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Hello. My name is Moneytrees and I am a Wikipedia administrator specializing in copyright. In December 2020 (Link to whole conversation), ClemRutter was indefinitely blocked by Diannaa for copyright violations per established practice, after having previously received five copyright warnings. You objected to this at the time, calling it excessive and claimed it happened "without even a warning", despite indefinite blocks of those with several copyright warnings over a long period of time being longstanding practice. Two hours later, you accepted Clemrutter's unblock request and unblocked them with the rationale "Unblocking based on the past trend of amicably resolving the issues, which I trust will also happen here, and than an indef block seems really excessive in this situation. Let's see what happens at CCI for the longer term issue." In the unblock summary you say "per talk page discussion" despite a discussion not really having taken place. I believe that this was an WP:INVOLVED unblock that you should not have done, given your previous comment and interactions with Clemrutter. A Contributor copyright investigation was filed at the time and you commented "Just to note that I have unblocked ClemRutter. The specific issue here seems to be with Thinking School, but I haven't checked past edits by the user. Thanks.", which worried me given the specific issue was not with Thinking School, and that you had not checked the user's past edits when unblocking. I opened the investigation (now at Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations/20210111) and have found several more violations during my brief time working on it. Given the several book sources cited, many of which are offline and cannot be easily accessed for text comparison, the CCI will be very difficult to complete.

In July 2021 Clemrutter received another warning for copyright violations, this time on Integrated education. This was labeled as a final warning, and Clemrutter was again indefinitely blocked by Diannaa on 4 August 2021 for copyright violations on Northern Ireland Curriculum. The ~2000 edits since the December 2020 unblock will now need to be added to the CCI and reviewed for issues.

The entire incident worries me greatly given what I see as misuse of administrative tools and your board candidacy. The way you seemingly ignored Diannaa's concerns is also very concerning. I would like to hear a detailed explanation behind your actions and why I should not be worried at the prospect of you being elected to the board. Moneytrees🏝️^{Talk/CCI guide} 19:39, 12 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Moneytrees: I stand by my unblocking. I don't meet WP:INVOLVED in this case, since I haven't been involved in any of the issues raised here, nor am I in a conflict with any of the editors. I'm very disappointed to see @Diannaa: has blocked them again, after failing to discuss the issue properly with Clem again - which goes against Wikipedia:Don't template the regulars - although it's good to see that the discussion seems to have happened after the blocking. In general, I think blocking should really be the last resort (hence why I'm not active in blocking), and I think it's being repeatedly misused by Diannaa in this case. If it is an ongoing issue, then taking it to CCI or arbcom is the much better way to proceed, not jumping to a block of an editor who's been here for over 17 years - although I can't actually find the conclusion at Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations/20210111. I note the issue was said to be about Thinking School per the last comments at [1]. Again, I don't think that I've misused admin tools at all here, and I can't see why you would link this to the board elections. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 20:06, 12 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hello Mike. Regarding my second block, I did discuss copyright issues with Clem on July 29, after having discovered a copyright violation on Integrated education on July 24. The discussion was not extensive, because one would assume that an editor that has been here since 2003 would be well versed in copyright matters, especially after having received six warnings and a block for copyright, in addition to having a CCI case opened. Less than two weeks later, I discovered another violation of the copyright policy, and blocked again. Some of his remarks since then show that he does not have a very good grasp of copyright and how it applies to Wikipedia editing. I have recently posted some basic rules on his talk page to try to help in that regard.

Regarding my first block, I did post a personalized message the first warning (April 2017), and I see some discussion at that time, and again in November 2018 when he violated copyright on Unique reference number. One month later he violated copyright again on Multi-academy trust and I used a templated warning. In March 2020 I advised him that when copying from copying from compatibly licensed material, attribution is required. In September 2020, another template for another copyvio. Still no improvement - the next violation of the copyright policy, in December 2020, I issued a block. This is the block you undid two hours later, stating that I had been too hasty! I have to admit I was surprised, because by this time Clem had been breaking our copyright rules for at least three years and had received five warnings. Shortly after that, I filed a request for a CCI, and this was opened a short time later. Little has been done on it so far, but I am trying to make time to get it started. Moneytrees found violations on four of the seven articles he checked, and I have found ten more so far with issues in the tiny articles at the bottom of Page 2. The CCI now has a third page, with edits from the time of your unblock to the present day, with an additional 170 articles/ 456 diffs that will have to be checked, in addition to the ~1200 articles initially posted at the CCI. The awful truth is, according to Amalthea's bot as of August 4, there's 202 open cases at CCI with 164456+ articles awaiting checking. We are spread pretty thin at copyright cleanup, so that's why Clem's CCI is not yet resolved. I typically spend most of my time at CopyPatrol where we have currently got two people doing daily work (75-100 new cases are added to the queue every day). At CCI, several people are currently working on Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations/Ardfern, which dates back to 2010 and is the oldest one on the board. We also have Wikipedia:Copyright problems, which is manned primarily by only two people.

TLDR: So I guess to wrap up I would like to say Clem was already receiving special treatment. He did receive multiple handwritten explanations of what he was doing wrong, and was prompted multiple times to read the copyright policy, a Wikipedia policy with legal considerations. And most people will not receive five/six warnings before being blocked. I definitely disagreed with you unblocking after two hours, but decided to walk away from it without arguing with you about it. I can understand why Moneytrees would want to bring this up when he saw you running for a board position. I felt a little sick myself when I saw your nomination and knew I would never vote for you, so sorry. — Diannaa (talk) 00:01, 13 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Diannaa:. Thanks for your detailed explanation. I was reminded today in another (non-wiki) issue that I don't always fully explain myself, so I'll try to go into more detail now (and I'll try to do better in general in the future). Also pinging @Moneytrees: since this might address the issues they raised as well.

For full disclosure, I met Clem at the London Wikimeets - in-person originally, later online. I would count him as a colleague and fellow Wikimedian. I became aware of this issue through one of those meetups (online in this case), and I reacted in the only way I thought ethical. From my interactions with him, I generally think that he is a good editor, who means well - and that they needed support to work through this issue, rather than being blocked for it. I'm normally not involved with unblocking/blocking users, but for me, this seemed like a clear case of an editor needing another chance, which I could provide by unblocking them. I'm worried that the second chance didn't lead to change, though. I won't be unblocking them again for this new block, I'll leave that for another admin to decide on.

However, I'm also worried that you are the only admin who has been posting the warnings and issuing the blocks. In general, this is bad practice - multiple admins should be involved with warnings and blocks before indeffing a long-term editor, regardless of who they are or what they have done. I'm worried that there's no AN/I discussion here, or an ArbCom request, or any attempt to get other admins engaged with the issue (at least, not that I'm aware of). Instead, you've been posting the warnings and doing the blocking directly, on your own - which isn't healthy. I really think you need to get other admins involved before you indeff.

Related to this, I am very worried about the backlog at CCI, which I wasn't previously aware of. Looking at Ardfern's talk page, they had forgotten that they were involved in a case - which seems understandable given that it had been running for more that a decade! This clearly isn't sustainable, and it's clearly burning out the editors that are working on this issue. Are there any tasks that could be automated here? I see that the list of edits on the CCI page is automated, but I know we have [2] from the DYK process - couldn't this check also be automated, which would mean that only the flagged edits with high % of likelihood that the edits had copyvios would have to be manually reviewed (plus a random selection of other edits to make sure that the script hasn't missed anything). I could try to code this up if such a check would be of interest (I operate Pi bot and code bot scripts using pywikibot) - but I would need more info about the CCI workflow first.

With the board election - I'm sorry this made you feel nauseous! You can find my reasons for standing in my candidate statement. With the specific issue of CCI, I think it's something that should be raised with the meta:Community Wishlist Survey - ideally I would love to be in a position to advocate a significantly expansion of this processs to cover many more than the top-10 issues!). However, if I'm not elected, then let's talk through how I could directly help with this issue via Pi bot. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 19:45, 13 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Potential copyright violations have to be checked manually by a human being. There's no way to automate the process. Listings at CCI have already been culled by a script. The remainder of the edits have to be checked by hand. You will see me doing the bulk of the warnings and blocks because since the initiation of the CopyPatrol system five years ago, I have done the bulk of the work, checking an average of 50 reports per day and far more some days. I don't take this lightly and realize that it's a big responsibility so I do the work as carefully and as accurately as possible, because people trust me to do it properly, from checking the edits, to the type and number of warnings issued, and blocking and unblocking. It's what we elect our administrators to do, and we expect them to do it to the very best of their ability all of the time. If you have some ideas as to how to get more people (both admins and non-admins) involved in copyright cleanup, I would be interested to hear them.

Regarding indef blocks, we have found that short-term blocks are ineffective and the editor typically resumes the same behaviour when the block expires, and we end up with still more cleanup to do, as is the case with Clem Rutter's CCI. The current system has been very effective in locating and stopping long-term copyright violating editors, and detecting and stopping new editors from getting too far, thereby reducing the number of new gigantic problems of epic scale like we have had in the past (Epeefleche, Racepacket, Trident13, etc).

Regarding warnings to Clem, he was warned by me, Zero0000, Sphilbrick, me, me. Not just me. I don't know why you thought that.— Diannaa (talk) 20:31, 13 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Diannaa: I'm surprised that there's no way to automate at least part of the process - identifying diffs with a high % of potential copyvio according to something like the DYK copyvio check would seem obvious? But yes, they would then have to be checked by hand. It does sound like you are mostly trying to do this yourself - try asking for others to help at the village pump and other places? Also, I would very much recommend taking cases to AN/I *rather* than just doing the warnings and indef block yourself - that way you get input from others, and can build up more of a group of people working on the problem. In general, I think indef blocking is using a demolition ball to tidy up someone's house - sure, it will mean it's no longer a problem, but the cost is way too high. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 11:13, 15 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry to drag out this thread. But I still have some unanswered questions. Why did you unblock Clem Rutter after only two hours, when he had received a final warning for copyright violations only 10 days prior, many previous warnings, and an open CCI? Why should Clem Rutter be treated any differently that any other person who repeatedly violates our copyright policy? Why do I have to get a consensus to block a person like Clem when nobody notices or cares if I block an editor with a shorter tenure or fewer edits or fewer friends? Surely I don't have to get Arbcom's approval or some kind of support at ANI to enforce our copyright policy, an official Wikipedia policy with legal considerations. Why would I have to do that in this case, when other editors don't get any such treatment? Please see the essay Wikipedia:Unblockables for more information that might apply to this case. Thank you.— Diannaa (talk) 19:31, 16 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Diannaa: No problem, although I think we're reaching the point of diminishing returns (since we have different viewpoints that aren't converging), I'm still happy to talk. My point is that Clem *shouldn't* be a special case - indef blocking is a big thing that should get ANI or arbcom support, unless it's clearly WP:SNOW and/or an intractable user problem. That an editor has more friends/edits/tenure increases the chances of others spotting it in time to avoid losing the editor, nothing more. Remember that we're the encyclopaedia that anyone can edit - at least, unless you're blocked. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 19:44, 16 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Pretty much all our copyright blocks are indef blocks the last couple years. We've found that shorter blocks don't work; escalating blocks don't work either. The user simply resumes the previous behaviour when the block expires. An "intractable user problem" is exactly what it is.— Diannaa (talk) 22:12, 16 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I think you still need to try shorter blocks - or better, talking to the users more - before you decided it's an "intractable user problem". You can't just jump straight to indef. And remember that every user is different. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 12:41, 17 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I'm mostly disappointed with your responses; it seems like you are ignoring what Diannaa is saying. Time limited copyright blocks don't work; see examples like Dutchy85 and Ljwljw.001, who still did not understand not to copy after 4 blocks. ClemRutter had been warned and engaged with several times, Diannaa clearly did not and does not "jump straight to indef". I'm honestly a bit offended by the lack of respect for one of the hardest working users in the sites entire history. If ClemRutter had not been unblocked at the time and instead engaged with the copyright issues presented through a more thorough discussion, then they could've been unblocked then and everything would be fine. But your unblock prevented a discussion like that from happening, and prevented ClemRutter from learning from their mistakes and addressing the issue. Your unblock put more burden on ClemRutter going forwards, and set them up to be blocked again. You may not have violated INVOLVED's wording to the T, but I believe you violated the spirit of it; you made a biased decision that ultimately hurt all involved. Moneytrees🏝️^{Talk/CCI guide} 03:42, 18 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Moneytrees: So, you have examples where an indef block has changed user behaviour and led to one of you unblocking them, right? Or only cases where the user has just been forced to leave? Mike Peel (talk) 06:55, 18 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Examples of cases where indef blocked people later successfully resumed editing include:

• Asmitghosh3
• Shadowwarrior8
• Laterthanyouthink
• Mayashamcdonald8818
• AGIOS PAISIOS
• AnkurWiki
• Dev0745
• Viaros17
  Another success story is Dr Blofeld, who in spite of being the subject of the largest CCI in history, no longer has copyright issues and continues to edit to this day. Blofeld was never blocked.

Cases where the person stopped editing shortly after being unblocked:

• Dawood.XV
• Zvi grossnass
• Mangodebango

Here's a couple examples where the user resumed violations after coming off a short block levied by other admins:

• San Marco Venice
• Shafiq Nadim

I'm not sure what you mean by a user being "forced to leave". Nobody is forced to leave unless they are blocked multiple times and refuse to reform. There's people like Mushroom9, repeated copyright violations, as well as socking to continue to add copyright violations. He is no longer welcome here. Epeefleche, one of the long-term copyvio editors, over the course of 9 years performed 150,000 edits. Over 5,000 different articles were listed at his CCI, with tens of thousands of individual edits to be checked. Almost all of his major edits were copy vio, and right up until the end of his editing career he stated that he believed that such a valuable contributor as himself should be permitted a certain percentage of copy vio. I am pretty sure Moonriddengirl told him privately that he was no longer welcome here. I had to give up on working on his CCI as it was sucking up too much of my time, with each remaining article expected to take several days to clean.— Diannaa (talk) 14:36, 18 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

OK, it's really good to see communication with editors after blocking rather than just blocking and leaving things there - perhaps it's paranoia, but that's always seemed to be the intention of an indef block rather than a shorter term block, and was what I was expecting in this case. A shorter block means that they aren't being 'forced to leave' like an indef block seems to. Although, I guess an indef block forces the user to change behaviour whether they want to or not so that they can continue editing, rather than just waiting out a shorter block - although I'm not sure that's a good thing.

BTW, I completely agree that copyvio checking is important, and that copyvios have no place here. And thank you for working on this tricky topic! But I really do see indef blocks as heavy-handed, and I do think more of the work here could be automated.

Anyhow, let's see what happens here when Clem's recovered and back online. As I said above, I'll be watching, but won't unblock again. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 18:10, 18 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Reading through this thread gives me the strong impression that you unblocked Clem because Diannaa didn't handle the blocking as you personally would have, not because there was anything procedurally incorrect with her block according to policy. There are many statements that you've made above that also lead me to believe that you are out of touch with how and when many active administrators on this project choose to use an indefinite block. Your statement that "indef blocking is a big thing that should get ANI or arbcom support, unless it's clearly WP:SNOW and/or an intractable user problem" is an opinion. While you can use that opinion as guidance when deciding whether you, as an administrator, would indefinitely block an account, you shouldn't be holding other admins to your personal standard. I echo Moneytrees' concerns above and support Diaanna's actions in this case. -- Jezebel's Ponyo^{bons mots} 19:38, 18 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Ponyo: Look at it another way: I believe my unblock following the unblock request was per policy. We're talking about the general issue in more detail in this discussion, and I'll happily admit that I'm expressing my opinions here rather than quoting policy. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 19:43, 18 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Mike, I noticed that you have very little experience in blocking or unblocking and I don't recall ever seeing you working in copyright cleanup. So I think you were the wrong person to perform this unblock, especially without prior discussion with the blocking administrator, especially after only two hours had passed. I wonder what led you to even notice the block or why you decided to get involved in this administrative area where you have so little experience.— Diannaa (talk) 22:12, 18 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Mike! I noticed the work you've done converting templates like {{Infobox observatory}} to be able to draw Wikidata. I'm an active participant at WikiProject Higher education and am interested in doing the same for {{Infobox university}}, but I see that the code is fairly complex, so I was wondering if you might be interested in helping out. The particular impetus is that university boxes have a lot of data that changes every year (staff counts, financial info, etc.), and although we haven't gotten to the point of batch importing it to Wikidata every year yet, that'd be a lot easier than manually updating thousands of pages. Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 21:53, 13 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Sdkb: I'd be happy to help. Are you working on it in a sandbox somewhere? Normally it's mostly straightforward to add Wikidata support to an infobox, it's mostly matching up infobox parameters with Wikidata properties, and then figuring out the code details. The bigger challenges are normally getting support from other editors (it can be quite a controversial change, sadly), migrating data over to Wikidata (you'll find info missing on Wikidata that needs to be added - also people often object to removing local contents, particularly if they're attached to specific formatting of some fields), and the occasional parameter that is more tricky to migrate (no matching Wikidata property, or tricky to fetch the information in the appropriate format). Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 11:17, 15 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I've got a prototype at User:Sdkb/sandbox/testpage. Most of the parameters appear to have a Wikidata property, but a few (type, campus type, affiliations) are subjective or require editorial judgement and therefore probably wouldn't work with Wikidata. A few others have some technical obstacles: |state= is tricky because there's no "state" property on Wikidata, just located in the administrative territorial entity (P131), which itself might have a county and only then the state. Some of the athletics stuff needs wikidata:Wikidata:Property proposal/athletics program to go through first. And former names and mottos in other languages will require some trickier coding. But overall, the vast majority of parameters seem to be transferable, and indeed it appears Pintoch began work on it in 2017.

Regarding getting support from other editors, WikiProject Higher education tends to consist of editors who care mainly about one specific institution; so long as there's a way to opt out, I don't anticipate they'd get annoyed, and the few of us who work across multiple pages are very eager for anything that can better help us update them in bulk. Data import does have some ways to go, but it's generally available in systematic format from government agencies (IPEDS in the U.S.).

Let me know what you think, and feel free to edit my testpage if you'd like to try anything. Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 03:54, 16 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Sdkb: It looks like a good start - particularly with matching property IDs to parameters! I'd suggest coding it differently, though. I've demo'd this at [3]. The two main differences are that it's directly in the template code, rather than being a wrapper for the template - that means that you can just call the template directly in the article, without any parameters, or if you use it outside of the article then you can specify the QID, like I've demo'd at [4]. The second thing is that I'd recommend using Module:WikidataIB, since that has more control over the content - like only requiring referenced material from Wikidata, which is why I also did this edit on Wikidata. This tends to be important here on enwiki, since other editors insist on it (and it's good practice in general) - although the references aren't actually shown in infoboxes anyway. I did experiment with showing references using Template:Wikidata, but didn't get too much support for it. WikidataIB also lets you override parameters individually, or by specifying 'fetchwikidata' or 'suppressfields'.

How does that look? Module:WikidataIB has a reasonable-ish manual, so perhaps you could try changing some more parameters using this format? Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 18:39, 18 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Going with the module sounds fine; I'll see if the doc/your example is enough to teach me to use it. A few more thoughts/questions:

Will it be possible to set an option to display the refs in some cases? Sometimes e.g. a college's colors won't be mentioned in the body, so those need to be sources in the infobox.

With the sandbox you set up, will local values for the parameter override anything on Wikidata? I'd think we'd want that (at least for the near future).

With presidents, that might be another area that's tricky, as some institutions use "chancellor" instead, but they're all generally coded as chairperson (P488) on Wikidata. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 19:02, 18 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Sdkb: 1) WikidataIB doesn't display references, if you look at the code of Template:Infobox telescope though you can see I've used both WikidataIB for the main value, and then Template:Wikidata to pull in references - but I never got positive feedback on that. 2) Yes, local values always override wikidata (try it). 3) I was unsure about this when I was setting up the example - I'm not sure why Wikidata doesn't have specific properties for 'president', 'chancellor', etc. That may need new properties on Wikidata. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 19:10, 18 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

1) I think there needs to be a way for users of the template to specify which values have a reference attached to them, since it's not possible to just have it always display or always not—some colleges might discuss the colors in the body (and therefore not need them references in the infobox) whereas others might not. I envision it working something like this:

{{Infobox university
|display_refs=colors,endowment
}}

The template would take the comma-separated list of parameters (in this case |colors= and |endowment=) and display the references for only those parameters. Any ideas on how to code that? It might require modifying the module.

2) Sounds good!

3) It looks like Wikidata decided to only have one property for an organization leader, which kinda makes sense, since it's the same concept, just different names for it. At Wikidata, I tried doing this, but it caused a constraint violation, since it wanted me to also add organization directed by the office or position (P2389)=Scripps College at university president (Q4376769). There might be some way to modify the constraint to allow for broader uses, or maybe confining it to offices specific to one institution was the point. Any thoughts? I'll work meanwhile on building the sandbox with the module. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 21:49, 18 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

On 16 August 2021, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Marble Arch Mound, which you recently nominated. The fact was ... that the Marble Arch Mound (pictured) in central London looks like the hill in Teletubbies? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Marble Arch Mound. You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (here's how, Marble Arch Mound), and if they received a combined total of at least 416.7 views per hour (i.e., 5,000 views in 12 hours or 10,000 in 24), the hook may be added to the statistics page. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.

—valereee (talk) 12:02, 16 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]