to understand what made you say that in the first place. If the organization is open to feedback and criticism, and if you are a valued member then it should be concerning why u spoke out, since it may affect others too. A club is only as valuable as its members - please remember that.
Do you think you could get away with standing in front of a courthouse shouting "fuck the government" for long without getting arrested? The first amendment doesn't protect you from a disorderly conduct charge.
Behavior matters in society, and we're not talking about the government here. If you want to behave like an asshole you will have a hard time in a lot of places, and that's a good thing for the most part IMHO.
Just the fact that all these weasel words have to get added should answer the question without them. Of course nobody would even give a shit if you said it once, like said admin said it once. And the best part is, it's totally speculation whether the ban has anything to do with it. So it's basically just a bunch of people saying "I don't know or care why this happened, because I know something for which they would deserve it", which is saying "fuck arbcom" -- not that we know or care about any of the context, at all. Not even saying "fuck you" to a person. I guess if he had said "fuck wikipedia" it should have been more than one year, because after all, that includes arbcom by definition.
I'm pretty sure I said "fuck HN" in other words before, one time I was so mad I actually took a break from posting, and after a year came back with a lot of upvotes on my last comment and a supportive reply.
> Behavior matters in society
This includes the ban, and arguing "my chess club owner would throw anyone giving them lip out instantly, so" with a straight face.
edit: actually, while we don't know for sure what the ban is for, it's pretty obvious it has nothing to do with "fuck arbcom":
> What we can say in this case is that the issues reported to us fell under section 4 of the terms of use, as noted above, specifically under the first provision entitled “harassing and abusing others.”
My description of much of this as "I don't know or care why this happened, because I know something for which they would deserve it" is correct - it's just not flattering.
Not that it has anything to do with Wikipedia, -- you're right that you might get arrested, but in the US the arrest may not go well for the arrester: See Cohen v. California (1971) (or something more recent: Thurairajah v. Arkansas).
In this case a closer analog would be someone saying "Fuck you" to a judge in court (arbcom), and then the property manager of the courthouse comes (WMF) unbiden by the court and evicts that person from the property and declines to provide any detailed explanation for their actions either to the public or the court.
It might well be that the judge would have eventually found the party in contempt and no one would have had an issue with it... but as it is the public is left confused and concerned about the property manager's use of their right to prevent trespass effectively undermining the authority of the established system of governance.
Abusive and uncivil speech and behaviour do not preserve freedom - of speech or anything else. They are a form of violence; an implication and insinuation of future or potential actual violence. As such they are designed to silence and constrain the actions of others from a position of privilege - the privilege of being the person who can and will commit acts of violence.
There is a flaw in your logic above "I personally don't like the self censorship approach. You must come from a more authoritarian culture" this is a deduction and assertion with no support; the GP may come from anywhere and it is perfectly reasonable for them to come from a very libertarian culture and yet hold opinions that are contrary to your opinion.
It sounds like your chess club owner would be acting as a benevolent dictator, deciding the rules and punishment after the fact. Works well enough as long as he remains benevolent.
Wikimedia simply promised to be better than that. The ban isn’t the problem, the process getting there is.
Benevolent dictator? Really? Seems like getting bounced for cursing people out is a very basic and mild response in society, not “ho ho this monarch is making up the rules from whole cloth!”
"Benevolent dictator" is a fairly well known term from the open source world that (taken generically) means the person in charge of something so informally organized there is no process for decision making beyond the person in charge doing as they wish.
Would the owner bounce their significant other for that behavior? Their sibling or close friend? Would they give more chances to those they favor and less to those they dislike? No one expects the owner to be truly impartial in that scenario, but we do expect that of Wikimedia foundation.
It's a breaking of process. Why couldn't ArbCom have handled this? Wrecking a good process to get handle one particular thing is trading away long-term stability for that one thing. Bad trade.
Yeah, but that also comes through as demeaning for the ArbCo; it assumes that once insulted, the members are unable to remain adults and exercise restraint.
No, IMHO the central office had already decided the ArbCo had already failed to defend itself and the platform from skilled manipulation.
The context of that was a mass message sent to all administrators that appeared to say that all administrators "must" enable two-factor authentication or the Arbitration Committee would disable their accounts. Some administrators were rather angry at this.
Heh, is this related to the sudden push by Wikipedia to Decentralize Everything?
Okay then, if we have a fully decentralized info network, which decision-making entities are installed as the prime movers? What contracts exist to operate such a decentralized governed network, facilitating elections and whatnot? (Assuming we want a “fair” and “just” decentralized state).
In other words, someone’s always gotta be in charge. Just a matter of who.
Kudos to the journalist and buzzfeed for putting in an effort to understand the relative dynamics and for linking directly to the underlying discussions.
Wikipedia is one of the few very large venues online that I feel really had moderation done right (HN isn't in the running due to not being very large. :))-- sites like reddit, twitter, facebook just get capricious bans handed out essentially at random--- on those sites earnest and serious harassment usually goes unaddressed while petty staff qualms or favors for connected parties are about the only thing that reliably gets addressed. (And I am speaking directly from experience)
Having a community that governs itself is really the only thing with a chance of scaling, but for that to work the community has to also own itself: Few will invest the labor required to maintain effective self-governance if they feel they are facing capricious overrides, creating an environment where they're working for someone else (without compensation) rather than for themselves.
For a long time Wikipedia was a shining example here, but this incident suggests to me that it may not be anymore.
I see your point, but the last paragraphs of the article painted a different scenario; one where the self-governing bodies were unable to address the skillfully borderline actions - where each one individually is within rule and custom, but as a whole are an act of harassment- of a malicious yet respected actor.
Fascinating... there are several historical examples of “revolutionary” bodies that succumbed to these dynamics. Curious to see if there’s some layman’s literature on the subject
not quite what you are wondering about, but FWIW this bit from the article
> “The community is currently blaming the foundation for their own mess, in my opinion,” he wrote, “which was caused by our abject failure to develop procedures to enforce civility without Foundation intervention.”
reminded me of something Gustav Landauer said:
> You don’t know what order with freedom means! You only know what revolt against oppression is! You don’t know that the rod, discipline, violence, the state and government can only be sustained because of you and because of your lack of socially creative powers that develop order within liberty!
That is a claim being made, but it doesn't appear to be one that is actually supported by the facts.
In this case, the editor in question had a longstanding dispute with Wikimedia connected party (a party whom, had, in fact been sanctioned by the community for their actions).
I understand that monarchy is now in fashion in communities, but the arguments for democracy in its various forms as opposed to various kinds of dictatorships remain strong enough that I'd want to see some pretty good evidence that self governance isn't a good trade-off. I don't think that anyone would argue that community self-governance won't make errors, all systems of governance will. The abject failure of centrally moderated large web communities certainly do not argue for that approach.
[Of particular interest: this case has all the marks of having received attention through influence (the banned user had a longstanding dispute with a WMF connected party who also quit the project at the same time)-- maybe that actually wasn't a factor here but WMF has not been forthcoming even TO the arbcom in private with a detailed justification for this actions. As a result of the apparent of impropriety and the largely unexplained secrecy it doesn't make for a particularly good argument that it's actually fixing a failure.]
To clarify in case this gets read as a greater accusation than I intended:
I have some personal experience potentially similar to the persons involved in the potential conflict of interest in this case: My partner was previously chair of the Wikimedia foundation board.
I was made uncomfortable on a number of occasions by staff whom didn't otherwise know me from Adam being unusually responsive to me compared to other contributors with similar or greater community standing but less luminous connections. ... and this happened even though no one asked for it and though I tried to carefully avoid invoking it.
No explicit corruption is needed to end up with an undue and improper influence, that's just how people work. I addressed it by reducing my involvement.
I can only imagine that now-- with greater distance between WMF staff and the community since many of the old time community originated staff left during Lila's tenure as ED-- that this sort of issue is even worse, since staff members that knew me as a community member didn't act that way as far as I could tell.
Hmm, I’m just a bystander. I’m not making any claim, just noting to the parent post that the article does indeed report two scenarios (and frankly there may be even more at play, simultaneously.)
I’m not into monarchies nor do I think most do, sounds like a bit of a straw man...
Just a passing observation: looks like several bottom-up movements, revolutions, alternative “emergent communities” tend to leave enough leeway for manipulative actors to play with the new weak norms without the rest of the community noticing how they’re being played. I’m curious if there are studies on the subject
Slightly off topic, but kudos to your contribution to the censorship on /r/bitcoin, you guys really won. I was skeptical of the mass bans you guys handed out, but you really pulled it off. You should give consultation to Wales on how to handle this situation. Maybe mass bans will be effective.
> Wikipedia is one of the few very large venues online that I feel really had moderation done right
For years Wikipedia has given a pass to abusive harassing arseholes because those people were also prolific editors.
That puts at risk the main principle of wikipedia - the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, because lots of those anyones are driven away by those toxic but prolific editors.
And wikipedia just isn't very good at acknowledging they're bad at dealing with toxic editors. A bunch of admins will see clear pattern of abuse and will excuse it. "That's not so bad", "it's pretty bad but it's not as bad as it used to be", "no-one has told that person to stop" (despite there being many requests to the person to stop), "it's pretty bad but they're prolific", "I don't think it's bad and so anyone else who think's it's bad should toughen up". (We see most of these in the Fram discussion.)
The worst thing about wikipedia (and we also see this on HN) is the refusal to trust process unless every single intimate detail is litigated in public, and that's something that often cannot happen when you have a person harassing others.
> For years Wikipedia has given a pass to abusive harassing arseholes because those people were also prolific editors
Can you suggest a similarly large service that does better?
I can tell you first hand that reddit and twitter absoltely give not the slightest shit about constant harassment, impersonation, and posting threats and personal information: Except when I pick up the phone and directly apply pressure to the legal or executive staff via connections.
> is the refusal to trust process unless every single intimate detail is litigated in public,
This isn't the case here. Wikipedia has a established governance process for dealing with trouble making administrators, who regularly handle highly private confidential information-- and they're equally in the dark here. There is a process, but it isn't the users who aren't trusting it-- It's the WMF that is not trusting, bypassing the process, and not acting in a transparent manner.
These Wikipedia admins are reaping what they sowed. The toxicity and ban-happy attitude in Wikipedia as a whole did not come from the Foundation (which is the internet landlord of the site anyway - if you don't like it, start a fork). The Wikimedia Foundation has just upped the ante a little bit.
And of course no corporate drama is complete without the CEO shooting themselves in the foot with misguided tweets [1]. There's something about Twitter that inspires people to say really dumb things.
Not to get into an extensive debate, but this is a complex issue where intelligent and well informed people can disagree.
As you note, obviously the concern has nothing to do with hosting bandwidth or similar. The concern driving the removal of stubs and other undermaintained pages are (1) editorial, relating to the quality of Wikipedia as a resource and (2) the efficient expenditure of maintenance labor.
The effort by volunteers to maintain Wikipedia utterly dwarfs monetary donations to the foundation even by the most conservative estimates. Similarly, the amount of potential harm caused to the world (or an individual, or to the public's goodwill towards wikipedia) due to an article which is grievously incorrect or malicious due to being unmaintained also dwarfs petty operating considerations.
The concern is that articles that no one cares about are potentially places where damaging content could fester and dealing with them, even inadequately, requires expenditure of editorial resources which could be better applied elsewhere.
There are contributors at both extremes of this ideological split, though most people are somewhere in between. The political dynamic has created something of a impasse where contributors more on the extreme end of include-everything oppose the addition of tools that would allow less aggressive handling (such as making those pages accessible only to logged-in users, whom are presumably better informed about the sausage making) because of the justified concern that these measures would also be applied to more borderline cases which are currently included.
I'm sure someone could do a whole graduate thesis on that question, or any of a million other questions about how Wikipedia works. Wikipedia is evolved, not intelligently designed.
It has a million behaviors that few can explain clearly-- some are historical baggage, others have critical subtle interactions. There are historical reasons for sure-- e.g. relatively early in WP's history there were a number of editors that mass created all sorts of quasi-random articles using automation. But are there good reasons to keep doing it? Dunno. Maybe someone more active than I has a better idea.
If the meta of wikipedia is interesting to you, you might find these notes I made for a talk I wrote in circa 2008 or so which addresses why WP's behavior is often kind of inexplicable to humans and why that isn't a problem or at least why it's not avoidable: https://people.xiph.org/~greg/zen.wp.txt
> The concern is that articles that no one cares about
I wonder how they determine which articles no one cares about. A page about a notable person on Pitcairn Island might be accessed once a day by every single one of its inhabitants but that would only show as 1500 page views by 50 users per month.
I blieve it's not about visitors "not caring", but editors. A stub may be "Firstname Lastname is a person on Pitcairn Island" and nothing else. The article just sits there, doesn't provide value to anyone looking for info on that person and nobody appears to care enough to grow it into an informational article.
> I wonder how they determine which articles no one cares about.
Like everything on Wikipedia the answer is some messy mixture of formal and informal processes, automation, and 8.2 kilotons of thinking meat ... which often gets it wrong but gets it right often enough to produce something truly great.
I haven't been involved in wikipedia gnoming for quite a while but I think: I think in practice what happens is that various editors who care about such things go around proposing stubs for deletion based on whatever criteria they think makes sense, and then other people sometimes oppose those proposed deletions (or moves to draftspace) with arguments and improving edits. So the criteria essentially is a measure of literal care put in by editors to preserve the article.
It’s a pretty awful practice, even worse is moving stubs to “draft space” purgatory where they can’t be found until you, as a single editor, create the entire article yourself without community support.
That is not what actually happens to stubs. It has never been the site's deletion policy to delete stubs. What actually happens to stubs is that they sit around for years. Some grow; a lot do not.
Nor was it what Fram did. Fram proposed deletion, of newly created articles (that had not sat dormant, moreover), and put the articles up for community discussion. The people who actually did the deletion were other people. Here's one such stub deleted by David Gerard, for example.
I deliberately did not give you an en.m.wikipedia.org URL. What you are seeing is a known problem with MobileFrontEnd, which erroneously masks some things. Use the URL that I actually gave you.
I don't quite understand what I'm supposed to be upset with here. You've got a guy who stalks users and attacks the administration, and they ban him for a year, which kind of seems like a measured approach to be honest.
Some other admins didn't like that treatment and quit. So what? If you see that kind of behavior as something acceptable and the organization doesn't, maybe you shouldn't be there either.
USA has started the political campaign and with it there is an increase in manipulation. What should be a matter of politeness - don't insult people - becomes an opportunity to push against moderated discussion. :(
Please HN review this thread carefully as this is what comes for the next year.
You might want to turn your skimming level down a bit.
Wikipedia's community has a long established set of processes for self-governance, but they were bypassed in this case.
The administration in question was banned by staff of the Wikimedia foundation, the 501c3 non-profit created by the community for the purpose of the operation of the infrastructure of Wikipedia, and have done so without providing a clear justification both for the circumvention of the project's governance and the specific. This is a highly unusual though not completely unprecedented event.
99% of the people who are up in arms about this would have had no issue had the arbcom banned the user in question, the constitutional issue is what has people so concerned.
> Wikipedia's community has a long established set of processes for self-governance, but they were bypassed in this case.
This is untrue.
The processes were used and they failed to work. They failed to protect people from this abusive admin. Read the discussion about fram - there are plenty of people there saying "he's a bit of an arsehole but he edits a lot". Clearly the existing processes were aware that fram was abusive.
Wikimedia is currently not even providing information about their actions to the arbcom. How can you argue that the process didn't work when it is apparently contingent on information which is being concealed from it?
People in the discussion aren't for the most part arguing that fram shouldn't be banned-- the discussion is almost exclusively about the constitutional issues and accusations of impropriety. ... but "bit of an arsehole" could mean a lot of things and doesn't necessarily mean abusive.
Wikipedia’s community is facing the same sort of problem with Fram that the Linux community has faced with Linus and that the OpenBSD community has faced with Theo.
Is conduct relevant if someone is otherwise a good contributor of good work output in service of the project?
Many, including a significant fraction of HN upvoters, have cheered on Linus and Theo over the years for conduct perceived as both hostile and contributory. Fram, too, has for many years had conduct perceived as both hostile and contributory.
Therefore, it should come as little surprise that Fram has supporters. The question raised near the end of the article is relevant: Why did Fram’s peers allow Fram’s conduct to continue?
To answer that question, we need only look inward: Linus is taking conduct training, so that he can continue to contribute usefully while conducting himself respectfully (but not necessarily politely). This change is not universally liked, as there are many who feel that they should have the right to disrespect anyone, and this is a critical turning point of sentiment against their “freedom”.
The advent of codes of conducts in open source invoked the same problem and the same reaction, at a larger scale: people who swear they will boycott contributions to any project that restricts their freedom of conduct in any way.
HN openly restricts the freedom of conduct of commenters, so I always smile when I see people post here that they’ll boycott some project over having their rights abrogated - they don’t see the irony and pointing it out would be inflammatory, so I keep it to myself.
But it’s absolutely not “much ado about nothing”. It’s right at the core of whether “the right of free speech” includes “the right of speech perceived by others as inconsiderate, disrespectful, derogatory, and/or harmful”. HN commenters don’t yet agree on this point, and it’s no stretch to consider that Wikipedia editors don’t either.
I think the least highlighted part of the story, and the one being totally ignored on HN, is the alleged secret romantic relationship between a foundation member and the alleged female complainant. That puts a lot in perspective for me. What's even more interesting is that the alleged complainant was mostly active on pages related to women athletes, women's rights, abortion rights etc., so it's not a far stretch to assume she's a feminist. And from her perspective she was being stalked and harassed by a privileged white male, who in fact was just doing his job of correcting her grammar, deleting stubs etc. Also his rude behavior wouldn't have helped. So she went ahead and did what any radical feminist in power would do, abuse her power.
Do you have any source for this (that isn't just rampant speculation)? If these things are going on and actually impacting editorial work within Wikipedia itself, it sounds like we are due for a nice little Wikipediagate...
There is no factual basis to these allegations though. And besides your first sentence and the first half of the second sentence, the rest is completely unsubstantiated. Your comment on feminism and her perspective has no bearing in reality
If the foundation would release the complaint, we wouldn't have to go digging into Fram's history to find the source of this conflict. So don't put this on me. Yes, these allegations could be wrong, but this is as close as we can get to the facts without the foundation releasing the original complaint.
Also, what is your take on this? Why do you think the foundation, that usually only steps in when someone is posting something highly illegal like child porn etc., bypassed the orb committee this time? Why is the complaint being shrouded in secrecy?
There's definitely something funny going on, and this is the only line of reasoning that makes sense to me. But I'm open to other ideas.
FWIW, "release the complaint" could simply mean releasing the details privately to the arbcom, which regularly handles privileged private data under non-disclosure.
I've seen no explanation in the article or in any of the discussion which would justify keeping the arbcom in the dark here. It's quite surprising, but not the first recent incident of WMF doing this.
I wish you would delete this comment and make it again without the loaded overtones that are going to cause it to get killed.
You're expressing an interesting observation but then ruining it with an overly politicized generalization that reflects poorly on you and your position.
Even if he would remove the vitriol in his comment, arguably it is still a pretty bad comment: Each sentence has no factual basis but is purely based on far-flung allegations and they still manage to make massive leaps of logic between each sentence.
Wow, I don't even know where to start. You are right that the alleged relationship is actually the most interesting part of the story. Because it shows what's so wrong about the user base's reaction: Without any merit - reminiscent of GamerGate (see my other comment) - a secret relationship is alleged that of course biases every actor involved. The community piles onto one user without any good reason, except that she is a woman. And her behavior, writing about topics that counteract certain problems in the community (and are thus almost an act of resistance), is disdained by the insecure, predominantly male, user base that feels attacked by the implicit political act in her presence and writing focus.
Every single sentence in your comment is without a factual base - and you still manage to make massive leaps of logic between them. It is clear that you are motivated by an anti-feminist standpoint that has little connection with actual reality or contemporary feminist thought. And for some reason, you deem it justified to harass users for it. If a substantial portion of Wikipedia's user base is like you, then that's pretty unhealthy.
One the lines in my comment was "this puts a lot in perspective for me". So it goes without saying that I'm reaching all those conclusions from my perspective. Am I misogynist? Hell no. Am I against equal rights for women? Not at all. But I'm against equal rights that come without equal responsibilities. And over the years in my life I have seen multiple women not being held accountable of their actions, just because of their gender. They get to make false allegations and totally ruin other people's lives and get no punishment even when these allegations are proved totally wrong. This only promotes these kinds of false allegations. And that's why I'm assuming the foundation is hiding the complaint in a shroud of secrecy, because it won't stand any ground in public. And, of course, even if the allegations against Fram are proven to be false, there will be zero consequences for the complainant. Only encouraging more women to file such complaints against other admins until all the well minded people start leaving the project and radical feminists gain control of it and start attempting to change the history.
What's going on is that the complainant xirself is indirectly letting us know that xir complaint didn't have any ground to stand on. Xey went straight to the Foundation precisely as a ploy to bypass the community's well-established due process, knowing full well that any bureaucracy of that sort would naturally "hid[e] the complaint in a shroud of secrecy"! It's not so much about xem being a woman - though that certainly can't hurt xem, I guess - and more about the political games that xey're overty playing. Quite disgraceful, all around.
Added: I'm not sure that we can know why the Foundation chose to act on this basis. It could have been personal in the way you imply, but this was a controversial editor who had strongly opposed Foundation initiatives before (Media view, Visual Editor, "next-gen" discussion platform to replace wiki-like talk pages, etc.) So I'd rather not speculate - the Foundation didn't need anything more than a flimsy pretext, and a formal complaint could certainly serve that purpose.
Thank you for articulating that better than me. This is exactly what I'm trying to say. Now the question is why would anyone in the foundation take a drastic action on the bases of a flimsy complaint? My life experience has taught me that these kinds of things are usually done by men in power out of love for a woman. Or by women who know they will face zero consequences in case this blows over. I'm ready to eat my hat, if we ever get the whole picture and we find out that a feminist was not involved (either the complainant or the foundation member who took action).
It is true that WMF should have communicated the reasons for the ban better and worked more closely with the community. However, I do not understand the extreme upset. From what I understand, he was an extremely toxic element of the community that drove new and old users away due to his repeated harassment, which does more damage than having him off the site and loosing his prolific enforcement of the speedy deletion policy.
One of the reasons why they should have communicated better is seen in the following abstract. It also demonstrates how toxic the community is and reminds me a lot of how GamerGate started: The ex-boyfriend of the game developer of "Depression Quest" alleged, in a very long rant, that she was sleeping with a game journalist for a good review in order to profit from it. Of course, that was complete bullshit as, even believing she slept with him, (a) he did not write a review for the game and (b) the game is for free. It is and was never about actual misconduct on the side of the victim of harassment but rather about their identity and how that upsets the community because they're an "Other" in "their" space (here, a woman and a transgender editor)
> Those dynamics are central to Fram’s ban. Egged on by Fram’s insistence that the foundation had actually banned him because of a grudge, and stymied by the foundation’s refusal to name the complainant, Wikipedians began to scour his history on the platform, looking for someone to blame.
> Much of that blame fell, perhaps predictably, on a woman and a transgender editor. In 2017, a fledgling Wikipedian accused Fram of monitoring her activity on the site to such an extent that felt like harassment. The editor, whose contributions focused on women athletes, lesbian history, and abortion rights, felt that Fram’s pattern of correcting her spelling and deleting her stubs — short, unfinished articles that are culled when they sit dormant for too long — demonstrated a lack of good faith.
[...]
> More recently, Fram had an acrimonious semantic debate with a high-profile transgender editor over whether referring to them as “xe” constituted misgendering. It culminated in an ugly claim by Fram that he would not be misracing a black person by calling them the n-word, only being racist.
"Please, stop being cruel to individuals whose names have come up in the course of this issue"
> On Wikipedia and in the forums of Wikipediocracy, a site where Wikipedians gather to discuss and criticize Wikipedia, users speculated about a secret romantic connection between the woman editor and a member of the Wikimedia Foundation board and about whether the trans editor might’ve been pretending to be trans to win a fight with Fram. The vitriol toward those two users grew so intense that Risker chastised some Wikipedians in her critical note about the ban.
> Those dynamics are central to Fram’s ban. Egged on by Fram’s insistence that the foundation had actually banned him because of a grudge, and stymied by the foundation’s refusal to name the complainant, Wikipedians began to scour his history on the platform, looking for someone to blame. Much of that blame fell, perhaps predictably, on a woman and a transgender editor.
Much of that blame fell, predictably, on the one and only person we know that the Wikimedia Foundation had taken the essentially unprecedented step of bypassing the standard community process to intervene against Fram on behalf of. (Because she publicly said so on her userpage, and Fram also confirmed this.) Framing it as though folks were just picking on some random woman because of misogyny is downright dishonest.
This framing is especially dubious since this seems to involve an area where the Wikimedia Foundation has had conflict-of-interest issues for a long time and where people's distrust of the Foundation demonstrably has nothing to do with gender or sex - the Wikipedian in Residence program. The Gibraltapedia fiasco, for example, involved entirely white cishet men so far as I can tell.
I'm not going to weep for Wikipedia. The most I really use it for is finding links to real resources and I can do that elsewhere. I've tried to contribute before, but would always have my edits reverted. They also ban Tor, which is unacceptable.
Anyway, democracy is either good or it isn't. I'm of the opinion that it isn't, but it's queer to me that one could champion democratic ideals and then complain about the demographics. I vehemently disagree with the idea that white men are somehow incapable of cataloguing the world's knowledge, purely because they're not black or Chinese or women or something else, for obvious reasons.
It's interesting that this seems to be connected to the usual group of troublemakers, people who are easily offended, but we'll see where this leads.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] thread"WP editor gets unprecedented temp ban, community taken aback" would be rather factual IMO.
"he had received two previous “conduct warnings” from the foundation’s Trust and Safety Council for his incivil style toward other Wikipedians"
"In 2017, a fledgling Wikipedian accused Fram of monitoring her activity on the site to such an extent that felt like harassment" and
"It culminated in an ugly claim by Fram that he would not be misracing a black person by calling them the n-word, only being racist"
As for that description of an accusation, anyone who naively created stub articles ("this is what I know, hopefully others will add to it", I've been there) might know how quickly having stuff deleted and being berated on your talk page can go. That can "feel" like all sorts of things, but if there was really something undue going on, I would like to hear it from more than one person, because this is more about patterns in the data of WP in contrast to other data on WP (e.g. how admins normally behave), not how it feels for a WP newbie.
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_response_t...
> Endorse with an additional request: if and when an editor with an instance of problematic editing such as WP:CopyVio is identified, en-WP admins and editors – including Fram – may scrutinize other edits of that editor. WMFOffice accepts that this is neither stalking nor evidence of hostility or harassment, rather such efforts are in good faith and necessary to maintain or improve the "Quality and Reliability" of the en-WP.
> he would not be misracing a black person by calling them the n-word, only being racist
How is that not true, technically? I mean, without the context of the actual dispute, this is the weirdest form of gossip. from the same WP page:
> I came here after reading some quotes which show a surreal level of straw men and evidence fabrication against Fram: a post where he said writing the n-word is unacceptable was labeled a racial slur! (I hope I dreamed that.)
so I clicked on the link there, and finally found the orginal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:No...
Reading comment and the discussion before it... to say this was "an ugly claim" is silly to me, and it only "culminated" in that because the other party didn't respond. Too much spooky language, no meat.
Merriam-Webster defines toxic as "extremely harsh, malicious, or harmful", and I think the disconnect is that in my mind, I associate "toxic" with malicious and harmful, not with "extremely harsh". I mean, was George Carlin a toxic comedian? He certainly was extremely harsh, but he meant well, he actually had a point, and so on. Of course, he wasn't always harsh.
I simply don't know if it's true for said admin, but if he was just a dick to everyone, the community would be relieved, not upset, and the charges wouldn't need to get trumped up like this, how it "culminated in an ugly claim", as if that was him being toxic, rather than being treated in a toxic manner, which would be my reading. Right at the beginning of that thread Fram said:
> The repeated statements you made that people "misgendered" you, that they "declared that they personally hate" you, and so on, from those discussions, are much worse personal attacks than what you are now trying to raise here. As far as I can see, no one adressed you with "Peh" in those discussions either. While yo may prefer "they" and it would be more courteous if people used this, there is no misgendering happening if they instead use "xe", which is explicitly intended to be gender-neutral. Your consta...
When I see "almost always being right on the underlying merits in a dispute, but going about it in a fairly obnoxious way" with regard to an editor I imagine things like finding someone doing something in violation of the policy then systematically going around and reverting them (instead of fixing the edits) and leaving them impersonal meat-bot "Your edits are bad and you should feel bad" notes, then when target flips out and starts accusing the correcting-editor of a vendetta, instead of backing off and bringing in help they just cite policy chapter and verse, escalating what could have been an education into an argument-- not because they get off on arguments, but because they suck at interacting with other humans online... Stuff like that.
There is a super wide range for potentially less than great behavior on Wikipedia much of which doesn't overlap with what you'd otherwise consider unprofessional or uncivil conduct.
For me toxic means unpleasant and harmful. It's slightly a stronger term that obnoxious (although I read "fairly obnoxious" in the British reading of the work "fairly", meaning "extremely"), but it's definitely on the same continuum.
Both mean rude, difficult to work with and likely to be harmful to the community because people leave rather than deal with them.
Makes sense. I do not know from were the 'freedom' argument comes from our relates to this.
Now ArbCom is a bit irrelevant, the Foundation decides guilt in secret and hands out punishment as they see fit.
This is an intervention that realistically should have been dealt with by the community. If he had posted "Fuck Wikimedia" as well, there could have been another perceived conflict of interest. Sooner or later you run out of conflicted groups of people and what happens then?
Right.
There was another recent incident which generated some drama due to the lack of transparency by Wikimedia, but it ultimately fizzled because the banned user in question was silent and so absent any alternative people assumed that the ban was well justified.
In this case, the banned user has written a calm and clear description of events from their perspective, including paraphrasing the communication they received from Wikimedia.
This discussion has essentially foreclosed the possibility that it was something like child pornography in question-- and, in fact, the specific citation of a rude remark towards arbcom stands out in particular because arbcom apparently had no involvement in the ban.
The community had years to deal with fram, and they decided not to.
Freedom from any consequences? That isn't a thing.
Should somebody go to jail for saying "fuck the DOJ"?
But I see this is going to be a "it's a private organization, you mustn't critique it" thread.
In your situation what if I now had misspoke and when expecting a temp ban, somehow get perms banned due to new rules? Their was no due process and the wikimedia foundation is no better than an authoritarian government.
If the person in question needs formal rules to not behave anti-social, maybe staying a year off wikipedia is a good opportunity to figure that out.
Seriously we're dealing with adults here, not children. Which actually goes to the root of the problem, the type of personality that spends so much time on editing the website seems to have a problem with very basic civility.
The purpose of free speech is to speak without free of being reprimanded for saying the wrong thing in order to communicate more effectively.
Only insecure organizations ban dedicated community members for speaking out of line. In a more open and democratic organization, the governing committee should just acknowledge statement and move on with the shared goals of the community. Especially with Wikipedia where controversy is expected, admins should not self censor with fear of being reprimanded for “thinking/talking” out of line.
And with regards to your chess club, that is your insecurity speaking - your chess club leader may welcome the feedback and try to understand what made you say that in the first place. If the organization is open to feedback and criticism, and if you are a valued member then it should be concerning why u spoke out, since it may affect others too. A club is only as valuable as its members - please remember that.
Behavior matters in society, and we're not talking about the government here. If you want to behave like an asshole you will have a hard time in a lot of places, and that's a good thing for the most part IMHO.
Just the fact that all these weasel words have to get added should answer the question without them. Of course nobody would even give a shit if you said it once, like said admin said it once. And the best part is, it's totally speculation whether the ban has anything to do with it. So it's basically just a bunch of people saying "I don't know or care why this happened, because I know something for which they would deserve it", which is saying "fuck arbcom" -- not that we know or care about any of the context, at all. Not even saying "fuck you" to a person. I guess if he had said "fuck wikipedia" it should have been more than one year, because after all, that includes arbcom by definition.
I'm pretty sure I said "fuck HN" in other words before, one time I was so mad I actually took a break from posting, and after a year came back with a lot of upvotes on my last comment and a supportive reply.
> Behavior matters in society
This includes the ban, and arguing "my chess club owner would throw anyone giving them lip out instantly, so" with a straight face.
edit: actually, while we don't know for sure what the ban is for, it's pretty obvious it has nothing to do with "fuck arbcom":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_response_t...
> What we can say in this case is that the issues reported to us fell under section 4 of the terms of use, as noted above, specifically under the first provision entitled “harassing and abusing others.”
My description of much of this as "I don't know or care why this happened, because I know something for which they would deserve it" is correct - it's just not flattering.
In this case a closer analog would be someone saying "Fuck you" to a judge in court (arbcom), and then the property manager of the courthouse comes (WMF) unbiden by the court and evicts that person from the property and declines to provide any detailed explanation for their actions either to the public or the court.
It might well be that the judge would have eventually found the party in contempt and no one would have had an issue with it... but as it is the public is left confused and concerned about the property manager's use of their right to prevent trespass effectively undermining the authority of the established system of governance.
There is a flaw in your logic above "I personally don't like the self censorship approach. You must come from a more authoritarian culture" this is a deduction and assertion with no support; the GP may come from anywhere and it is perfectly reasonable for them to come from a very libertarian culture and yet hold opinions that are contrary to your opinion.
Wikimedia simply promised to be better than that. The ban isn’t the problem, the process getting there is.
The sustained pattern of behaviour that the community failed to deal with was what caused the ban.
"Fuck arbcom" is the reason the ban was handed out by WMF and not arbcom.
Is this what happened? Maybe. It certainly sounds a plausible, but without any transparency, it’s hard to say.
No, IMHO the central office had already decided the ArbCo had already failed to defend itself and the platform from skilled manipulation.
I would expect reforms are on their way
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/MediaWik...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration_Com... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration_Com...)
If my employer demanded I use TFA (they do), and I defaced one of their public web pages, I’d be fired.
I doubt that comment is the issue.
Okay then, if we have a fully decentralized info network, which decision-making entities are installed as the prime movers? What contracts exist to operate such a decentralized governed network, facilitating elections and whatnot? (Assuming we want a “fair” and “just” decentralized state).
In other words, someone’s always gotta be in charge. Just a matter of who.
Kudos to the journalist and buzzfeed for putting in an effort to understand the relative dynamics and for linking directly to the underlying discussions.
Wikipedia is one of the few very large venues online that I feel really had moderation done right (HN isn't in the running due to not being very large. :))-- sites like reddit, twitter, facebook just get capricious bans handed out essentially at random--- on those sites earnest and serious harassment usually goes unaddressed while petty staff qualms or favors for connected parties are about the only thing that reliably gets addressed. (And I am speaking directly from experience)
Having a community that governs itself is really the only thing with a chance of scaling, but for that to work the community has to also own itself: Few will invest the labor required to maintain effective self-governance if they feel they are facing capricious overrides, creating an environment where they're working for someone else (without compensation) rather than for themselves.
For a long time Wikipedia was a shining example here, but this incident suggests to me that it may not be anymore.
Fascinating... there are several historical examples of “revolutionary” bodies that succumbed to these dynamics. Curious to see if there’s some layman’s literature on the subject
> “The community is currently blaming the foundation for their own mess, in my opinion,” he wrote, “which was caused by our abject failure to develop procedures to enforce civility without Foundation intervention.”
reminded me of something Gustav Landauer said:
> You don’t know what order with freedom means! You only know what revolt against oppression is! You don’t know that the rod, discipline, violence, the state and government can only be sustained because of you and because of your lack of socially creative powers that develop order within liberty!
In this case, the editor in question had a longstanding dispute with Wikimedia connected party (a party whom, had, in fact been sanctioned by the community for their actions).
I understand that monarchy is now in fashion in communities, but the arguments for democracy in its various forms as opposed to various kinds of dictatorships remain strong enough that I'd want to see some pretty good evidence that self governance isn't a good trade-off. I don't think that anyone would argue that community self-governance won't make errors, all systems of governance will. The abject failure of centrally moderated large web communities certainly do not argue for that approach.
[Of particular interest: this case has all the marks of having received attention through influence (the banned user had a longstanding dispute with a WMF connected party who also quit the project at the same time)-- maybe that actually wasn't a factor here but WMF has not been forthcoming even TO the arbcom in private with a detailed justification for this actions. As a result of the apparent of impropriety and the largely unexplained secrecy it doesn't make for a particularly good argument that it's actually fixing a failure.]
To clarify in case this gets read as a greater accusation than I intended:
I have some personal experience potentially similar to the persons involved in the potential conflict of interest in this case: My partner was previously chair of the Wikimedia foundation board.
I was made uncomfortable on a number of occasions by staff whom didn't otherwise know me from Adam being unusually responsive to me compared to other contributors with similar or greater community standing but less luminous connections. ... and this happened even though no one asked for it and though I tried to carefully avoid invoking it.
No explicit corruption is needed to end up with an undue and improper influence, that's just how people work. I addressed it by reducing my involvement.
I can only imagine that now-- with greater distance between WMF staff and the community since many of the old time community originated staff left during Lila's tenure as ED-- that this sort of issue is even worse, since staff members that knew me as a community member didn't act that way as far as I could tell.
I’m not into monarchies nor do I think most do, sounds like a bit of a straw man...
Just a passing observation: looks like several bottom-up movements, revolutions, alternative “emergent communities” tend to leave enough leeway for manipulative actors to play with the new weak norms without the rest of the community noticing how they’re being played. I’m curious if there are studies on the subject
Two bureaucrats (out of 20), 18 administrators, an ArbCom clerk has already resigned, and now 4 out of 9 members of ArbCom is planning to resign.
For years Wikipedia has given a pass to abusive harassing arseholes because those people were also prolific editors.
That puts at risk the main principle of wikipedia - the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, because lots of those anyones are driven away by those toxic but prolific editors.
And wikipedia just isn't very good at acknowledging they're bad at dealing with toxic editors. A bunch of admins will see clear pattern of abuse and will excuse it. "That's not so bad", "it's pretty bad but it's not as bad as it used to be", "no-one has told that person to stop" (despite there being many requests to the person to stop), "it's pretty bad but they're prolific", "I don't think it's bad and so anyone else who think's it's bad should toughen up". (We see most of these in the Fram discussion.)
The worst thing about wikipedia (and we also see this on HN) is the refusal to trust process unless every single intimate detail is litigated in public, and that's something that often cannot happen when you have a person harassing others.
Can you suggest a similarly large service that does better?
I can tell you first hand that reddit and twitter absoltely give not the slightest shit about constant harassment, impersonation, and posting threats and personal information: Except when I pick up the phone and directly apply pressure to the legal or executive staff via connections.
> is the refusal to trust process unless every single intimate detail is litigated in public,
This isn't the case here. Wikipedia has a established governance process for dealing with trouble making administrators, who regularly handle highly private confidential information-- and they're equally in the dark here. There is a process, but it isn't the users who aren't trusting it-- It's the WMF that is not trusting, bypassing the process, and not acting in a transparent manner.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#New_Buzz...
Can someone please explain why they do this? You'd think that with $100M/yr in donations, hosting stubs wouldn't be a problem.
As you note, obviously the concern has nothing to do with hosting bandwidth or similar. The concern driving the removal of stubs and other undermaintained pages are (1) editorial, relating to the quality of Wikipedia as a resource and (2) the efficient expenditure of maintenance labor.
The effort by volunteers to maintain Wikipedia utterly dwarfs monetary donations to the foundation even by the most conservative estimates. Similarly, the amount of potential harm caused to the world (or an individual, or to the public's goodwill towards wikipedia) due to an article which is grievously incorrect or malicious due to being unmaintained also dwarfs petty operating considerations.
The concern is that articles that no one cares about are potentially places where damaging content could fester and dealing with them, even inadequately, requires expenditure of editorial resources which could be better applied elsewhere.
There are contributors at both extremes of this ideological split, though most people are somewhere in between. The political dynamic has created something of a impasse where contributors more on the extreme end of include-everything oppose the addition of tools that would allow less aggressive handling (such as making those pages accessible only to logged-in users, whom are presumably better informed about the sausage making) because of the justified concern that these measures would also be applied to more borderline cases which are currently included.
That could describe the bulk of the millions of articles, why single out stubs for the axe specifically
It has a million behaviors that few can explain clearly-- some are historical baggage, others have critical subtle interactions. There are historical reasons for sure-- e.g. relatively early in WP's history there were a number of editors that mass created all sorts of quasi-random articles using automation. But are there good reasons to keep doing it? Dunno. Maybe someone more active than I has a better idea.
If the meta of wikipedia is interesting to you, you might find these notes I made for a talk I wrote in circa 2008 or so which addresses why WP's behavior is often kind of inexplicable to humans and why that isn't a problem or at least why it's not avoidable: https://people.xiph.org/~greg/zen.wp.txt
> The concern is that articles that no one cares about
I wonder how they determine which articles no one cares about. A page about a notable person on Pitcairn Island might be accessed once a day by every single one of its inhabitants but that would only show as 1500 page views by 50 users per month.
Like everything on Wikipedia the answer is some messy mixture of formal and informal processes, automation, and 8.2 kilotons of thinking meat ... which often gets it wrong but gets it right often enough to produce something truly great.
I haven't been involved in wikipedia gnoming for quite a while but I think: I think in practice what happens is that various editors who care about such things go around proposing stubs for deletion based on whatever criteria they think makes sense, and then other people sometimes oppose those proposed deletions (or moves to draftspace) with arguments and improving edits. So the criteria essentially is a measure of literal care put in by editors to preserve the article.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy?oldi...
Nor was it what Fram did. Fram proposed deletion, of newly created articles (that had not sat dormant, moreover), and put the articles up for community discussion. The people who actually did the deletion were other people. Here's one such stub deleted by David Gerard, for example.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Leone_national_cerebral...
Some other admins didn't like that treatment and quit. So what? If you see that kind of behavior as something acceptable and the organization doesn't, maybe you shouldn't be there either.
Sounds like much ado about nothing.
USA has started the political campaign and with it there is an increase in manipulation. What should be a matter of politeness - don't insult people - becomes an opportunity to push against moderated discussion. :(
Please HN review this thread carefully as this is what comes for the next year.
Wikipedia's community has a long established set of processes for self-governance, but they were bypassed in this case.
The administration in question was banned by staff of the Wikimedia foundation, the 501c3 non-profit created by the community for the purpose of the operation of the infrastructure of Wikipedia, and have done so without providing a clear justification both for the circumvention of the project's governance and the specific. This is a highly unusual though not completely unprecedented event.
99% of the people who are up in arms about this would have had no issue had the arbcom banned the user in question, the constitutional issue is what has people so concerned.
This is untrue.
The processes were used and they failed to work. They failed to protect people from this abusive admin. Read the discussion about fram - there are plenty of people there saying "he's a bit of an arsehole but he edits a lot". Clearly the existing processes were aware that fram was abusive.
People in the discussion aren't for the most part arguing that fram shouldn't be banned-- the discussion is almost exclusively about the constitutional issues and accusations of impropriety. ... but "bit of an arsehole" could mean a lot of things and doesn't necessarily mean abusive.
Edit: The arbcom has issued a statement-- a fairly strongly worded one, by arbcom's standards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_response_t...
Is conduct relevant if someone is otherwise a good contributor of good work output in service of the project?
Many, including a significant fraction of HN upvoters, have cheered on Linus and Theo over the years for conduct perceived as both hostile and contributory. Fram, too, has for many years had conduct perceived as both hostile and contributory.
Therefore, it should come as little surprise that Fram has supporters. The question raised near the end of the article is relevant: Why did Fram’s peers allow Fram’s conduct to continue?
To answer that question, we need only look inward: Linus is taking conduct training, so that he can continue to contribute usefully while conducting himself respectfully (but not necessarily politely). This change is not universally liked, as there are many who feel that they should have the right to disrespect anyone, and this is a critical turning point of sentiment against their “freedom”.
The advent of codes of conducts in open source invoked the same problem and the same reaction, at a larger scale: people who swear they will boycott contributions to any project that restricts their freedom of conduct in any way.
HN openly restricts the freedom of conduct of commenters, so I always smile when I see people post here that they’ll boycott some project over having their rights abrogated - they don’t see the irony and pointing it out would be inflammatory, so I keep it to myself.
But it’s absolutely not “much ado about nothing”. It’s right at the core of whether “the right of free speech” includes “the right of speech perceived by others as inconsiderate, disrespectful, derogatory, and/or harmful”. HN commenters don’t yet agree on this point, and it’s no stretch to consider that Wikipedia editors don’t either.
Also, what is your take on this? Why do you think the foundation, that usually only steps in when someone is posting something highly illegal like child porn etc., bypassed the orb committee this time? Why is the complaint being shrouded in secrecy?
There's definitely something funny going on, and this is the only line of reasoning that makes sense to me. But I'm open to other ideas.
I've seen no explanation in the article or in any of the discussion which would justify keeping the arbcom in the dark here. It's quite surprising, but not the first recent incident of WMF doing this.
You're expressing an interesting observation but then ruining it with an overly politicized generalization that reflects poorly on you and your position.
Every single sentence in your comment is without a factual base - and you still manage to make massive leaps of logic between them. It is clear that you are motivated by an anti-feminist standpoint that has little connection with actual reality or contemporary feminist thought. And for some reason, you deem it justified to harass users for it. If a substantial portion of Wikipedia's user base is like you, then that's pretty unhealthy.
Added: I'm not sure that we can know why the Foundation chose to act on this basis. It could have been personal in the way you imply, but this was a controversial editor who had strongly opposed Foundation initiatives before (Media view, Visual Editor, "next-gen" discussion platform to replace wiki-like talk pages, etc.) So I'd rather not speculate - the Foundation didn't need anything more than a flimsy pretext, and a formal complaint could certainly serve that purpose.
One of the reasons why they should have communicated better is seen in the following abstract. It also demonstrates how toxic the community is and reminds me a lot of how GamerGate started: The ex-boyfriend of the game developer of "Depression Quest" alleged, in a very long rant, that she was sleeping with a game journalist for a good review in order to profit from it. Of course, that was complete bullshit as, even believing she slept with him, (a) he did not write a review for the game and (b) the game is for free. It is and was never about actual misconduct on the side of the victim of harassment but rather about their identity and how that upsets the community because they're an "Other" in "their" space (here, a woman and a transgender editor)
> Those dynamics are central to Fram’s ban. Egged on by Fram’s insistence that the foundation had actually banned him because of a grudge, and stymied by the foundation’s refusal to name the complainant, Wikipedians began to scour his history on the platform, looking for someone to blame.
> Much of that blame fell, perhaps predictably, on a woman and a transgender editor. In 2017, a fledgling Wikipedian accused Fram of monitoring her activity on the site to such an extent that felt like harassment. The editor, whose contributions focused on women athletes, lesbian history, and abortion rights, felt that Fram’s pattern of correcting her spelling and deleting her stubs — short, unfinished articles that are culled when they sit dormant for too long — demonstrated a lack of good faith.
[...]
> More recently, Fram had an acrimonious semantic debate with a high-profile transgender editor over whether referring to them as “xe” constituted misgendering. It culminated in an ugly claim by Fram that he would not be misracing a black person by calling them the n-word, only being racist. "Please, stop being cruel to individuals whose names have come up in the course of this issue"
> On Wikipedia and in the forums of Wikipediocracy, a site where Wikipedians gather to discuss and criticize Wikipedia, users speculated about a secret romantic connection between the woman editor and a member of the Wikimedia Foundation board and about whether the trans editor might’ve been pretending to be trans to win a fight with Fram. The vitriol toward those two users grew so intense that Risker chastised some Wikipedians in her critical note about the ban.
Much of that blame fell, predictably, on the one and only person we know that the Wikimedia Foundation had taken the essentially unprecedented step of bypassing the standard community process to intervene against Fram on behalf of. (Because she publicly said so on her userpage, and Fram also confirmed this.) Framing it as though folks were just picking on some random woman because of misogyny is downright dishonest.
This framing is especially dubious since this seems to involve an area where the Wikimedia Foundation has had conflict-of-interest issues for a long time and where people's distrust of the Foundation demonstrably has nothing to do with gender or sex - the Wikipedian in Residence program. The Gibraltapedia fiasco, for example, involved entirely white cishet men so far as I can tell.
Anyway, democracy is either good or it isn't. I'm of the opinion that it isn't, but it's queer to me that one could champion democratic ideals and then complain about the demographics. I vehemently disagree with the idea that white men are somehow incapable of cataloguing the world's knowledge, purely because they're not black or Chinese or women or something else, for obvious reasons.
It's interesting that this seems to be connected to the usual group of troublemakers, people who are easily offended, but we'll see where this leads.