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This message was sent to all administrators following a recent motion. Thank you for your attention. For the Arbitration Committee, Cameron11598 02:40, 4 May 2019 (UTC) Template:Z152[reply]

For anyone else curious about this piece of scaremongering, the (well-hidden) central discussion is Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard#Return of permissions to administrators notice. ‑ Iridescent 06:15, 4 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for that link. Now I am busy wondering if the 2FA bit falls into the mentality Technology Will Fix Everything that we are seeing way too frequently elsewhere in the real world... Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 08:41, 4 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

No, it falls into "we need to be seen to be doing something to justify our existence, and this is something"; see Politician's syllogism. Looking at the discussion, it looks like they genuinely didn't grasp that putting out a statement that basically reads "screw what the RFC said two weeks ago, we're going to just make up a non-existent policy and demand that everyone complies" would provoke a backlash. ‑ Iridescent 12:57, 4 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for that link. In many ways I use your Talk the way we used to use AN:K, a central and functional noticeboard. I'm around slightly more than I used to be, but seriously contemplating giving up the Mop. I don't need it, rarely use it and holy crap things seem to have gotten infinitely and unnecessarily more complicated in the last decade. I have a secure password so this isn't about this, but the broader this. StarM 15:43, 4 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I think Keeper is still about, just editing mainly from IPs. (On how different things have become, see my comment above that As someone who's been a legacy admin (four admin actions between 2011–2015), I still believe that it's an issue; coming back even from a relatively short time away is a culture shock since the wording of the policies generally doesn't change but the interpretation of them does. Arbcom's refusal (for arguably legitimate reasons) to maintain archives for WP:ARC means it's virtually impossible to conduct any kind of analysis of "which types of action raise concerns and which concerns does the committee accept as valid?", so we're stuck with anecdotal evidence, but I don't think you can seriously claim that inactive admins re-emerging, and active admins suddenly deciding to barge into an area they've never touched before and screwing up, aren't a genuine problem. It may not necessarily be that things have actually got more complicated, but it's hard for anyone who hasn't been there and done that to appreciate just how different things are now.) ‑ Iridescent 15:48, 4 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I actually wanted to respond on the discussion board to the notice, but the amusing part is the discussion was never created, and I figured it was not in my best interests to create a new thread. At the bottom of the motion, it said 'Discuss this at: Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard#Return of permissions for compromised administrator accounts'. If you click the link, I believe it still doesn't actually take you to the current discussion which was manually created by a current admin after she noticed there was nowhere to discuss it. It merely takes you to the discussion board, not the topic. Enigma^msg 00:45, 5 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It looks like what happened is that the section was correctly created at the time of the motion, but the committee then spent so much time discussing whether a special notice needed to be sent out, and deciding on the wording of the motion, that the discussion was archived by the bot in the meantime, and consequently User:Liz needed to re-create it when she received the notice and wanted to ask about it. As with most of this sorry episode, the absence of a discussion seems to have been a cock-up rather than a conspiracy. ‑ Iridescent 07:10, 5 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, ok. Here's what happened. I went to the archive list and they were all dated up to "Feb 2019 –", so I figured that was the most recent one and it should include the discussion from April, if there was one. No discussion there. It appears someone must've been manually marking the archives and dating them, but that person stopped doing it, so the archive I mentioned is actually Archive #39, and not the most recent one (#40). Enigma^msg 16:05, 5 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Arbcom being disorgnanized? 😲 ‑ Iridescent 16:11, 5 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yep I sent up the bat signal to him. How different is a very good way of putting it. Amid all the inactivity discussions I keep hoping to find a Readers' Digest of changes akin to how you can track changes to notability and other guidelines. In the mean time, this is a pretty good clearing house as everyone seems to land here. StarM 02:16, 17 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Star Mississippi, working through the back issues of Wikipedia:Administrators' newsletter would probably be as good a place to start as any. ‑ Iridescent 20:02, 17 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Ooh, thanks for that tip. Apologies for the delay. Remember when I had to rename due to a certain editor's actions & you mused whether I'd ever been to Mississippi? You were indeed right, I finally remedied that last week. Alas I didn't pass through my namesake as I took a different route. StarM 02:03, 30 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I've been through through MS, but AFAIK have never actually stopped in it. Of all the states, it's probably the one about which I know the least. (I tend to avoid the South; I don't do heat if I can help it.) ‑ Iridescent 19:58, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Administrator account security (Correction to Arbcom 2019 special circular)

ArbCom would like to apologise and correct our previous mass message in light of the response from the community.

Since November 2018, six administrator accounts have been compromised and temporarily desysopped. In an effort to help improve account security, our intention was to remind administrators of existing policies on account security — that they are required to "have strong passwords and follow appropriate personal security practices." We have updated our procedures to ensure that we enforce these policies more strictly in the future. The policies themselves have not changed. In particular, two-factor authentication remains an optional means of adding extra security to your account. The choice not to enable 2FA will not be considered when deciding to restore sysop privileges to administrator accounts that were compromised.

We are sorry for the wording of our previous message, which did not accurately convey this, and deeply regret the tone in which it was delivered.

For the Arbitration Committee, -Cameron11598 21:03, 4 May 2019 (UTC) Template:Z83[reply]

Apparently the Arbs got the message from your talk page response above, Iri. I chuckled. ceranthor 21:14, 4 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The annoying thing is that part of the intent behind this—"if you use a weak password you only have yourself to blame"—is completely valid, but the attempts by a couple of arbs to take the opportunity to rewrite policy by fiat to push their pet theories about 2FA, and the subsequent lies and obfuscation, have meant that the sound part of the message is being missed. I personally think the whole thing is completely overblown—there are a couple of things a compromised account could do that would actually cause damage rather than being a slight nuisance but they've never happened and even if they did would still be fixable. We're not talking about the secret override codes that will destroy the internet. ‑ Iridescent 09:06, 6 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Spotted this (the COI announced; still rather blatant; it got shut down very quickly, but it is a good example of several things, some good some not so good). Was also impressed with this. Carcharoth (talk) 15:51, 14 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Jack Cade got to the nomination alright  :) ——SerialNumber54129 17:03, 14 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Given that Opabinia regalis says a couple of threads up that this "legacy admin" business is more meme than reality and Arbs Are Never Wrong, there must be a legitimate reason why a self-confessed spammer with 942 edits and a grand total of one admin action in the past decade still retains the sysop bit. (For those who've blotted out the WMF's early history from their memory or weren't around at the time, Brad Patrick was the general counsel and interim director of the WMF who managed to fail to spot that the person they were hiring to be the WMF's CEO had a string of criminal convictions and was currently on parole.) ‑ Iridescent 18:03, 14 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

BP's user page looks like a promo. - Sitush (talk) 18:22, 14 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I probably should not ask, but what are we talking about? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:28, 14 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

This piece of spamming at WP:ITN/C, and its nominator. ‑ Iridescent 18:47, 14 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

IIRC, he is currently the only sysop on en.wiki (and probably any project?) that retains +sysop without an RfA. Well except the obvious exception. There was a rather pointless AN thread about it a few years ago. TonyBallioni (talk) 18:53, 14 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I've seen legacy admins who are out of touch with policy, but being unable to handle an ITN template or even wikilinks is a whole new level.-- Pawnkingthree (talk) 19:03, 14 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@TonyBallioni I don't believe that's correct. This is the list of admins as of 13 June 2003 (the day before WP:RFA was created), and while many of them are inactive or blocked, there are still around 20 survivors from the days of Jimmy handing out user rights to his buddies, a few of whom are still very active. You may recall a certain amount of unpleasantness at the time of the Arbcom elections last year regarding a then-admin who got their adminship via the "puff of white smoke from Jimbo's chimney" route. ‑ Iridescent 19:12, 14 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Ha. That reminds me, over on TVTropes we all get the stick via "puff of white smoke from the staff chimney". Although some people I recognize as active and not as troublemakers are also on that list. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:41, 14 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

But TVTropes hasn't spent the better part of two decades beating its own chest about how radically transparent and accountable it is. Plus, I would imagine that if you discovered that one of your sysops (1) didn't know what a wikilink was and (2) was using their userpage to host an advert for their employer and (3) was requesting you run advertising for their employer on your front page, either that user or that user's sysop rights would quietly disappear. ‑ Iridescent 20:01, 14 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Ah yes, I should have clarified, I meant without any discussion either on the list pre-RfA, though I suspect Angela might also fall into that camp. Now that I think about it, you’re right that there’s probably a few still kicking where Jimmy just flipped the bit with no questions asked after a private email. Might be fair to say he’s the only RfAless RfA-era admin on any major project. That being said, there are some projects where even crat has been handed out on a whim without an RfB, so it wouldn’t surprise me if the Latvian Wikiquote has an admin who never went through one. TonyBallioni (talk) 22:32, 14 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Some diffs: [1] [2] [3] Enigma^msg 23:31, 14 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Magnus Manske will certainly fall into that camp, at least—as the author of MediaWiki 1.0 he was quite literally the first person with advanced user rights. ‑ Iridescent 18:20, 15 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Iridescent, I'm not sure that "arbs are never wrong" is a good paraphrase of Opabinia's comments above. (And it's obviously not something she believes, given, if nothing else, the number of times she's been outvoted on things). Were you possibly thinking of someone else's comment there?

On the subject of "legacy admins," your observation about your own relatively inactive period illustrates why a solution to the perceived problem is so difficult. Under many of the failed proposals, you would have been desysopped by 2015; I doubt (correct me if I'm wrong) that you would have been interested in going through RFA again after you returned; but it's clearly beneficial that you remain an admin today, so any policy that would have removed you would be a "net negative" in at least this instance, and I expect a number of others. Newyorkbrad (talk) 07:54, 15 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The part I'm attributing to Opabinia is the part highlighted with the {{Talk quote inline}} template (this "legacy admin" business is more meme than reality), which is definitely a fair paraphrase of her words since it's a direct quote. Arbs Are Never Wrong is a more general tendency which certain committee members (not OR) have always suffered from but seems to be more pronounced with this incarnation, and with two committee members in particular who appear genuinely to believe in Arbitrator Infallibility and consequently consider disagreement with their opinions to be prima facie evidence of disruption.

There would be ways to address the legacy admin issue, but they all suffer from the difficulty in turning around Wikipedia's huge cultural inertia. Ultimately the issues all come back to the "RFA is hell" meme; if there were routine reconfirmations (say, every five years for active admins, after a year of complete inactivity or after two years with no logged admin actions), RFA would be as routine and uncontroversial as renewing accreditation in any real-life field. (The concerns that a mass of renewals would flood RFA are valid, but there are ways around them; the reconfirmation only runs the full week if there is significant opposition in the first 48 hours, for instance.) Besides, it would for the first time in a decade give the crats something to do. ‑ Iridescent 08:51, 15 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I agree in principle with reconfirmation RfAs but always have a lingering suspicion that everyone the admin has offended will come out of the woodwork. While that can happen even at a first RfA, I think it pretty inevitable that any moderately active admin will have upset a lot more people than most in their pre-admin state. And on the subject of emerging from woodwork, Master Jay isn't showing much sign of doing that yet. - Sitush (talk) 08:59, 15 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I guess Users:NJA and Amorymeltzer are the epitome of being legacy admins, and they haven't smashed the windows yet. But MasterJay, yeah; we could've dried that out and fertilized the lawn with it. ——SerialNumber54129 09:53, 15 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Out of curiosity, would that sentence have read differently if I'd put parenthesised yet...?  :) ——SerialNumber54129 09:53, 15 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

If I'm infallible, and I say I'm wrong, am I right? :)

Eh, I think this is actually a pretty good example of what I meant. If the worst a "legacy admin" is doing is making a sort of tone-deaf suggestion on a back-office project page, what's the actual problem? (Getting too fussed about "COI on the main page!!!" seems a little over the top about a post that's basically "hey, my coworkers did something cool and I'm excited about it", as a proposal for a single link in a little-noticed section of a page whose contents nobody really wants anyway, except the search box and maybe the TFA.) It's not like we're short on admin bits and they're stopping someone else from getting one.

I've never warmed up to the reconfirmation idea. A real-world re-accreditation would be a judgment in relation to a reasonably well-defined standard by a specific professional body. RfRC would be a judgment in relation to the current wikipolitical winds by an unstable group of mostly reasonable people unpredictably mixed in with varying numbers of petty grudge-bearers, RfA obsessives, and ANI shitposters. 85% of the time it would go fine, because most admins do mostly boring things and one or two bad calls or unfortunate troll encounters wouldn't cause much fuss. But it'd probably cause more harm in the form of hurt feelings, frustration, and disengagement on the part of perfectly good admins than benefit in the form of removing bad admins. Everybody who thinks that the problem with RfA, or with the existing admin corps, is insufficient desysopping of bad admins knows where the case requests page is. If terrible adminning is really so widespread, we should be drowning in cases. Opabinia regalis (talk) 06:46, 16 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

OR, have you seen the page of the user in question? This isn't "hey, my coworkers did something cool and I'm excited about it", this is blatant advertising. I agree that ITN is unloved, but we're still talking about a page that averages 17 million views per day and is arguably the most valuable piece of internet real estate in the world (the only pages that get more views are the homepages of Google and Baidu which are untouchable by advertisers, and Facebook and Youtube which are unique to each viewer).

"Nobody is complaining to Arbcom so everybody must be happy" is a nonsense argument given the nature of Wikipedia's bureaucracy. As you know we have a current open admin-conduct case—a relatively bland and straightforward example of the "I am concerned this admin may be interpreting rules incorrectly and/or overstepping their remit" school rather than a full-scale descent into vindictiveness or a case which requires lengthy analysis of complex social or legal issues. At the time of writing, this case—only half-complete—runs to:

1. Case request page, 7,098 words, 42,118 characters;
2. Case request talk page: 12,261 words, 73,178 characters;
3. Evidence: 9,348 words, 57,973 characters;
4. Evidence talk: 6,010 words, 35,579 characters;
5. Workshop: 22,564 words, 139,184 characters;
6. Workshop talk: 1,467 words, 9,149 characters.

That comes to around 60,000 words already, with all the sound and fury of the PD, the decision, and the enforcement to come. Given not only the timesink issue, but the fact that except in the most blatantly clear-cut cases the filing party will be typically subsequently be targeted for harassment by the friends of the reported admin, the surprise isn't that there aren't more arb cases filed, but that there are still any at all. I could, without pausing for breath, instantly name three admins who are so incompetent their activity is actively disruptive, but they could be replacing every image on the main page with goatse and I still wouldn't bother formally reporting them to Arbcom (as opposed to a "hey, have you guys seen this?" email to arbcom-l).

Reconfirmation would provide a mechanism for weeding the problem admins out; because there would no longer be the "this decision is de facto irreversible" concern we'd then be able to start giving the admin bit out far more freely, so although it would result in increased churn, we'd probably improve in terms of both the total admin numbers, and in editor retention in general. As NYB alludes to but is too polite to say so explicitly, I'd be one of those whose reconfirmation would be likely to fail, as I've told too many people over the years that they can't always have what they want; I still think it's a price well worth paying if it breaks or at least weakens the hierarchical mentality. I don't really get it'd probably cause more harm in the form of hurt feelings, frustration, and disengagement on the part of perfectly good admins than benefit in the form of removing bad admins as an argument; if someone is that invested in the admin bit as part of their identity that they'd walk out altogether were they to lose it, they're probably someone whose relationship with Wikipedia is unhealthy for both them and us and it would do good for them to be forced to think "is it right I devote so much of my time to blocking strangers on a website?". Swedish Wikipedia has annual mandatory re-RFA, Portuguese Wikipedia has "anyone can call for an admin to re-run RFA" and Dutch Wikipedia has "every year, if an admin has five complaints about their conduct they're obliged to re-run RFA", (all with an "as far as I know this is still the case" disclaimer; they may have changed their processes) and none of them have fallen apart yet. ‑ Iridescent 07:55, 16 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The problem I see is that if someone is that invested in the admin bit as part of their identity that they'd walk out altogether were they to lose it, they're probably someone whose relationship with Wikipedia is unhealthy for both them and us and it would do good for them to be forced to think "is it right I devote so much of my time to blocking strangers on a website?". and many similar arguments will invariably be read as "well, suck it up". Besides, some people will take issue with having a pile of often questionable complaints raised even if they pass the reconfirmation RfA, just like some people go away after being blocked/brought to ANI even if the block was overturned as improper (and perhaps the blocking admin defrocked)/the ANI ended up with a boomerang. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 10:29, 16 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding reconfirmation, I'd actually look at the Commons process for deadminship RfAs; it specifically says Please note this process should only be used for serious offenses in which there seems to be some consensus for removal; for individual grievances, please use commons:Commons:Administrators' noticeboard/User problems. De-adminship requests that are opened without prior discussion leading to some consensus for removal may be closed by a bureaucrat as inadmissible.. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 10:29, 16 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Serious offences, we can handle fine, as those go to Arbcom. Where en-wiki falls down is with admins with a long history of repeated low-level incompetence but never quite rising to a smoking gun of a serious breach. (Obvious recent example, but hardly unique.) I'm not sure we really need to be taking lessons from Commons on vetting standards, anyway. How many convicted sex criminals currently hold advanced permissions there? Is the answer anything other than "none"? ‑ Iridescent 15:20, 16 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Reconfirmation RfA standards or admin standards? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:54, 16 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Your link to that ANI reminded me of another obvious example of an admin who is prolific with the block button who, imo, makes worse blocks than anything in the recent ArbCom cases, but makes so many of them that the Huggle crowd would be up in arms if the committee did anything. (and no, I will not name names)

I'm not really sure how to describe the problem of so prolific with their use of the tools in one area that we tolerate their blatant disregard for policy because it would be too much work to fix type of situations. We have several of those, and they always make me shake my head when stuff like the Giantsnowman case happened because I can think of multiple admins off the top of my head that are way worse on the type of behaviour that was complained about there. It is an area we as a community (and as sysops) fail, but I'm not really sure there is a good solution. TonyBallioni (talk) 20:16, 16 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I assume I know who you have in mind, and (again without naming names) just gonna put this here; the small handful of trigger-happy admins are literally responsible for more blocks than the rest of Wikipedia combined. ‑ Iridescent 20:45, 16 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The problem with a list like that is that it doesn't, in itself, reflect whether the names at the top are the worst admins or the best or somewhere in between. An admin with a lot of blocks may be trigger-happy and driving contributors away ... or else perhaps that admin is doing far more than his or her share of the work at AIV and (the useful part of) UAA.

I don't necessarily want to get into naming names either, but in my roughly eight-and-a-half years on the ArbCom, I can't recall any case involving repeated, significant misuse of admin tools (as opposed to isolated incidents) that were brought before us and that we didn't at least take a close look at. Newyorkbrad (talk) 21:21, 16 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Well, yes, I'm not critiquing ArbCom and I don't think Iri was implying that necessarily everyone near the top of the list was trigger happy. My point was that there are definitely admins who no one will take to ArbCom if only for the fact that AIV/CSD/UAA/WHATEVER will grind to a halt because in addition to making up their own rules as they go along, they also do the overwhelming majority of the work there, a substantial portion of it good, and no one really wants to have to go through thousands of log entries to find the 5% that are bad enough to merit a case, not to mention pick up the slack that would occur if a desysop happened. TonyBallioni (talk) 21:30, 16 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

One thing that would help good admins avoid mistakes would be to more strongly encourage admins to request more second opinions in borderline or unusual cases. When I used to spend a bit of time patrolling UAA and AIV and occasionally AN3, I'd block the obvious vandals and trolls, no-action or warn-only on the bad reports, and occasionally post a "this is borderline" or "I'm not sure, what do others think." That may seem like a luxury when a board is overflowing with reports, but we need more of it. Newyorkbrad (talk) 21:36, 16 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Tony, there's plenty of admins to pick up the slack if the most prolific three-letter-acronym-process grinders were removed. F'rexample, every time I've poked my nose into CAT:CSD or one of the weekly image deletion categories like CAT:ORFU in the past year, I open a half dozen pages up in tabs, get through one or maybe two, and then find out everything in the entire category has been simultaneously deleted with Twinkle. I can't possibly be the only one this happens to, over and over. —Cryptic 01:23, 17 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Cryptic, reminds me of how I stopped regularly going to AIV when I became 99% certain some admins go through the page history to block accounts that haven’t edited since other admins declined the block request. To be fair, I also regularly block declined AIV request, but that’s usually because of CU... TonyBallioni (talk) 03:32, 17 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Cryptic, I used to work on CSD quite a lot, and as you know there are many improper nominations (which is to be expected, as the criteria are very specific). I got pissed off with it for various reasons. One is that I kept seeing what you and others have seen, some admins just nuking everything that's been reported without taking any time to check properly. I've seen similar problems at various WP:TLAs (and don't get me started on AFC) but I just don't have sufficient time or motivation to challenge the fiefdoms of incompetence that some obsessive regulars have staked out. Another reason I gave up at CSD is the shit I used to get from people whose nominations I declined, and I'm talking about experienced people who should know better. G11 is the most common one, and there are experienced people here who use it to nominate anything that they think has any hint of conflict of interest, and they're supported by admins who delete regardless of content (when G11 is only for pages "that are exclusively promotional and would need to be fundamentally rewritten"). Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 07:45, 17 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, and on the subject of "plenty of admins to pick up the slack if the most prolific three-letter-acronym-process grinders were removed", I recall one example of a prolific admin working on unblock requests (another backlogged area). Their eventual exclusion from the admin cadre might have added to the backlog, but it greatly enhanced the fairness of the process. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 07:49, 17 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I concur with Cryptic's observation, to the extent that I've largely given up patrolling CAT:EX and CAT:CSD as it's intensely irritating to spend time drafting a patient explanation of why I'm declining a particular nomination, only to find one of the usual suspects running "batch delete" and deleting everything regardless of whether it meets any deletion criterion or not. Watch WP:RFPP for any length of time and you'll rapidly notice a couple of admins who'll automatically accede to all but the most frivolous requests, despite protection supposedly being a last resort when all other measures have failed. @NYB, I'm not suggesting Arbcom don't take seriously concerns that are brought to them; I'm suggesting that the recent fetishisation of bureaucracy by the committee makes it virtually impossible to bring such concerns to them in the first place; few of us want to embark on a process that can quite literally take up an hour per day for a full calendar month, just to say "I'm concerned that User:Foo may be misinterpreting the criteria for revision deletion but when I raised the matter with them they didn't give a satisfactory answer". ‑ Iridescent 20:00, 17 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Iridescent, how does batch delete work—does it mmen you have to delete everything selected under a single criteria, or carn you have a mix? E.g., delete a 100 pages under both U5 and G11? ——SerialNumber54129 12:54, 19 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Serial Number 54129: With one "batch" of Batch Delete you can use only one deletion reason. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 13:11, 19 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Jo-Jo Eumerus: You're very kind, many thanks. I wondered how someone had managed to delete a hundred userpages as U5 without there being a G11 among them :D ——SerialNumber54129 13:25, 19 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I sometimes think there is competitiveness among those I call, the "deleting admins", to delete the most pages (I don't think it's similar for blocks). I look at the numbers and there is just no way that they are giving individual pages a glance of more than a few seconds. And I wish we could disable batch delete option from Twinkle...except for rampant vandalism, I think it holds the potential for serious damage. If an admin is going to delete a page from Wikipedia, I think the least they can do is inspect each page and make sure the tags are accurate. I'm reassured when I go post a message to an editor and see a notice on the talk page from an editor or admin about incorrect CSD tagging...I know that person is paying attention and got to a tagged but valid page before it was deleted.

But as a newish admin, I'm unlikely to accuse any specific admin of incorrect behavior. If they are brought to ArbCom I might comment, but otherwise the most I will do is not emulate their behavior. Of course, maybe when I've been an admin for 10 years, I might feel differently than I do now. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 00:12, 18 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

WP:ADMINSTATS: worst idea ever. Evvverrrr. At least the xtools page loads slowly enough that people can't really keep score with it. —Cryptic 01:56, 18 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. My personal pet peeve? User pages that are tagged for not WEBHOST or PROMOTIONAL reasons when there might just be a sentence or two about the editor on the page! Seriously? That tag is supposed to be for user pages where the editor keeps the results of their fantasy football league or pages full of information about their job or band, not for an editor to say a little bit about themselves. But I see those two tags misapplied, usually by eager, newbie editors. And when the editor has been inactive since 2008? What is the point in deleting that page? Grrrr. </soapbox> Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 00:21, 18 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yes; WP:U5 is a particularly sore spot with me as well. If you read the discussion that led to its enactment, it's clear that it was meant to exclude anything that even looked like an attempt at an article. So what does it overwhelmingly get used for, well over 95% of taggings in my experience? Drafts like User:James1770/sandbox. And I don't even bother declining them anymore, because they kept on getting retagged and then deleted as soon as my back was turned. —Cryptic 01:56, 18 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

And the admin who deleted that is something of a case in point, unless you actually think they can not only asses 40+ pages per minute. It's dispiriting when you decline a deletion and try to explain to a new editor what they need to change to comply with the rules, in the knowledge that someone else will over-rule your decline and delete it anyway in the next few minutes. This is also the reason so many people have given up making any comment along the line of "I don't think this warrants sanctions" at WP:AE, as a couple of self-appointed super-users almost invariably come along, disregard the attempts to negotiate settlements, and start blocking indiscriminately. ‑ Iridescent 07:14, 18 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yep, AE is scary because of that - almost a kangaroo court of one. - Sitush (talk) 07:33, 18 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Of eine...?  :) ——SerialNumber54129 07:54, 18 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The issue at AE of late has actually been the opposite. You get a consensus for something and then someone who wants to look merciful for ACE2019 decides to unilaterally close with a sanction substantially less then what was being discussed. TonyBallioni (talk) 13:34, 18 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

And there I was thinking that the buttons Administrators: check links, history (last), and logs before deletion are stuff you are supposed to click on, in that order... Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 08:00, 18 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that this WP:ADMINSTATS is something problematic. Too bad that we'd need some informal research on the (anti)correlation between the number and the quality of one's admin actions to get that removed. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 08:00, 18 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

In either irony or hypocrisy, depending on your point of view, I think Wikipedia has problems at both ends of the spectrum. We have the hyperactive admins who delete/block/protect nearly indiscriminately without regard to policy; we also have a problem with inactive admins who delete/block/protect based on their personal opinions because they've lost touch with policy. (The latter is being demonstrated fairly spectacularly as I speak at Arbcom, where a legacy admin is in the process of talking himself from "mild rebuke and asked to be more careful" to "full site ban".) If someone ever writes the definitive history of Wikipedia (Andrew Lih's hagiography doesn't count), the dichotomy would make an interesting chapter in Volume Three: The Maintenance Phase. ‑ Iridescent 18:41, 18 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

As I've said before on here, I've got a problem with the way WP:G5 is used, and have started at least one conversation on this very page over it. As I understand it, it was designed to be a simple and quick device to stop banned editors repeatedly posting the same completely inappropriate content over and over again. However, the biggest farce I personally witnessed was this incident, where I got yelled at and threatened to be desysopped for having the total audacity to reverse a G5 deletion on a notable topic that subsequently closed as a unanimous "keep" at AfD. Plus ca change. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 16:27, 18 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Now see, my impression is that nowadays G5 is also used as a way to quickly zap a block evader's contributions in the hope to discourage them. Certainly that's how we do on TVTropes. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:36, 18 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

But that's not what it's supposed to be; it was always intended to be that edits in contravention of a ban could be reverted, not that they must. ‑ Iridescent 18:41, 18 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed. That is why when I cleaned up after a sock this week, I only tagged certain creations for G5 - those were ones that effectively had no reliable sources etc and, in some cases, which they had created in the past with similar lack of usefulness. Some other creations - a couple about places, one about a dynasty, and so on - I just tried to tidy up as best I could because they do have potential. One of the farm was this. - Sitush (talk) 18:48, 18 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

re: G5, it depends on the case, tbh. There are a few where I’ll fire up Special:Nuke and not wait for others. This is usually the case with specific long term sockmasters where I know the history and most don’t and you’d end up with well done hoaxes, hard to spot BLP vios, etc. if it was left for the standard four eyes rule. There are other long-term sockmaster who get off on bragging off site about how they’re able to create so many notable articles and we can’t do without them. I typically support G5 in these cases depending on the subject. At the same time I usually just leave it up to the clerks and reporters to figure out what to do with articles (like the one Sitush just mentioned.) That way you’ll usually have had six eyes looking at a case before deletion. TonyBallioni (talk) 20:52, 18 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Here's a good example of a sock knowing what it's talking about  :) 12:54, 19 May 2019 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Serial Number 54129 (talk • contribs)

I'd call that a good demonstration of the point TB is making, and of why the wording of the banning policy has that the presumption in ambiguous cases should be to revert clause. VX4C is someone who's quite often right, but is wrong often enough, and prolific enough, that it's not a good use of people's time to check every one of their posts to see if on this occasion it's valid. ‑ Iridescent 02:50, 20 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

What TonyBallioni says. I tend to stay away from the whole G5 thing, and I can recall an administrator who routinely rolled back and blocked *any* IP that added results to certain sports articles, claiming that it had to be a certain vandal. The fact that the edits were always correct (although often unreferenced) was immaterial; the fact that the IP addresses were often local to where the sporting event took place was immaterial; the fact that more than one checkuser told him he was wrong was immaterial. He was completely certain he was right. Ironically, he was also notorious for adding unreferenced or poorly referenced sports results himself. Ah well. I'm probably one of the few people visiting this page who can say she took an "admin" case to Arbcom and saw it through all the way, but I wouldn't have wasted my breath on the sports result guy.

On the other hand, earlier this year as part of addressing the hacked accounts issue, myself and another CU went through page by page and removed certain information that the users had put on their userpages; sometimes we just removed the info, but if the account hadn't been used for more than a year, or it was obviously promotional, we deleted using G6 (doing this for security reasons, if ever questioned) or G11 (for obvious reasons). I'm sure I racked up over 1000 deletions in a few weeks, but I'm not in any way motivated to look at the admin activity log to try to figure it out. I'll admit I was on tenterhooks for a bit wondering if someone would call me out on those deletions. I pay a bit more attention to the CU/OS activity logs, mostly because we have to maintain a minimum level of activity to keep the bits, but even then it seems my OS specialty is saying no to people rather than actually suppressing stuff. Risker (talk) 03:39, 20 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The administrator who routinely rolled back and blocked *any* IP that added results to certain sports articles, claiming that it had to be a certain vandal has already been named further up this thread, (and for reasons I don't quite understand given my lack of involvement with sports articles was also discussed as some length on my talkpage at the time) so don't worry about naming GS. In general I lean slightly more towards DragonflySixtyseven's allegory than I do towards "comment on content not the contributor applies to banned users too"; the problem with the Mattisses and Gregs isn't that all their contributions are problematic—most are positive—but that enough of them are problematic that it's a timesink monitoring them, and because of their positive contributions it upsets other people who haven't seen their bad side if we don't nip the socks in the bud. ‑ Iridescent 09:54, 20 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, it was someone else (further back than GS, and I've the name-and-shame because at one point he was editing under his real-world name), but the point is taken; even though the admin I was talking about is largely inactive now (at least I think he is), there's still the opportunity for someone else to fill those "over-enthusiastic" shoes. Risker (talk) 03:34, 21 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

To be fair, as I said in the GS case I can sympathize with editors who revert over-enthusiastically on sports articles. The combination of "too many articles to verify every change", "lots of obscure stats where incorrect information is unlikely to be spotted" and "large numbers of new editors making mistakes" must make the temptation to just lock things down almost irresistible. ‑ Iridescent 14:47, 21 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, we have the same problem with a few other sockmasters if we let them be around too long. My biggest issue with socking, however, has always been the dishonesty about it. In an online community where no one knows who you are for the most part, maintaining a sense of order/trust/things working really does require AGF to make it work. AGF can't really work if the community is afraid that everyone is a sock of a banned user. On those cases where people are able to pull off months long socking you'll see the wailing and mourning for them combined with anger that the community was lied to. Luckily, despite the claims at WPO and other sites, the beloved banned editor socking away is pretty rare. We catch most of them pretty early. TonyBallioni (talk) 14:20, 20 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

How do you know that you catch most of them early, as opposed to never catch most of them? Eric Corbett 15:53, 20 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

To be blunt: most people aren’t that competent/don’t care enough to try to hide. I of course can’t prove that there aren’t 100 banned editor X socks out their writing FAs: you can’t prove a negative. What I can say is that in my experience, most people are too lazy to try to evade detection long-term. I’m sure some do it, but just from a pure effort standpoint, it’s more work than it’s worth, especially if you can just create a new account. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:04, 20 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The idea that "you can't prove a negative" is quite simply untrue, "a principle of folk logic, not actual logic". So however you cut it you cannot possibly have any idea whether or not most "beloved banned editors " are caught early. Just saying. Eric Corbett 16:46, 20 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Most people who've been caught aren't that competent/don't care enough to try to hide/are too lazy to try to evade detection long-term. Whereas, most people who haven't been caught are probably not any of those things. – Levivich 16:51, 20 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Most human beings are all of those things. So are most sockmasters. CU isn’t useful because it’s a particularly sophisticated tool (it isn’t.) It’s useful because of human nature. I probably know more about it’s use on en.wiki than most LTAs, and I sure as hell wouldn’t be able to put in the effort to consistently evade. The fact that we’ve had multiple CUs and former CUs on other projects get caught socking goes to show that even those who know how to use it usually slip up. The reason banned editors tend to get caught early is they inevitably act in a disruptive manner that draws attention and leads to grounds for a check. Yes, some can pull it off long-term: we can all think of examples. There is not, however, some great sock army out there of productive unjust banned editors out there. We can’t give you a list of every sock we don’t know about, but we are fairly good at spotting them. TonyBallioni (talk) 17:26, 20 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

... with thanks from QAI

Thank you for Droxford railway station, with a history!

"In 1897 the London and South Western Railway built a new railway line to block the Great Western Railway from expanding to Portsmouth, and as a consequence we now have Brexit; I may have left out some intervening steps, but that's basically the gist.

Droxford was an obscure country station that was built just in time for the combination of the First World War and the internal combustion engine to render it uneconomic. For three days in 1944 it was one of the most important places in the world; it was here that Commonwealth leaders monitored the troops massing for the Normandy landings, it was here that Ernest Bevin and Anthony Eden held their secret discussions about the Conservative and Labour parties cooperating in peacetime; above all, it was here that Winston Churchill annoyed Charles de Gaulle to such an extent that Anglo-French relations broke down, leaving Britain (and Ireland) outside the nascent European Economic Community."

I am sorry I missed the FAC, but you had John, sadly missed. Blues mood. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 05:01, 4 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_adminship/Optional_RfA_candidate_poll#Shut this down?. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:40, 7 June 2019 (UTC)Template:Z48[reply]

Replied there. ‑ Iridescent 11:13, 7 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

File:Free high-resolution pictures you can use on your personal and commercial projects. (14332427586).jpg has gone the way of the dodo, seems like. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 08:05, 14 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Don't know what the image was about but Billinghurst deleted it, as out of scope. Commons improving standards? ∯WBG^converse 08:46, 14 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Ironically, it was an illustration intended to represent "bullying and harassment". ‑ Iridescent 19:04, 14 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Winged Blades of Godric: The file is still available on Flickr. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 19:22, 15 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Precious

Six years!

Thank you with soothing blue. Thank you also for understanding the inflammatory significance of a poppy. I recently replaced the image by one I took myself, for the untranslatable Freundliche Vision, which I understand as a vision of friendliness. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:07, 16 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

More pic talk - too many words for me even to read - I like your sock cat, and wonder if you'd have a secret police supervision and no appeal cat? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 16:13, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

How about Psycho here, who is also in the rotation? Thank User:Ceoil for finding that one. ‑ Iridescent 16:17, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

She's mrs Psycho to you, Iridescent. Ceoil (talk) 19:03, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Since in light of Recent Events we no longer need to be so uptight about linking to Youtube, have one that seems apt for the current climate. IMO this works much better acoustic and with JC doing the vocals; the album version with Lucy Brownhills's whiny voice and the rock arrangement sounded too much like a petulant teenage garage band. ‑ Iridescent 19:17, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

This where you and I will have to fall out. Much as I love Julian Cope's book writing, and I really love it - we go nowhere without The Modern Antiquarian, and his head-on books are kind of bibles, he doesn't half come up with some total bullshit in interviews, though that maybe part of the charm (yes I get dragged in too, esp via Brain Donor, but have calculated that 93.4% of his music is wank). This is the perfect antidote[4] Ceoil (talk) 20:34, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, both. Gender of police doesn't matter, but what's the bet that most members of secret police are men. This used to be the encyclopedia anybody cam edit, and isn't. You have a few believing that you are disruptive and harassing, and convincing police of that, and that was it. Sad. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:08, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

In real life certainly, although that probably reflects their regimes' view of a woman's place, and the fact that the agencies were recruiting from the army, rather than an innate masculine need to snitch. In totalitarian regimes with more gender equality, not so much; the KGB and Stasi certainly had their share of female agents. Wikipedia's own secret police consists of four men and five women. ‑ Iridescent 19:22, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps I was mislead by a name such as Jan, whom Floq told me not to ping. - How about a new caption for the tossing in the rotation? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:05, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

		The Userpage Barnstar
		Hello Iridescent. I don't know much about you, but your talk page often seems to have interesting discussions for some reason. Benjamin (talk) 05:41, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

+1 Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 08:38, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Er, thanks? Although A "userpage barnstar" when my userpage has been blank for nine years is probably some kind of metaphor for something. ‑ Iridescent 08:50, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It seemed to be the most relevant one I could find. Benjamin (talk) 22:50, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Sooooooo....

....All those in favour of being secretly watched by the WMF civility gestapo raise your hands? Slightly more serious, since this has now demonstrated that it is effective to remove your opponents through direct appeal to the T&S team (bypassing ENWP dispute resolution), do you forsee a spate of 'snitching'? Arbcom and ANI/AN being defunct due to all complaints heading that way? Personally I would support shutting it all down and directing everything aimed at them to the email addresses of the T&S team.... See how long before the crap drowns them. Only in death does duty end (talk) 19:40, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I've no issue with being watched by the WMF or anyone else. This is a wiki, and anyone can review the history of anyone else. "If you've received an allegation that someone is acting problematically, keep an eye on them to see if it's just a one-off case of someone having a bad day or if there's an actual problem" is Adminship 101, and applies just as much to T&S; that they reviewed Fram's contributions rather than taking the words of the anonymous denouncer at face value is a good thing, even if I disagree with the conclusion they reached. (That I disagree with the conclusion they reached is on the assumption that Fram's version of events is correct, given that T&S have been asked if that's the case and not indicated otherwise. I do notice a group of editors, all of whom appear to come from the same small clique, insinuating that Fram is lying. I have no idea if that's the case or not, but if nothing else it might give some indication as to where the anonymous denunciations are coming from and that the unfortunate Laura is being attacked for something she didn't do.)

On the broader point, I more or less agree with Ivanvector's comments here. The WMF might have fucked this up badly (as I said to a WMF employee—not T&S—privately today, the very fact that they didn't expect this to be controversial and plan accordingly is as far as I'm concerned prima facie evidence of a severe competence issue in whichever anonymous coward is hiding behind the WMFOffice account). However, it looks like a cock-up rather than a conspiracy, and a unique set of circumstances that's unlikely to occur. The tiny Wikipedias outnumber the big wikis twenty to one, and T&S probably aren't used to handling issues on big wikis with advanced dispute resolution setups. As I read it, they didn't understand our processes, thought that because Fram had been rude about arbitrators that meant Arbcom couldn't handle a case involving him, genuinely thought they were being helpful in stepping in, and probably expected to be showered with plaudits and were completely taken off guard when even those who would have been happy to see Fram banned took offence at the WMF trying to impose direct rule.

Unless we start to see more people receive the night and fog treatment, I'd be inclined to assume this is a one-off screwup which won't happen again. I imagine all the people who signed off on the ban (it takes a lot of people to sign off on an office action, even if some of them are probably just rubber-stamping everything that passes across their desk) are shortly going to have an very uncomfortable meeting with the board in which it's pointed out that their inflated salaries are dependent on keeping the donations rolling in, and needlessly creating a situation where the core community that keeps their showpiece site running are talking seriously about forking or at least GAFIA is not the way to go about it. "That guy who runs the website that used to be big once before it fell apart and Facebookpedia took its place" doesn't get invited to parties, and Jimmy knows it. ‑ Iridescent 20:54, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

(adding) I'd also like to endorse Newyorkbrad's comments here, made while I was typing the above screed, which (to my surprise) are short, clear, and to the point, and with which I entirely agree. ‑ Iridescent 21:05, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Ah spooks eh, dontcha just love 'em?? Martinevans123 (talk) 21:07, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

After the first partial ban imposed (in February this year) in de.wiki, there seemed to be this huge discussion about it. That they didn't expect a massive outcry from this then has to really be willful blindness rather than severe incompetence. Galobtter (pingó mió) 21:11, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I don't speak the language so can't offer much of an opinion on that thread, but in my experience de-wiki are even worse than Commons when it comes to assuming that any action taken by the WMF must be the result of a Vast Global Conspiracy—the WMF probably assumed that en-wiki would be more pliant when it came to obeying the edicts of their betters. Plus, looking at the names of the T&S people (you need to scroll down to them) the only one I recognize as at all active on en-wiki recently is Karen Brown, so it may just be that they didn't realise how active Fram was and that any action taken against him would light up 447 people's watchlists. ‑ Iridescent 21:21, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I agree. They had to have known this would be negatively received, because they received pushback the first time they tried this stunt. Enigma^msg 22:05, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Have you followed the DE-WP interactions with the WMF much? They do actually have some justification for that viewpoint. (My German is not terrible.) Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:27, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Well tbh if the core community ever did want to demonstrate its actual power in running ENWP, a month of 'no reversions', no admin actions and turning off the anti-vandalism bots would do it. See how the screaming starts once some high profile (and rich) BLP's get continuously vandalised. But I disagree in part regarding the 'no problem watching'. I have no problem with people's *contribution* history being completely visible and transparent, but that is a different kettle of fish to what the timeline in Fram's statement indicates is going on - that the T&S are/were actively *monitoring* him after he was on their radar. In order to have a 'gotcha'. Thats not the same as 'we have had a complaint so we have looked into it' which is what you seem to be addressing. Granted I do expect the T&S to monitor editors who present a genuine safety concern (child protection etc), editors being mean to each other is not a safety issue. Thats 'people on the internet'. That sort of longterm monitoring of Fram's editing history is concerning, especially given the imposition of what appears to be an interaction ban between a highly experienced admin who has a good track record of dealing with troublesome editors, and an editor who has a less sterling reputation. And while it may be unrelated, the imposition of *interaction bans* by the T&S team smacks of interference in ENWP's own governance. Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:14, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

To address NYB's comments in relation to the above: "please do give careful thought to how it might be possible to quickly deescalate this situation, without jeopardizing the Office's needful role in dealing with the very serious situations that are within its core responsibilities to address." - I think this may be the cause of the current issue, in that no one on ENWP sees the T&S 'core responsibilities' (or even non-core) as policing internal wiki disputes. Thats why we have dispute resolution venues. If it *is* something that would legitimately fall into what people normally would expect a T&S initiative to be involved in, none of that information appears to have been given to Fram (assuming Fram is being open) as his description of events is very far from that. Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:18, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

That, I agree with. This is the remit of T&S (in their own words); nowhere do I see anything remotely relating to interpersonal disputes or civility, and I've seen no indication that Fram made any statement that could be construed as a threat. ‑ Iridescent 21:26, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately I think the only way to reasonably rein in the T&S over-reach would be a trustee board-level resolution to direct WMF policy in this area. I seriously doubt, given the current board members, that will ever take place. Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:30, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

From what I can make out, they saw the local only ban as a final warning for behaviour that they otherwise would have global banned for, since it had a nexus on this project. That’s probably the biggest issue with this entire thing: they very well may have more than Fram is saying or they only gave him one diff. The way it was executed, however, implied they only viewed it as an issue here when what they were apparently trying to say was this behaviour needs to stop and this is your last chance. Hopefully there will soon be a de-brief and they can rethink the concept of project bans... TonyBallioni (talk) 22:00, 11 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Now that the Wikipediocracy thread has been pointed out to me, striking large chunks of my initial comment. The evidence might be circumstantial, but there's too much of it to ignore. On the plus side, someone has made lots of new friends. ‑ Iridescent 06:42, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The Wikipediocracy suggestions could well be on target, but there are a few snippets in what has been officially said to make me mindful of at least one other (speculative but, I think, realistic) possibility (which assumes the "Fuck Arbcom" post was the trigger), and I'd hate the wrong person/people to be blamed. I'm still holding back on my judgment until we heard what the board has to say. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 09:20, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

This was one of the reasons I posted the "Elephant in the room" section. I was hoping that we might gain more clarity on why Fram was banned, though it doesn't seem to have worked (and yes, if your speculation is the same as mine, it is realistic). Black Kite (talk) 10:59, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

While it's probably not sensible to speculate pending the meeting on the 14th, I can only think of four realistic possibilities for the complainant. Three have flat-out denied it being them, and given that the identity will come out, to the board if not the community, in two days' time, it would be pointless to lie; the fourth has remained distinctly silent. ‑ Iridescent 12:37, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The aspects of employment law being raised here and there trouble me. I also agree with what you say about the salaries of the WMF employees being dependent on not killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, see what I said here. What happens on Wikipedia and WMF sites is not at the same level, but I was reminded of this. Carcharoth (talk) 10:11, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

But again, that raises the issue as to why Fram. He's certainly cantankerous, but he's by no means the rudest editor on Wikipedia nor could any of his history realistically be construed as raising safety concerns. Given that I (and you) can think of plenty of occasions where the office haven't stepped in to ban genuine violent criminals when they've been identified, what is so special about "Fuck Arbcom" that it warrants direct action? ‑ Iridescent 12:37, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I think there have been other complaints made about Fram (fairly obviously), and that those who made the complaints know this (and Fram may not be aware of all of the complaints - T&S may have put him in an impossible position by only partially disclosing the complaints made against him), so Fram can't really explain what is going on here. What may happen is that the Board are told (in confidence) about other matters, but this can't be disclosed outside of the Board. Oh, I see Fram has posted some more, see here. Hopefully someone will re-post that here somewhere. Carcharoth (talk) 13:55, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Anyone can check Fram's contributions. Did anyone find anything that rises to the level of bypassing Arbcom and requiring Office action? That's what I'm having trouble understanding here. Either there is something not visible on wiki or the accuser wields a very big stick. The thing that seems the most closely related to Fram's case was another previously "clean" admin who was quietly desysop'd and blocked by Arbcom. Some of the community of course had issues, but since the decision came from the community in the form of Arb it was eventually accepted, since that's exactly what the community set up the committee to do. Side-stepping this procedure naturally causes editors to speculate. Mr Ernie (talk) 11:27, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I agree. ‑ Iridescent 12:37, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Futile attempt to stop this

@Everyone, it's probably not sensible to continue any of these discussions until after the board have had their briefing, as we're all at the shadows-in-a-cave level at present. While I certainly don't trust Jimmy, I do trust Doc James to give an honest account regardless of whether I always agree with him or not, and if he says that having seen the evidence he feels the WMF's actions were correct and there's a reason they needed to be done this way I'm willing to accept it. ‑ Iridescent 12:37, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

To me, this is not about Fram and what he did or didn't do. This is about the WMF attempting some sort of hostile takeover of en.wiki. Enigma^msg 15:27, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

But until we have some idea why they did what they did, we don't know that's what did happen. Sometimes things do have to happen without explanation regardless of how frustrating it is for all those who aren't in the know as to why; until the board have reviewed the case, it's impossible for us to say whether T&S did the right thing, the wrong thing but for defensible reasons, or were abusing their position. ‑ Iridescent 16:03, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Tbh I dont think it really matters anymore. Its clear enough that it was on-wiki actions that prompted it, and its not T&S job to get involved in on-wiki disputes (especially since in this case there is zero on-wiki evidence that supports the veiled claims of harrassment). At this point it needs a board-level resolution to make it clear to the employees of the WMF that absent serious concerns (legal, child protection etc) that they are not to interfere with local wikis in order to impose their own standards. As I recall board elections are in 2020, so I will be actively seeking candidates to stand on a stated platform of curbing WMF over-reach. Dont get me wrong, I know its got very little hope of succeeding, and if it does, unlikely a board resolution would pass, but it would send a concrete message. I will be reaching out to DE-wiki as well. The DE community are also extremely unhappy with WMF intereference in their own governance. Personally I would like Doc James to be one, but I doubt he will get behind attempts to curb WMF-staff level actions. Only in death does duty end (talk) 19:32, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

If Fram hadn't been an administrator, do you think there would have been so much outrage? The cynic in me says "No", as nobody cares what happens to the bottom feeders in this kind of institutional bullying. And all these calls for patience simply play into the hands of the bullies, who know that in a week or so this will all be forgotten. If anything's to be done it must be done now, not in accordance with a schedule laid down by the bullies. Eric Corbett 19:51, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'd be inclined to guess yes; the issue isn't that he's an administrator, but that he's the 187th most active editor of all time (and many of those above him are bot-assisted), and that he was given a sudden year-long block with no right of appeal and no real explanation. I'd imagine that if the same thing happened to an equally active non-admin like Blofeld, Beyond My Ken or yourself, the reaction would be similar. ‑ Iridescent 20:00, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

You should be less cynical Eric, if you had been banned in the night *by the WMF* for being uncivil, there would be an equally vocal outcry. Granted there might be a bit more understanding, but like Fram, no one has ever seriously considered you harrassed people. Only in death does duty end (talk) 20:08, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'm pretty certain that a similar degree of outrage would've occurred had this happened to any well-established prolific editor. For the record, some of people outraged explicitly said they do not like Fram. It's not like it's a bunch of admins getting together to protect a fellow admin. If the WMF had done to this to someone who doesn't contribute much at all, I would agree that there would not be such an outcry. I don't think the affected having the bit precipitated this at all. It's about someone being banned, while circumventing the local wiki, without any stated evidence, and with no chance to appeal (or even e-mail or respond on talk). Enigma^msg 20:38, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I suppose that time may tell which of us is right, but my fundamental point is that I felt continually harassed by certain administrators during my time editing here, who now perhaps in turn feel harassed by the WMF. So the boot is simply on the other foot. As far as I'm concerned to be able to edit here you have to be able to put up with the unchecked coercive control imposed on you by administrators and others who take a dislike to you, and I couldn't, so the only thing that's changed is that the harassment has been notched up a level. Which is why I don't see waiting as having any merit whatsoever. Eric Corbett 20:31, 12 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Where I'd say this situation differs is that when you felt that (for instance) Chillum, or indeed Fram, was unfairly targeting you, there was a recognised path to appeal any action he took (even though you never actually appealed blocks, you were aware that you could have), and anyone blocking (or unblocking) you would invariably explain why they'd done it and what their reasoning was. Here, we have a situation where the WMF have without public explanation blocked a long-term editor without discussion and with any appeal expressly forbidden, for something that probably did violate policy but was no worse than many (probably most) editors have said at some point. That the editor they blocked was a very vocal critic of the WMF's approach to changing the user interface and the block was enacted the day before they issued a public announcement about their proposed changes to the user interface, and that the sole editor singled out for this treatment was an editor who had been in public dispute with someone closely connected to the WMF Chair, couldn't have been more certain to set the conspiracies flying if they'd tried.

If the WMF had, for instance, issued a clear statement that from now on they were going to enforce the civility policy rigidly and anyone swearing would be warned on the first occasion and blocked on the second, I might have grumbled but I'd ultimately accept it—their website, their rules, and there's a legitimate argument to be made that if we have written rules they should be enforced—but it's the inconsistency and arbitrariness, coupled with the lack of any appeal mechanism, that's troubling, and is the reason even people who are no friends of Fram and would happily testify against him in any formal case are complaining here.

(Incidentally, for both of the two days this saga has been running the discussion page has received more page views than the TFA. Yes, admittedly that's partly an artefact of the fact that the last two TFAs have had fairly dull-looking blurbs so fewer people than usual clicked through—and of people visiting the discussion page on more than one occasion to see the most recent updates and consequently counting as multiple visitors—but even so…) ‑ Iridescent 09:14, 13 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Huh. Perhaps it's being linked to from offsite? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 09:29, 13 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

More likely that it has 250 different editors plus presumably other people who have watchlisted it, and is being updated so frequently that it keeps popping up on people's watchlists so people keep looking to see what's changed. 500 editors each viewing it 10 times accounts for 5000 edits right there, and many of those people are going to be refreshing it a lot more than 10 times. (Remember, every edit counts as two pageviews; the initial view before you click [edit] and the reloading of the page once your edit is saved.) ‑ Iridescent 09:43, 13 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

General comment Thinking over what we've seen, it's as if the WMF watched ArbCom exceed its remit on several occasions recently and said (American slang) "You ain't seen nothin' yet. Hold my beer." Enigma^msg 06:43, 14 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

On losing admins

• It seems this month is easily on track to have the most admins lost since March 2012 (which was 23, the record for any month aside from the first month where inactives were desysopped, which obviously should not count). I wonder if the WMF T&S sees this as a positive. For the record, I don't recall having any interactions with Fram, or having ever commented on him, but the WMF could hardly have handled this any worse. Enigma^msg 14:23, 13 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  They probably don't see it as a positive, but I'm not certain they see it as a negative either. I'd imagine there's at least a faction in Community Engagement who would contend that clearing out the old guard of the class of 2006–08 would actually be beneficial in the long run and aren't going to be too heartbroken to see a mass pruning of the editor base to allow recruitment of a new crop who won't feel intimidated by all these old sweats patronizing them.

  They might not be entirely wrong, either; there's a reasonable case to be made that those who've been around since the early days don't appreciate just how weird an environment Wikipedia is to those coming at it fresh who don't understand either the markup and the culture, and we could do with more admins and established editors in general who are sympathetic to the experience new editors face. (This is probably not the time to be saying it, but Fram was a consistent offender for "you didn't get the format of {{InsanelyComplexTemplate}} absolutely correct, reverted as non-constructive" or "what do you mean, you aren't aware you violated the WP:PYRZQXGL policy, everyone should memorize the whole of Wikipedia:List of policies and guidelines before they start to edit, I've undone every edit you've ever made as I can't trust you" newbie-bashing. 99% of the time he's correct, but that doesn't mean the 1% isn't there. As a member of WMF staff recently pointed out to me, I had sharp words to say about Fram myself in this thread-from-hell last year—the timing of which tallies fairly accurately with "investigations usually take four weeks" and "I received my first warning from WMFOffice in April 2018", incidentally. My I've (obviously) got serious concerns about your recent conduct there is a reference to this declined arb case the previous day.)

  We could certainly do with more regulars (whether admin or not) from the other side of the VisualEditor/WikiText divide, as the number of conversations in which old and new editors are talking at complete cross purposes because each doesn't understand what the other is seeing is starting to get silly. ‑ Iridescent 15:52, 13 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'm conscious that I don't want to keep sounding like the Official Megalibrarygirl Fan Club ^(TM) but one of the reasons I was keen to get her involved more in backstage stuff is she has only ever used Visual Editor, which I'd imagine is pretty rare amongst the hardcore admin crowd, and doesn't have any residual memories of what things were like more than five years ago. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 17:43, 13 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Personally. I've always struggled with WP:PYRZQXGL, but it is sometimes useful. But then maybe "I couldn't give a flying fuck about how I come across." Martinevans123 (talk) 16:16, 13 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  Amazingly, Pyrzqxgl is a blue link—I assume some decades-old memory of The Wizard of Oz bubbled to the surface there. For anyone wondering what Martin is on about there, "I couldn't give a flying fuck about how I come across" is something Fram said to me in March 2018 after I told him he was "coming across as a vindictive crank", which if the timings are right means it's possibly Entry #1 in WMFOffice's famous dossier. As I've said elsewhere, I'd consider that thread-from-hell and the rejected Arb case as a good example of Wikipedia's civility enforcement mechanisms working as they should, not the example of a broken process some people seem to be painting it as; Fram was being obnoxious, people formally complained that he was being obnoxious, he was told to stop being obnoxious, and he stopped being obnoxious, all with nobody being blocked or banned and not too much time wasted. ‑ Iridescent 16:41, 13 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  Hmm, not tooooo much time. So regarding proper process, yes, I'd have to agree with you 100%. But as to what he's actually alleged to have said or done this time, it might take a while to find out. Martinevans123 (talk) 18:55, 13 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

They've confirmed that it all relates to on-wiki activity so there's no invisible emails etc to find, I can confirm there's nothing remotely contentious in Fram's last four months of deleted contributions all of which are routine AfD nominations or maintenance (see right for a glimpse of what the Magical World of Admin Tools looks like), and TonyBallioni has done the same review of his oversighted contributions. Unless there's server-side suppression going on here—technically possible but well into the realm of conspiracy theories—any problem edits are in his visible history. Special:Contributions/Fram is probably the single most pored-over page on the site right now, and to the best of my knowledge nobody has found anything recent except the "fuck arbcom" diff, and if they're going to start blocking everyone who lost their temper at the thread in question we may as well all go home. ‑ Iridescent 19:55, 13 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Ah thanks. What a relief. [5] Martinevans123 (talk) 19:59, 13 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Sandstein does get it right a lot of the time: statement. On newbie perspectives, see this. Carcharoth (talk) 16:37, 13 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

My "99% of the time he's correct, but that doesn't mean the 1% isn't there" could just as well describe Sandstein, but when it comes to interpretation of policy to-the-letter he's invariably correct; the issue is one of inflexibility and an unwillingness to appreciate that policy should reflect reality, not the other way round. On this occasion he's most definitely correct; I can't think of any quicker way to HTD than for Arbcom to allow people to railroad them into declaring Wikipexit without the community on board. (Sure, 250 people would support it, but that's still only 1⁄15 of the highly active users, let alone the long tail of occasional editors who have no idea what the fuss is about.) ‑ Iridescent 17:20, 13 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

That's the most upside-down thing in all of this - I keep agreeing with Sandstein. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 17:27, 13 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

On a couple of occasions, and not just recently, I have found Sandstein to be insightful and helpful, though I suspect that's probably more because I happen to agree exactly with his interpretation of policy at that time. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 17:43, 13 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

On a scale of "end of the encyclopedia as we know it" to "no one would notice", what do you think would happen if the entire "1⁄15" up and left tomorrow? How much of the work do the most-active 250 do? Would an admin strike work as a matter of practicality? Would editors run RfAs and replace everyone, and would the new admin know what they were doing? Has there ever been a walk out or strike before and how did it go? Is a wikipocalypse survivable and how long would it take to recover? – Levivich 02:02, 14 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Honestly, it depends which of the 250, but we'd survive and they'd likely be replaced eventually. This sounds really bad, but I'm sure Iri can show you the graph/stats that shows we've been maintaining the same approximate active editor number for a while. It isn't the same users. Rather there's a cycle of in and out. We are regularly losing highly active users and replacing them.

It isn't great, but it isn't the end of the world. No one is irreplaceable is true for every organization. People with specialized skills might be noticed more at first, but eventually they'd be replaced. That's one of the advantages to having reached the scale of Wikipedia: you'd need a critical mass to quit, and 250 honestly isn't it. TonyBallioni (talk) 02:30, 14 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

A starting point may be to examine the mainspace (i.e. article-building) contributions of all the most vocal people in this whole debate and go from there. Sandstein on paper has the right idea about the board of trustees....just hoping they are pretty independent of T&S is all.....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 03:39, 14 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I took the top ten contributors to WP:FRAMBAN and looked at their mainspace contributions - Winged Blades of Godric, Seraphimblade, Beyond My Ken, Starship.paint and StudiesWorld have all been actively contributing there over the past few days. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 11:16, 14 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Ritchie333, there? I have written 8 new articles, (near-entirely) rewrote another 3 articles for pending trials by GA and indulged in all forms of routine edits ( spanning from reverting vandals to commenting over t/p discussions and DyKs) over the past one month. What do you wish to imply; that we don't edit main-space? ∯WBG^converse 12:13, 14 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

No, you misunderstood, "there" means "mainspace". As you just clarified. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 12:15, 14 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I found the shitstorm when I took a break from an off-wiki task on my one day off a week and turned to my Wikipedia tabs intending to write one of two articles. Neither has got written. Usually my attitude is, I can best cock a snook at the WMF by continuing to write articles to demonstrate how ridiculous they are to keep proclaiming the encyclopedia almost finished (and that right there by the way is blind entrenched Dunning-Krugeresque bias), especially if I keep throwing in topics they don't care about. But right now I'm not sure it wouldn't be taken as treachery. "Oh look she doesn't really care, she's still volunteering her labour." I'm honestly not sure what to do. I know they don't care about me or any other encyclopedia writer; we're all just worn-out cogs to them, and I'm not even any good for training an AI, too variable. But I care. Yngvadottir (talk) 17:55, 14 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not under the illusion that anyone will miss me if I'm gone, but I'll just share my reaction. I took down my userpage and replaced it with a brief message, and I've ceased my mainspace editing. I normally pride myself on being someone who is mostly in the mainspace and avoids the drama boards as much as possible, but now I've done a complete 180. This is not sustainable. Eventually the outrage will peter out and I'll have a decision to make, because at last check, the WMF is still claiming en.wiki as their own personal fiefdom to do as they like. Enigma^msg 19:27, 14 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Personally I write and edit for the benefit of the readers. And because I enjoy doing it. It matters little to me whether what I'm doing pleases or displeases the WMF. I would like to see answers and a positive outcome to the Fram debacle as much as anyone else, but don't particularly intend to change what I do in the meantime.  — Amakuru (talk) 18:18, 14 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps ironically, I think this might be more likely to move me towards doing more article work. There has clearly been a power shift (however much the WMF might deny it) and there are new standards as to what constitutes harassment and related bannable offences. As those new standards are not explained, we don't know where the new lines are drawn, and bans can not be appealed, I really don't know what is permitted and what is not when trying to resolve behavioural disputes in my admin role. While that uncertainty persists, I'm really not sure I feel comfortable doing admin things. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 19:48, 14 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks to those who replied. I'm close to Enigmaman's position. I try hard not to assume readers find my articles useful; I put them out there partly in case someone needs background on something, and it's the totality of the encyclopedia I care about, really. For the same reason, I won't be blanking my user page; I think the list of articles might be useful, if only to those investigating the dissenter (and demonstrating a type of editor not to try to replace with bots). But I don't want to contribute to letting them think we accept their terms. So, day after day, I don't do much except keep saying my piece. It's sad, really. I am a terrible politician. We shouldn't have to deal with their BS. Yngvadottir (talk) 19:57, 14 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

All this is subject to change when the mythical Statement From The Board emerges, but I'd put my position nearer Yngvadottir than Enigmaman. I wouldn't have an issue with continuing to write uncontroversial obscure articles (which is almost all of them; only one thing I wrote here ever reaches the million-views-per-year mark). Where I would have an issue is with any but the most uncontroversial and routine of maintenance. If we're heading towards a system in which we have an "anonymously denounce" button to go with "thanks", and anyone who manages to reach a (secret and undisclosed) total of complaints is summarily disappeared, then there's no way I'd touch editing any topic on which there's the slightest controversy, let alone touch something like New Page Patrol, deletion discussions or WP:ERRORS, and I'd recommend the same to anyone. It's impossible to be involved in the administration of a website that attracts this many people without offending some of them, and I don't really see how to interpret the increasingly elliptical statements emerging from T&S as anything other than "offending anyone will not be tolerated". ‑ Iridescent 21:37, 14 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Really? I'd had you down as more of a 'na fuck em' kind of guy. Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:40, 14 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Why? Revolutionary suicide is a particularly pointless exercise in this context. This is ultimately a dispute about a change in the terms and conditions of a website, it's not as if T&S are rounding editors up at gunpoint and forcing them to work in Fluffernutter's underground lair. Assuming the ban isn't reversed tomorrow, then either the ban of Fram is a one-off incident, T&S discreetly agree behind the scenes to take a hands-off approach and eventually we all go back to normal and throw a welcome party for Fram in a year;* or, people gradually decide that they find living under the new order unpleasant, drift away, and Wikipedia goes the way of Myspace. I've drifted away before; it's really not difficult. ‑ Iridescent 21:57, 14 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
*Statement of the obvious, but Fram is Belgian and presumably at minimum is fluent in French or Dutch and probably German as well, and still has plenty of places he can still contribute if he still wants to contribute to Wikipedia and the ban isn't lifted. I imagine that in light of recent events if he turned up on de-wiki, they'd probably give him admin status in about thirty seconds flat. (He could then find a pretext to block Jan Eissfeldt for harassment, and thus complete the Circle of Life.) ‑ Iridescent 21:57, 14 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I thought Jan was already blocked/banned on DE? As an aside, I routinely get jealous of the average Belgians command of multiple languages. Only in death does duty end (talk) 22:20, 14 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

How about the Swiss? Enigma^msg 22:28, 14 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I've been to Brugge (actually partially took my honeymoon there) and Rock Werchter many times. I have yet to visit Zurich. Only in death does duty end (talk) 22:39, 14 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Well, you're not putting yourself at risk by working in the mainspace. My reasoning is simply because if I'm made to be feel not welcome (and the WMF makes me feel that way), why would I want to contribute? Indeed, I wouldn't care about working in controversial areas because I would no longer value my account, so I'd be more likely to work in controversial areas than articles, actually. Enigma^msg 21:42, 14 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Of course you're putting yourself at risk by working in the mainspace; all it takes is to step on the wrong person's toes. (I'll remind you that a pair of mainspace edits^[6][7] is why we're here in the first place.) If you think editors who restrict themselves to mainspace avoid controversy, switch the "highlight blocked editors" gadget on in preferences and then head on over to Talk:Shakespeare authorship question.22:02, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

I stand corrected. I was using my own personal opinion about how sticking to mainspace is "safe" while getting involved in drama boards makes it more likely you will get blocked or taken to ArbCom over something you say there, whereas mainspace I feel it's unlikely to get in trouble for your edits. I make an edit, and if someone doesn't like it, they revert it. Done. I will also note that Fram's is an atypical case. Usually people claiming "harassment" or "bullying" are doing it based off of comments, not article contributions. Enigma^msg 22:04, 14 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

? Seems to be no nearer resolution than it was last week? Martinevans123 (talk) 14:31, 17 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Code of conduct

You might find this video to be interesting, wherein Sydney Poore (T&S) states that an "Universal code of conduct" for all WMF sites would be implemented next year, onwards.

Interestingly, parts of Meta (esp. the areas, linked with WMF) has a Safe-Space-Policy which includes weird stuff like any oppose comments/!votes in any discussion/proposal must be placed over some remote venue, because they think that new participant(s) get discouraged by oppose votes and like to see a string of green supports. (Sitush has some experience .... )

Also, around 1:49 in the video, someone(??) states:- If you're constantly getting negative feedback for doing something, how often you are going to do it?. What exactly, do these folks include under the purview of negative-feedback, is another mystery. Seconds back, they have deemed reversion of edits and sexual advances to be of similar forms of harassment ....

For a trivia, the video was published a day, after Fram was Office-banned :-) ∯WBG^converse 10:08, 15 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, a new Universal code of conduct and a new User reporting system - it's nice the way Wikipedia communities had to find out about it by seeing it on Youtube. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 10:09, 15 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Probably, our former arbitrator can list the various mediums that we need to subscribe to, to keep ourselves abreast of all these stuff .... Interesting times, we are in:-) ∯WBG^converse 10:20, 15 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Anyone else getting the 'this seems like part of an orchestrated plan' at this point? I mean, I am usually extremely pessimistic of conspiracy theories, but the timing on this is either deliberate or massively incompetent. Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:23, 15 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

(+1) This is testing the limits of Hanlon's razor .... ∯WBG^converse 10:29, 15 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yep, this was the piece of evidence that pushed me over the line of hanlon's razor. I now think that it's more likely that something nefarious is going on instead of innocent stupidity or incompetence. I'm wiling to wait for Doc Brown to get back to us about what happened in the board meeting, but if we don't get satisfactory communications then, I'm starting to wonder about foundation-ectomies. Tazerdadog (talk) 12:12, 15 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Fwiw, this is probably actually going to be useful on places like az.wiki and am.wiki or even nl.wikiquote. There are many projects where you have self-appointed rulers of the project and where at one point you had large enough communities to have permanent sysops, but where now the community is dead except the self-appointed rulers who can do whatever they want to anyone new who comes along. These type of initiatives tend to get panned widely on en.wiki, but when taken in the context of the other 700-something projects makes sense. Stewards are not going to get involved beyond obvious vandalism and global ban discussions are complicated to say the least. Dealing with the abusive harassing sysop on the East Fooian Wikibooks is definitely a legitimate function of the WMF, and I suspect stuff like that is where they’ll spend most of their time. TonyBallioni (talk) 12:27, 15 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  Yes, I think it's probably a good idea (if it's implemented well), but it's not a good way to find out about it. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 12:31, 15 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  Actually, I'll add that now the WMF has introduced the new power structure and their parallel (to ArbCom) intention of dealing with what they term "harassment" issues, we *need* a published set of the rules they will be enforcing. And no, like WBG says below, I really don't think this is anything to do with smaller Wikipedias (even if there's a spin-off benefit there) - not when we hear it via a Youtube about the gender gap on en.wiki. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 12:55, 15 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  The foundation does not need a CoC to deal with Croatian wiki or Az.wiki; how exactly a CoC would have dealt with the az.wiki/am.wiki scenario? They have till-date denied to intervene, even in far disastrous scenarios like Croatian wiki.
  

  The foundation is focusing on en-wiki in it's bid for a CoC; the screenshots showed over the video, all belong to en-wiki. Choosing to believe in otherwise, is to remain delusional. I agree that a CoC can be helpful but I don't trust the T&S, at the first place and this non-transparency is hugely concerning.
  

  Also, did you know of this? ∯WBG^converse 12:47, 15 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  Well, I know there is one at mw:Code of Conduct for the technical spaces of Wikimedia, complete with the associated enforcement systems and the like. That might be the prototype these people have in mind. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 13:07, 15 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  I know that, and was exclusively referring to the proposed CoC for all non-technical sites. ∯WBG^converse 13:18, 15 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Hmm. There is nothing over meta, as to the upcoming CoC. Now, now, there does exist a page about User Reporting System, whose consultation phase ran from February, 2019 to June, 2019 and have just concluded. Per the timeline, they are currently, either designing workflows or (even better) developing the relevant software.

  When and where was it advertised? Any admins or long-standing-editors, visiting this page, who have been consulted? I see none apart from Risker, Rob. NickK and Joe. ∯WBG^converse 13:14, 15 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) I don’t really follow community health initiative stuff as it rarely has any impact on en regardless of how they market it. The functionaries list does sometimes get posts about this or that consultation related to it, but to date it’s all been on-wiki that I recall, and again, I tend to ignore it since I haven’t seen any impact here. They also usually announce these things at AN. Risker would be much more likely than me to be able to tell you any relevant background.

T&S is by far the most competent team at the WMF, and they usually get the correct outcome when they do act. There is room for criticism, but there are people who watch this page who remember the pre-T&S era and they’ll tell you that having them is an improvement, regardless of their faults.

Having a CoC helps on smaller projects because it gives them something to point to when they do intervene rather than an ambiguous TOU. On am.wiki having a CoC would have made it possible for intervention even if Teles hadn’t have been blocked for trying to resolve the situation. I’m fairly certain blocking someone for having Queer in their name and then going on to explain how homosexuality is against the laws of Ethiopia would be covered, and in situations like that, having the foundation act rather than the community can be beneficial.

Finally, I think everyone is being unfair to Sydney here. This was not a WMF sponsored video, and it was very clearly edited. A five second clip in someone else’s video where there was fairly obviously a back and forth going on beforehand as part of an interview is not some secret conspiracy to undermine community governance. Whatever she is talking about has likely been discussed somewhere on meta or en before: if anything the community health initiative is overly transparent to the point of people ignoring their consultations because they happen too often so people just tune them out. TonyBallioni (talk) 13:35, 15 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Risker did say that en-wiki functionaries had been notified of that. But it is not clear what cross-over there is between the day-to-day T&S matters and long-term initiatives. I presume not too much. I agree people should not be unfair to the work by FloNight and others, but I do fear it will get a lot more attention now, possibly in a good way, possibly not. Let's hope the outcomes are positive (that doesn't sound quite right, but rushing a bit as logging off soon). Carcharoth (talk) 14:38, 15 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

TonyBallioni, interestingly, WMF used to have a non-discrimination policy covering it's staff, contractors and all users for about ~ 11 years. It was only in 2017, that they removed users from under it's purview. I still don't see as to how the az.wiki or cr.wiki situations would have been any better with some CoC.

It seems that the functionaries were mailed to contribute in the consultation phase. Not sure what harm would have come of a more public broadcast.

I am not being unfair to Sydney and she is not immune to criticism. As OED said, the timings strongly indicate that they are either awfully incompetent or they are part of some sinister conspiracy. Also, any ethical video producer will show the final video to all the involved people,for their consent, prior to publishing it. ∯WBG^converse 15:16, 15 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

You do no know who posted it right? I dont think ethics comes into it. Only in death does duty end (talk) 15:25, 15 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Only in death:I suspect the silent majority, including most of our churned contributors over the years (of which I, like prolly most of us, am at high risk of - even after over a decade), supports efforts to improve civility in this place. I do think any such policy should get a bunch of collaboration and sign-off with the local wikis, but additional tooling to collect better data and make complaints easier should be welcomed. WMF shouldn't have to ask permission to think about these things, and I one reason you might have not heard about them as much so far is that they don't want to dilute attention to current focuses like Wikipedia:Talk pages consultation 2019. II | (t - c) 00:28, 16 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• I am so sad to be proved right. Yngvadottir (talk) 16:03, 15 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I've collected a few links to flesh out some background at Wikipedia:Community response to the Wikimedia Foundation's ban of Fram #New "User reporting system". I hope some will find them useful. --RexxS (talk) 17:59, 15 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Waiting for the man

Still waiting for this mythical board statement and I reserve the right to change my mind depending on what that says, but from what's available at the moment it looks like Risker is correct that this was intended as a shock-and-awe operation to demonstrate the WMF's strength, that has badly misfired. Remember, the T&S team operate within the WMF echo chamber, and WMF employees' perception of who constitutes "the community" is filtered by who is likely to write to them (people trying to get WMF funding and people with grudges) and who is likely to meet them in person (people so obsessive they would be willing to spend their own money to attend a Wikimedia event, people with their snouts in the "Travel Scholarship" trough, and personal friends of employees). Consequently, their perception of who we are and what we want is viewed through the prism of the personal prejudices of a relatively small group of ultra-insiders, many of whom have personal reasons to dislike Fram as someone who has consistently called attention to quality issues arising from assorted WMF-funded pet projects.

At a guess, because they received a bunch of complaints about Fram at the time of the Arbcom case in 2018, they put him on their radar as a potential problem user, but failed to appreciate that he took the warnings to heart and addressed the problem elements of his behaviour. When they subsequently received a steady trickle of complaints from people disgruntled that he was flagging copyright violations and inaccuracies in articles created as part of high-profile schemes like Women in Red, they got the impression that Fram was some kind of monster since all they ever heard about him was complaints (nobody writes to the WMF to praise editors they think are doing a good job).

When they decided they needed a grand gesture to mark the start of the Age Of Enforced Corporate Values and show that there was a new sheriff in town who was going to write the rules from now on, they assumed that Fram was a textbook example of one of those incredibly toxic personalities who cost more than they are worth and should be encouraged to leave and that his crimes would be so obvious they wouldn't even need to explain them since any right-minded person would welcome his departure, and failed to appreciate that Fram had undergone a major on-wiki personality shift in the past year and that the signal they've actually sent is "once your name is on our hit-list, we'll be coming for you come what may so there's nothing to be gained by trying to improve".

(To the handful of people who are still trying to maintain that Fram's recent conduct was so problematic that it warranted this kind of sanction, show us some evidence. An editor this bad must be some kind of monster; you'll surely have no problem pointing to some diffs of problematic conduct more convincing than "was rude about Arbcom as an institution whilst carefully avoiding blaming individuals" and "expressed a fairly commonly-held view about the grammatical correctness of singular they".)

When the facts change I change my mind; while I initially pooh-poohed the wilder conspiracies, there are too many things happening simultaneously, all of which follow the same "from now on we're in charge, everyone is obliged to follow our rules but we're not telling you what those rules are" pattern, for it to be reasonable to assume the Fram block wasn't intended either to send a clear "the civilian administration of this project is now subordinate to the occupying authorities" signal, or to silence the person most likely to challenge imposed new systems and rules. WMF people can continue as much as they like to claim that they expected opposition and prepared for it, but unless they genuinely hoped to provoke a full-scale civil war and the mass suppression of anyone who isn't comfortable with top-down administration, I can't see how this could possibly be what they wanted.

Arbcom certainly has its problems—look a couple of threads up for my laying into them—but they're ultimately accountable and if we think they're screwing things up badly they can be removed at the end of their terms. If you genuinely believe there's a "silent majority" who think that the electoral experiment has failed and would rather have top-down imposition of rules by an unelected and self-appointing group, then give us the wording of your new Code of Conduct, dust off SecurePoll, and the silent majority can have their say on whether it's better to have a good king or a bad president. ‑ Iridescent 08:26, 17 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I would like to think the mythical board statement is not forthcoming easily because there is a moral and ethical split between the board members. More likely I suspect there is some horse-trading going on in order to put out a statement board members are willing to put their names to. Only in death does duty end (talk) 08:32, 17 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

A less juicy but equally likely answer would be that they've decided to publish a list of diffs in detail to explain which of Fram's actions they do and don't consider problematic, and it's taking time to redact them in such a way that it protects people's identities while still indicating what was problematic. (Plus, remember that the meeting was on Friday and presumably not much gets done over the weekend, and that all these people are in different time zones and they presumably all need to sign off on any statement before it's published.) As well as the meta-issue of the future of Wikipedia/media there are also real peoples' jobs at stake here if there is evidence coming to light of misconduct within T&S; I'd rather they put some thought into it than rush out a statement they need to keep correcting and clarifying later. ‑ Iridescent 08:43, 17 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'm afraid I am all too unsurprised that they have not deigned to give us even another placeholder. Another explanation: the WMF board of trustees, like many, is a gravy train and feel-good front that has little to do with actual decision-making. tldr: I wasn't holding my breath.

I have sent some encouraging and warm messages over the years, including the other day, to individuals implicated in one way or another in this endangerment of the encyclopedia and demonstration of contempt for those who contribute to it. I stopped reading WP:FRAM after seeing some messages from people I had respected that make me very angry. The roile that it now becomes apparent has been played by Women in Red (if only by having a Twitter account—and why in the name of all things EEML did they set up one of those—that has hosted diatribes against the rest of the community) also deeply hurt me. I almost joined that lizard cult. I was on the brink of doing a fast read and making a bridges-burning statement on the page yesterday, but got too busy offline. This gets worse and worse. Please tell me where to put the articles I cannot now put here. It would take a lot for me to trust this website any more. Starting with real apologies for victimising all of us as the worst possible way to go about offering help to victims, which is something I agree needs to be provided, and I do not in the least appreciate being called a victimiser and abettor of victimisation! Now must pack up ready for end of workday, would have loved to write two articles in the past week, now 3 thanks to Uncle G ... Yngvadottir (talk) 13:45, 17 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

To be fair, boards are not really there to 'make decisions' at that level. They set policy, hire an ED to execute it, make sure the organisation does what its supposed to. But they dont really interfere on a decision level unless something goes catastrophically wrong. Boards for not-for-profits and charity organisations are even more hands off in general anyway. Only in death does duty end (talk) 13:54, 17 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Exactly. A lucrative résumé-padding front. Yngvadottir (talk) 16:01, 17 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yngvadottir, that's not really fair. Non-executive directors are supposed to have no involvement in the day-to-day running of an organization, whether that organization be Microsoft or the local animal shelter. Their purpose is to set the general strategic direction, to act as a body of last resort in the event of a serious problem within the management (as is happening now), to make decisions that genuinely can't be taken internally such as setting Katherine Maher's salary, and to act as a body of people beyond the fear of internal reprisals if there are awkward questions that need to be asked regarding mismanagement or criminal allegations. If the board were to start making decisions as a matter of routine, we'd be the first people to complain. ‑ Iridescent 14:58, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Do we have any indication they are acting on this other than to rubber-stamp it? Why were we waiting from a statement from them? The pose of being above it all is a very useful way to get money and a nice résumé line for presiding over the indefensible. Yngvadottir (talk) 15:05, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

They might well be trying to pull Jimmy's traditional trick of saying nothing and hoping it all blows over, but there might well be a reasonable explanation for the delays—it's only been four days since the meeting, after all, and these people all have day jobs. To repeat, The pose of being above it all isn't a pose, it's an obligation; assuming California law is the same as most other places, boards can't get involved in micromanagement; they're not technically employees of the WMF, they're a group of external people who scrutinize the WMF, in our case augmented with a handful of "community representatives". Our article at Non-executive director is shitty but summarizes the basics of what they can and can't do reasonable accurately. ‑ Iridescent 15:31, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Jimmy still thinks that he in his capacity as founder has the ability to overrule office actions. I'm sure WMF Legal has had a nice sit down with him over that recent comment... TonyBallioni (talk) 15:36, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

He might still have the ability; the WMF's internal procedures are so opaque they're black, and I could certainly believe there was a "power to override any employee action" clause discreetly inserted back in the days of CBD that nobody ever got around to revoking. ‑ Iridescent 15:43, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Sigh. That unfortunately does sound like something he'd do just to say he could do it and no one bothered to change it on the assumption it would never be used. TonyBallioni (talk) 15:47, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Without wanting to overly personalize it by bringing up the names of people who've been gone for over a decade, see this and this for example. There would have been good reasons Jimmy might have felt it appropriate to quietly retain a God Mode button in the background, and I can easily imagine nobody ever bothering to remove it. ‑ Iridescent 16:22, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Sidetrack about IRC and smaller wikis

Just noting in passing that Fram has been on the WMF radar since at least 2013 (diff found by WereSpielChequers and posted to WT:FRAM). I'm not saying they've been slowly working up to the point of carrying out this specific one-project/short-term ban, though; I still think there are others who are being similarly watched and this was not particularly good target selection in order to get community buy-in; on the other hand, it might well have been a good target to get internal WMF buy-in. And I think we should be wary of dismissing the idea that having T&S/WMF step in and address "unpleasant" people is massively unpopular, in either the local or global sense. There have definitely been projects where the community was in fact unable to address what we'd consider extreme behaviour by certain individuals or small groups, whose behaviour has included blocking/desysopping/otherwise controlling users who didn't share the "preferred" point of view, and at least one case where a powerful user was likely an agent of the state. On a lower level, there's pretty open misogyny and homophobia on several projects. And on projects with only a small number of participants, there's often a dominant person who pretty much controls the project. In these kinds of cases, I'm not sure how local communities can fix these issues, and having someone with "god power" come in to sort things out may well be the answer. I'm pretty sure T&S expected at least some significant pushback (although perhaps not so much pushback that they were seeing admins line up for their chance to rebel), but the manner in which this issue was dealt with may well have some significant impact on the recommendations coming out of strategy groups. And now...back to the real world. Risker (talk) 13:57, 17 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Well I suppose waiting 5 years in order to get revenge for the embarressment of having one of your staff members reprimanded for talking about setting people on fire could be possible. Seems unlikely to me though. How is ol' throatpuncher these days? Still with the WMF? Only in death does duty end (talk) 14:19, 17 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

To go by his website, his current job is "seeing how many vague tech buzzwords can be jammed into a single sentence". ‑ Iridescent 14:31, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Of the conspiracy theories advanced (or dreamt of) about the situation, getting revenge for a 6 year old warning seems the by far unlikeliest. How much turnover has occurred in the WMF since then? Galobtter (pingó mió) 17:43, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Not as unlikely as you'd think. Ol' Throatpuncher may be gone, but Fluffernutter was the other half of most of those IRC logs we're not allowed to quote, and take a wild guess as to what her current job is. ‑ Iridescent 18:08, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you Yngvadottir for mentioning Uncle G and leading me to this. A needed bit of distraction from what has been going on. :-) Carcharoth (talk) 15:00, 17 June 2019 (UTC) On the matter at hand, I made a small contribution here, and all the comments made so far by Risker are well worth reading. Carcharoth (talk) 15:05, 17 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Please, somebody do the Droll Tales. I'm not the best choice and am not going to be able to, despite a library run and JSTOR reading. Yngvadottir (talk) 16:01, 17 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Yngvadottir, that would be an interesting project to take on, hopefully someone will get to it. In the same spirit, though one of the examples has an article already, I recently encountered two works of fiction/poetry from the past which I wanted to share and I hope might help distract (in a good way) from the current mood around here. The first is an early SF work from the 19th century by Paschal Grousset writing under the pseudonym of André Laurie, namely Les Exiles de la terre (1887), available here at the BNF. The plot is jaw-dropping for its time and described in his article as "probably one of the most fanciful cosmic tales of all times" (I wouldn't go quite that far, but it is astonishing). The other work is 400 years earlier, in Italy not France, and is poetry not science fiction, but is set 400 years earlier still in the First Crusades. It is Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso. I managed to find one of many online translations (sadly, my language skills are not enough to read either of these in their original languages), and read parts of the version here, also available here. I think it was the Fairfax translation, but maybe I should be reading a different translation. I found myself wondering how I'd not heard of either of these works before. At least en-Wikipedia has stubs on some of Victor Hugo's plays, such as Marie Tudor, though there are a surprising number of red-links at Template:Victor Hugo. Carcharoth (talk) 11:00, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Don't get me started on the misconception that the encyclopedia is almost finished, or even almost finished except for women's biographies (I'm told Daniela Di Bari [it] probably doesn't meet FOOTY, but there's the link to her on Italian Wikipedia if anyone reading here disagrees, or agrees with my suspicion she can pass on GNG). I could show you a whole bunch more redlinks I had intended to get to if no one else did, and I already had two articles ready to be written when this blew up. And I did know about Gerusalemme liberata. But I don't feel right writing articles under these circumstances. I'd hate to be asked to strike, but I feel guilty enough improving stuff, I may have to scramble my password. We should have forked years ago. I will not let the WMF think I'm ok with them treating us like chattel, or like harassers until they decide we aren't. Yngvadottir (talk) 12:15, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know quite what the issue is with Gerusalemme liberata, of which I seem to be the main editor these days, though needless to say I've never read more than a sentence or two of the actual poem. But those bits seem to have been written by people who had. The article is 25k long, & has got a steady 60ish vpd for ever. If it wasn't for the unacceptable if laughable treatment of Islam, its battling babes in armour would surely have been turned into a movie franchise by now. As it is, for anyone who takes any notice at all of what the Baroque operas they listen to are about, it is pretty inescapable. Likewise the recurrent scenes in art and other media until Walter Scott created a replacement source of characters. Even in the 1850s it seems to have been something well brought-up English gels were expected to be familiar with, presumably in translated redactions. Now pretty much any question would probably stump University Challenge teams. Johnbod (talk) 16:11, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yngvadottir Someday someone will explain to me where the misconception that the encyclopedia is almost finished, or even almost finished except for women's biographies comes from. Quite aside from the fact that this is utter nonsense, many of the articles we do have are very incomplete. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 13:08, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Aside from myopia, the WMF. A few years ago—I think before they started really pushing women's biographies—they made some kind of decision that we should now concentrate on maintenance, with the objective of getting everything to GA and FA, since we were "mostly finished" in terms of coverage. Which demonstrates how poorly qualified they are to tell us what to do. Yngvadottir (talk) 13:12, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure whether the emphasis was meant so much on "wow, look at how complete we are" as on the more sensible "gee, there are quality issues with what we already have (including lots of BLPs)." It was probably some of both. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 15:35, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Newyorkbrad, you're so diplomatic. I frankly don't care what their intent was. What they said was that they were changing focus and required us to do so because they deemed the vast majority of topics to have been covered, on en.wp that is. (Note that they developed the execrable translation tool not long after, while also running the disastrous Indian education editing experiment. And note that I have always been very much aware that there's unexamined bias in what we have and don't have articles on. I just neither see the percentage of biographies that are of women as the make or break metric, nor recognize the WMF's authority to tell me what to do about it.) This meme of near completeness comes largely from them in their vast ignorance and arrogance. I would discuss civility, the treatment of new editors, the Visual Enema, and volunteerism if we weren't in a particularly acute state of emergency because these incompetent and self-absorbed people feel that by virtue of getting paid for taking credit for what we do they are our bosses and we should accept their orders and their idiotic notions about anything, what and how to write being the thing they know least about. I'm halfway out the door, but I don't have any advanced permissions to lose so I can speak plainly here. Yngvadottir (talk) 20:21, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I can agree with what NYB is saying, for what that's worth. It's obviously nonsense to say that the project is complete—there are still huge swathes in which the articles don't exist, particularly outside the US and England (yes, specifically England; our Scottish and Norn Iron coverage is still full of holes)—my bellwether for when we start being vaguely complete is the point at which Britt Kersten is not only no longer red but has at least a couple of thousand words. That said, I don't think "this has been accumulating pages for two decades now, let's try to assess what we have so far and see what needs to be improved" is necessarily a bad thing. I just hit Special:Random three times and got Charles Sweeton House, Berry (singer) and Surabad, Isfahan, all of which are less useful than a redlink (since if we had no article, the page wouldn't show at the top of search results and consequently the first hit would be a page that actually said something about the topic). This pattern is repeated all across Wikipedia, and I don't think the WMF are at all wrong to point it out. ‑ Iridescent 22:25, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

You are better equipped than me to look for what they actually said, but if that was what they meant, it is most definitely not what their acolytes passed on as being what they said. The habit of assuming good faith is hurting us here, especially since whether we work on maintenance, writing new articles, or both, and how we collectively or individually judge the adequacy of an existing article are None Of Their Business. Yngvadottir (talk) 11:59, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Well, it's not necessarily None Of Their Business. If they had a reasonable justification for telling us not to do something, I don't think anyone would object—e.g. "The database can only handle 10,000,000 entries and we're approaching that limit, please stop creating new pages unless it's absolutely necessary for the time being", "In light of legal action by the French government we warn people not to write about anything considered sensitive information in France if they live in or intend to travel to France" (that one actually happened), "There's a major education program going on this week with a lot of new editors expected to join, please be extra careful when reverting". The issues here aren't that they're intervening, but that they're intervening arbitrarily and refusing to explain their reasoning, they're issuing warnings against "problematic conduct" without specifying what they consider "problematic" so nobody knows what they're supposed to avoid doing, that they're handing out sanctions which are hugely disproportionate for the alleged offences, and that they're (explicitly) now claiming that WMF are infallible so consequently any decision made by a WMF staff member may never be challenged. ‑ Iridescent 14:19, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, now. And not unrelated, since two diffs in the e-mail to Fram concern his critiquing someone's writing. But they've also repeatedly stuck their oars in regarding what we write about and how we write it, imposing their peculiar view of how coverage is biased, pushing Wikidata, pushing infobox use as a criterion of article completeness, and again this is my recollection, maybe, just maybe someone misinterpreted teh relevant internal document(s), launching this meme of completeness and wanting us all to pivot to the spurious objective of making everything GA and FA. Those are all orders with no justification, grounded in rank ignorance and failure of imagination (not to mention that by not simply requesting we spend more time checking for and fixing incomplete sentences and bare URLs, they suggest to me that those writing the memos have never actually looked at the encyclopedia.) I didn't start contributing here in service to the WMF, and they don't merit any indulgence of their claim to be our bosses. Yngvadottir (talk) 16:21, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Well, you asked

OK, have a big stack o' data:^[1]

The rate of increase in Wikipedia's size is dropping asymptotically. While it will continue to grow as long as there are still editors willing to add articles—each year brings a fresh crop of politicians and footballers—the total number of topics covered is levelling off, so what growth there is in database size is increasingly going to come from people expanding the existing articles rather than working from redlinks. Substantially expanding existing articles is generally harder for new editors than working from scratch or just adding a sentence here and making a tweak there, as there are existing stylistic preferences to consider as well as the pitfalls of running across an article WP:OWNer. That difficulty is what will hammer Wikipedia if there's a mass resignation, as without the old-timers willing to patiently walk newcomers through editing, it will just get too confusing and people will stop joining. (As I've said before I have no issue with Visual Editor, which was meant to address that problem; my issue was with the total botch they made of its implementation, and the way in which they forced unusable crap like MediaViewer through piggybacked onto it.)

The figure to watch isn't the article count, article size, or the collapse of the admin corps, it's the active editor count. It's starting to drift upwards again after the steady decline in the years following our Eternal September in 2006. If, as a result of this situation, the blue line to the right sees a statistically significant drop, that's when you'll see the WMF start panicking and trying to decide which blameless T&S employee needs to be thrown to the wolves to appease the angry mob. ‑ Iridescent 14:16, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Yngvadottir, regarding "the one thing they pay attention to is increases and decreases in the "highly active editor" number", the WMF have elegantly solved the issue by removing the "highly active editor" count from their statistics altogether, so we'll never know. They're now using five edits per month as their definition of "active"; "English Wikipedia has 58,000 active editors" sounds better on the press releases and grant applications than "English Wikipedia has around 3500 active editors". (There are some genuinely interesting things on the stats site if you dig around, particularly the "most edited pages last month" list.) ‑ Iridescent 15:51, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, thanks. That dovetails alarmingly well with the meme that the community would be healthy and creative and wonderful if all us old-timers were kicked to the kerb or persuaded to leave voluntarily; and I suppose with more than ten years now, I am no spring chicken, although I came aboard in the saggy middle rather than either the Age of Dragons or the brave new world of Politi-Wiki. That means I have to manage less than five edits next month, gak. Perhaps I could ask you in advance to rev-delete any excess, especially like the two extra that their lousy maintenance caused me to make yesterday at Village Pump/Tech? Yngvadottir (talk) 16:23, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Deleted edits still count (that's always been the case; it's why the edit count you see in Special:Preferences is always higher than the edit count you see on the edit count tool). They also now count any IP from which five or more edits have come as an "active editor" now, although there is an option in the sidebar to filter IP and registered editors. If you want to contribute to articles without your edit count rising and without touching the wiki-politics, your best bet is to work on another CC BY-SA licensed website. (If you don't mind dealing with even more self-important assholes than you'll find on Wikipedia, Citizendium is just barely alive, while you may find some familiar faces here.) ‑ Iridescent 16:36, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It doesn't seem to have any visible faces at all, let alone familiar ones  :) ——SerialNumber54129 17:32, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Iridescent may understandably be reluctant to "out" us in the current climate, but I'm quite happy to state that I'm one of the disillusioned Wikipedia editors behind that site. Eric Corbett 18:20, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Eric Corbett: I remember you saying you were into another project, I think, nice work. Not that you need any permission or anything—per CC-by-SA etc—but if you want to import any of my GAs/FAs for your history cadre, be my guest. ——SerialNumber54129 18:33, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. Despite the CC-BY-SA thing, I'm inclined to believe that it's better to have agreement that it's OK. :-) Eric Corbett 18:37, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Better to have 'em spitting out the tent than in, as they say  :) ——SerialNumber54129 18:45, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Ditto if you want anything of mine. ‑ Iridescent 18:50, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Much appreciated, thanks. Eric Corbett 19:04, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'd offer my articles, but I don't think I've written anything you'd want, and it would be a PITA to convert the citation style. But if you have seen anything, just take it. Yngvadottir (talk) 20:03, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Of course you've written stuff that's of interest, and we'll save replicate it with your permission. I think you may misunderstand our citation style though; while it may look similar to Wikipedia's short citation format it's produced in a completely different way. Every source is stored in a shared library, so there's no need to remember anything other which part of which source you're citing. Eric Corbett 20:12, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Iridescent's talk page is such a goldmine of interesting stuff. This Engole site is mostly focused on biography and English stuff, isn't it? I see that that site has a more narrowly defined scope than Wikipedia. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:41, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not a member there, but I'd imagine the focus on biography and English stuff just reflects the interests of its founding editors, rather than a particular remit. If you were to look at the original batch of articles on Wikipedia back when it was still Nupedia, you'd assume it was only interested in topics Larry Sanger and Magnus Manske found interesting. (Larry was a fan of traditional Irish folksongs; our article on Donegal fiddle tradition predates our article on United States.) ‑ Iridescent 20:47, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Good to know about the IPs: so they count cybercafes and public libraries, too. No, I knew about both of those, but what I want is for what we have built not to be wasted by the WMF. I'm just one person, albeit with eclectic interests and good spelling and grammar. This encyclopaedia has always had the breadth of its editorship and our collaborative work as its strengths. Yngvadottir (talk) 17:28, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Fram situation

Hello Iridescent!

I'm a reporter from BuzzFeed News and I'm hoping to talk to you about the Fram situation. I'm (Redacted). Would love to hear from you.

All best,

Joe — Preceding unsigned comment added by JosephABernstein (talk • contribs) 15:14, 17 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hehe, I can think of a lot of people who want to talk to Joe Bernstein. Now that someone has shown an interest, there should be no shortage of candidates! I see he reached out to Fram on Commons as well. Enigma^msg 15:28, 17 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

FWIW: Fram's reply. Carcharoth (talk) 15:30, 17 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

So it begins. I wonder how accurate my prediction here on the press being unfavorable towards the community/favorable towards the WMF position will be. Might depend on how much they chat with the community vs the WMF among other things. Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:54, 17 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I seem to recall the last time an admin went straight to the press it ended in tears. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 16:08, 17 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Have you read Fram's response on Commons? it is linked above. Carcharoth (talk) 16:12, 17 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Well as I recall it wasnt revealed who went to who. What I can tell you is that the story was written at the political desk (of the Guardian) and no one ran it by the tech section. Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:13, 17 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Also, from that page "Funtionaries-en mailing" .... Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:19, 17 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Oops. Butter fingers... That is a safe, edit, I think, as was this. Carcharoth (talk) 16:22, 17 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Only in death does duty end, I liked the end of that article. The statement by the Liberal Democrats. Contribsx has not edited since being blocked/unblocked. Enigma^msg 18:06, 17 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

JosephABernstein, I'm happy to discuss this with you, but given that this is ultimately an issue about a lack of transparency, I'd far prefer to hold any such discussion publicly. (Actions based on off-the-record conversations, and "we can't disclose our sources but…" insinuations, are why trust between the Wikipedia communities and the Wikimedia Foundation has broken down in the first place.) Since presumably anything I were to say to you would be potentially destined for publication, there would be nothing to be gained by having any discussions privately.

Although I was the first person to comment when the ban was announced, I haven't been particularly involved in the discussions arising from it; virtually everything I have to say about the issue has already been said on this page from this point onwards. The best summary of how and why the actions of the Wikimedia Foundation are being perceived as a declaration of war against Wikipedia's culture of openness and diversity has already been made by Risker in this lengthy comment. ‑ Iridescent 14:21, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• JosephABernstein has published his article. He's communicated with a few people one-on-one, including apparently someone from T&S. Mr Bernstein, a block is distinct from a ban. If you decide to run for admin at any point, you'll get asked about that '-) Yngvadottir (talk) 20:11, 27 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Wow. That was a pleasant surprise. Which is to say it was for the most part, factually accurate and editorially neutral. I'll give him a pass on the block/ban error given he is a newbie. -Ad Orientem (talk) 22:23, 27 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

There were a few errors I noticed (most notably relating to xe and LH) but given that it was written by someone who is not immersed in en.wiki culture, I think it was pretty good, overall. Maher's response to it was disturbing and reminiscent of Raystorm's response... Enigma^msg 03:19, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, it wasn't bad. I considered commenting, but it looked as though one had to have a Facebook to do so. But all levity aside, I think the block/ban distinction is important here given that the WMF have previously imposed global bans and this time have imposed a one-year and single-project ban; as opposed in both cases to a block. (Haven't seen Maher's response, just got up.) Yngvadottir (talk) 05:05, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

IMO JosephABernstein did a good job explaining to outsiders both why T&S did what they did, why there was such a backlash, and why it has the potential to affect people who have no interest in Wikipedia's politics; it's considerably better than most external coverage of Wikipedia, which tends to be either hopelessly fawning and idealistic, frothingly hostile, or unreadably technical and boring.

I'm not going to nitpick over the handful of errors; the only ones that aren't minor technicalities seem to be: the use of "wiki" as a synonym for "Wikipedia" (which I know irritates some people but given the number of occurrences of "on-wiki" and "off-wiki" in that conversation, nobody could be blamed for assuming "wiki" is the accepted abbreviation); describing Fæ as trans (a reasonable if wrong assumption from 'I no longer want to be described as "he"'); and describing LauraHale, an ultra-insider former vice-president of Wikimedia Australia who prior to joining Wikipedia a decade ago operated her own independent Wiki which she lobbied the WMF to absorb[[8][9], as "a fledgling Wikipedian" (presumably just a case of taking her 'how was lil ol' me to know it was against the rules?' act at face value, and we do keep telling people to Assume Good Faith after all).

Katherine Maher's response and continuing responses, not so much. I actually find plausible the implication in her follow-up comments that she didn't appreciate the strength of feeling about the issue, and assumed the Bernstein piece was a journalist trying to manufacture a story based on a couple of disaffected editors. Given the dysfunctional nature of the SF office, it seems entirely plausible to me that an over-zealous employee was intercepting and deleting all the incoming emails of complaint and that the Board hushed things up from her because they didn't want her involved until they'd agreed on a common position, so she was never aware anything was going on until suddenly people started asking her for a response to the Buzzfeed article; until Opabinia raised it with her today nobody had made a comment on her talk page since 2017. All that said, it's still totally unacceptable for the Executive Director of a major tech firm—particularly someone whose own publicity is burbling about her record in "preserving a free and open internet that supports digital rights and free expression" and "advocating for the rights of ordinary internet users"—to be publicly trading insults with insufficiently-fawning journalists like a third-rate Elon Musk tribute act. When the senior management of Wikipedia is handling a situation so badly that people are begging Jimmy Wales to be more active, something is seriously wrong somewhere. ‑ Iridescent 14:38, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I don't buy that she was unaware of the strength of the issue. A BoT meeting does not happen w/o her presence and James has further said that the BoT liaise with other wings of WMF, only through the ED. ∯WBG^converse 14:53, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I don't believe she wasn't aware of the issue; I can believe she wasn't aware of the strength of feeling. The Wikimedia movement—and particularly English Wikipedia and Commons—has a long history of "controversies" that on closer inspection turn out to be a handful of people vehemently disagreeing with a decision, but the overwhelming majority not having a strong opinion either way, and unless she had the time to read a thread which must now be above the two megabyte mark, there would be no particular reason for her to think this was any different to the reaction to the ban of (for instance) Russavia, Betacommand or Jytdog, where a handful of people vehemently opposed it but the reaction of most people was some variation of either "good, they had it coming" or "I personally wouldn't have banned for that but I can totally see why they did it".

Bear in mind that the WMF currently operates 881 different wikis so senior management aren't going to be aware of all the internal politics; most of what Katherine Maher sees is going to be through the prism of what Jimmy Wales, Doc James, and her own employees choose to pass on to her, so presumably "many editors think the board are ineffectual and the staff are incompetent" is something that's unlikely to reach her desk. ‑ Iridescent 15:08, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

She's responsible. The buck stops with her. I didn't expect much of her, but another stone has just fallen into place. I am sad that anyone is still counseling patience and assuming good faith of the WMF. If tehre is any way to be rid of them, we must take it to protect the encyclopaedia. Yngvadottir (talk) 17:32, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Her response to DuncanHill—claiming that the reason she's made more comments on Twitter in the past 24 hours than she's made Wikipedia edits in her entire career because "I've only been with WM for 5 [years]"—doesn't exactly fill me with confidence. I don't know if ED is one of those jobs like football manager where it's impossible to succeed because the expectations are unrealistic, or if the WMF just have a really bad track record in recruitment, but whatever residual good faith I have is rapidly dissipating. ‑ Iridescent 17:41, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Iridiscent: From her further replies to me it looks like she hasn't received/noticed emails from the 25th. I've told her I'd rather converse on wiki. I'm going to the shops now. I would go up the allotment but it's too hot. I am struggling to retain my good faith assumption of a massive cock up followed by an unconscious cover up. And as for her not knowing what's going on - it's her job to know. DuncanHill (talk) 17:58, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sorry to say I believe you are being far too kind, although it's her job to be responsible even if she was ignorant. Iridescent: I was one of those who had some hopes of the previous ED. You have an apposite pic/caption in the rotation at the top of this page. She messed up, but she tried to clean the Augean stables, and she got axed for it. So it's not automatic that a WMF ED will wave her hands and say "Carry on" to whatever horrors the organisation perpetrates. Yngvadottir (talk) 18:08, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Coverage in The Signpost

Just a heads-up that The Signpost is preparing an initial Discussion report on the Fram situation also. We are planning to include the graphic from this userpage showing deleted contributions. ☆ Bri (talk) 18:32, 17 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Help yourself, although make it clear in any caption that deleted contribution histories are more dynamic than vanilla page histories, and such screenshots only show deleted contributions as they appeared at a particular moment—i.e., it won't show anything that was deleted subsequent to the image being captured, and will show anything that was oversighted subsequent to the image being captured. The image did—as it should—have an explanatory title which made it clear the exact moment of capture, but in what I'd consider a clear abuse of the filemover right FlightTime has renamed it without explanation to an actively misleading title which suggests it shows all of Fram's deleted contributions as opposed to being a screenshot of a limited subset of them at a particular instant. ‑ Iridescent 17:35, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I was just actioning the move request posted here. If there's special qualifications that I'm not aware of for screenshots, I will stay away from those request. - FlightTime (open channel) 17:50, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The requested title was dated. The person who moved it to an undated title was you.

(Not that it probably matters all that much. The only things in that screenshot that aren't publically available anyway are the revision summaries.) —Cryptic 18:20, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure how that how that happened, but I assure you it was an accident. Do you want me to moved to the dated name? - FlightTime (open channel) 18:27, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I've done so. Not my upload but it seems like this rename was a mistake and the rationale proffered is sensible. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:34, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Jo-Jo Eumerus: Thank you very much. - FlightTime (open channel) 18:37, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

FlightTime edit-conflicted with me adding a date to my requested title. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 23:07, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

WMF legal counsels

Random question: given that you seem to know the history of the WMF and its employees, and given what you said to Kudpung and given what Dave (WTT) said on his talk page (see also my comment there), where is it possible on the WMF pages to find a history of who the legal counsel has been over time? I have Brad Patrick and Mike Godwin so far, but embarrassingly have forgotten the one that was there at the meeting I refer to in 2012. This trend for WMF Legal to get more involved in community matters (if I am reading WTT's comment right) is concerning, but maybe the seeds were there in 2012 as well? Carcharoth (talk) 10:34, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Will answer properly when not on phone but you're thinking of Geoff Bingham. ‑ Iridescent 2 11:11, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Geoff Brigham (meta user page), not Geoffrey Bingham, but yeah, thanks for remembering that. Carcharoth (talk) 12:46, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

GorillaWarfare had a very useful timeline/table affair detailing when the senior staff came and went and which crisis each departure coincided with, during the period of chaos after Sue Gardner resigned, but she seems to have taken it down. There's an archived version (in which the filters don't work so you can only view the whole thing ignore that, the filter buttons do work in Chrome) here. ‑ Iridescent 13:08, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Very useful. Didn't know Oliver changed his name to Os. Carcharoth (talk) 13:11, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Oh gosh, thank you, I redid my website and didn't realize I'd inadvertently broken it. Will get it back live right now... GorillaWarfare (talk) 17:21, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Update: It's live again at https://mollywhite.net/wikimedia-timeline/. GorillaWarfare (talk) 17:31, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

GorillaWarfare, loving the pained expression of the cat.^[10] ‑ Iridescent 18:41, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

<mv my post to lower down> Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:57, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Fram's criticisms of the WMF

I have completely lost track of this, but somewhere I remember you pointing to Risker's pointing out of an old comment by Fram being very critical of the WMF, can you or Risker remember that? Anyway, while over on meta (to where Fram has been asked at COM:AN to move his 'responses' on Commons to the en-wiki discussions), I looked at Fram's contributions (like many heavy users of en-Wikipedia, the shift to contributing heavily and consistently at meta can be difficult to effect and he does not have many contributions there), and I found this from 2014. The archived thread is here (the whole of that page is almost a potted history of various matters from back then). See also here. A consistent theme seems to be that (on some matters) the WMF don't engage with the community because they don't know how to or are unable to deal with the end result. It is a real and recognised problem that keeps recurring. Carcharoth (talk) 11:16, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Is this diff (posted by Risker in the morass above) what you're thinking of? The personalities involved then are one of the prime things making me think that this is potentially motivated by personal grudges rather than a misplaced good-faith attempt to act on what they mistakenly thought was a genuine problem: while the WMF is finally—years late—rid of the wretched Oliver "30-feet double-ended dildos coated in acid and razor wire in the ARSE for all eternity" Keyes, his cronies are still very much present at the WMF.

Regarding this, I can't fault Fram's assessment of the first two. James Forester I never had any dealings with so can't judge. Regarding WAID I think Fram is being unfair; when someone's job is to try to come up with justifications for whatever the WMF does, and the WMF has a cannon as loose as Jorm, there are going to be some verbal gymnastics. Being a spokesperson whose job entails putting a positive spin on your employer is not always going to be easy; I imagine every British Ambassador in the world is right now trying to work out how they're going to put a positive spin on "incoherent racist drunken oaf". ‑ Iridescent 12:58, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

You mean the British PM-in-waiting? With reports of a domestic splashed over the papers. I have a feeling Jeremy Hunt might actually pull off a surprise. Well, here's hoping. Still not sure how likely a second referendum or general election is. Hmm. Nothing like UK politics or Brexit to take your mind off things... :-) About T&S, I am on friendly terms with a number of them, though some of my criticism might have upset some of them - who knows who has read what? Hmm. Can you link to when Oliver Keyes left the WMF? Also, some of this is years ago, but the way Wikipedia works (keeping a record of everything), works against it in that respect. Imagine an office dispute being recorded in a wiki. Carcharoth (talk) 13:07, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Here's Oliver Keyes's ragequit (this isn't outing, the link is on his Meta userpage). Assuming Boris wins I would think the government would last weeks rather than months. Even with the DUP to prop them up they have an upcoming byelection which will reduce the working majority to three, and the DUP continuing to prop them up is a big ask; while Christian fundamentalists could work with the vicar's daughter from Wheatley, being seen to prop up a bumbling thug who refuses to disclose how many children he has by how many different women is a very different proposition. ‑ Iridescent 13:21, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Where Os Keyes has got to now (academia) is actually (as far as I can tell) impressive (see his personal home page). I'm glad for him on a personal level (I did speak to him a couple of times in a pub in London, though I doubt he would remember). As for UK politics, yes, the effects of the by-election may be interesting. Carcharoth (talk) 13:30, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

If Wikipedia_talk:Harassment#RfC:_Clarification_of_OUTING closes as option #2, it may very well be considered outing even if something is linked on someone's meta userpage.. Galobtter (pingó mió) 17:05, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

If T&S want to add me to their Nacht und Nebel list, I'm sure even Jan could find a pretext more convincing than "outed Ironholds as ironholds.com". ‑ Iridescent 18:44, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

In case it gets missed, see here. Logging off soon. Might not be checking back on all this until Monday now. Better things to do. :-) Carcharoth (talk) 13:15, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

[moved from above] Keys changed and changes many things depending on whose flavour of the month he is. All I can say is that following his resignation from the WMF, the projects I was working on, such as NPP and ACTRIAL, into which he was imposed on us by the WMF as 'coordinator' (causing at least one of my NPP team to resign), leaped forward like a spring lamb. If anyone wants to know what it was really like to have to work with O Keys (WMF), drop me an email. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:46, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Crossroads

Actually, one more point. Re-reading that timeline by GW reminded me how much of a 'crossroads' people thought the WMF and the wider movement was at at that point back then. Two questions: (1) Was that as much of a crossroad as people thought and did anything change? (2) Are we/the WMF at a similar crossroad now? Ironically, at times of great change and stress like this, those most likely to be affected/move on are (eventually) not the middle managers, but the executives and chairs. We will see how this one goes. I do feel sorry for the rank-and-file employees who have to wait out the storms caused, frankly, by mismanagement. Carcharoth (talk) 13:21, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Risker or NYB are probably better placed than me to judge that one; I largely missed the Tretikov period. The most obvious change I can see between then and now is Visual Editor, which has created a de facto caste system on Wikipedia between old editors who speak Wikitext with a native level of fluency, and new editors who've grown up with VE and consequently get confused and upset when they have to engage in discussions (VE doesn't work on talkpages; while you can puzzle out what wikitext does, for new editors editing talkpages must be as confusing as being forced to write in Scots or IPA.) ‑ Iridescent 13:30, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

OK, thanks. Am now trying to work out what to make of this. It may actually be what happened. Though surely the machines of loving grace should know how to manage backlashes? :-) Carcharoth (talk) 13:55, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Personally I find it improbable; the Facebooks et al that FeydHuxtable mentions certainly can and do conduct endless research into online community dynamics, but in my experience most of the tech types at the WMF would have trouble counting to twenty without taking their socks off; it's no secret that the WMF gets the programmers Google, Twitter, Apple and Facebook didn't want. (FWIW, A Nobody/LGRDC wasn't banned because of some kind of anti-inclusionist witch-hunt, but because he got caught red-handed socking while he was the subject of an open arb case. If there were some kind of deletionist cabal running banning policy I guarantee that the Colonel wouldn't still be with us.) Besides, if the WMF were doing this (a) someone would have leaked it during the Knowledge Engine fiasco, (b) that kind of project would appear in the budgets, and (c) the devs would be boasting to anyone in earshot about their new AI system. I'm far more inclined to believe "we thought this was what you wanted" or "there was a coordinated campaign to get people to file complaints and we made the mistake of taking them at face value" are the most likely possibilities, with "there was indisputable wrongdoing which we genuinely can't discuss", "we intentionally wanted to send the message that nobody is safe pour encourager les autres" or "pretext to enforce a personal grudge" less likely but possible. ‑ Iridescent 14:44, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Is "the community didn't deem this sanction-worthy but we don't agree" a possibility as well? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 15:06, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see how that could be; there was no recent complaint of any kind filed against Fram anywhere since March 2018 (there's a handy table here), so whatever it is, it's not "you didn't act on this issue so we had to do it for you". ‑ Iridescent 15:14, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

See, to me that list comes off as a list of things that were processed onwiki, which may not necessarily include whatever-brought-this-ban if it was a "last straw on the camel's back" situation. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:44, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Direct quote from T&S explaining what the "last straw" was:

This decision has come following extensive review of your conduct on that project and is an escalation to the Foundation’s past efforts to encourage course correction, including a conduct warning issued to you on April 2018 and a conduct warning reminder issued to you on March 2019. With those actions in mind, this ban has been triggered following your recent abusive communications on the project, as seen here.

Either Fram is fabricating that email (which I assume nobody is alleging; T&S would have pointed that out immediately); or Jan is lying (eminently possible but AGF and all that) or the 'last straw' genuinely was "hurt Arbcom's feelings". ‑ Iridescent 19:22, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Well, considering the output here... Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:38, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the ping Iridescent. With enormous respect, I doubt even you know the full story of the Inc / Del wars. A hero like Le Gran Roi doesn't take a fall due to regular wiki -politics. Unlike most Inclusionists who tend to avoid personal conflict, he had the stomach and skill to take on deletionists champions, helping to get even deletionist sock-master admins desysoped and perma-banned This put him right to the top of the Deletionist hit list. They had emails chains with dozens of recipients where they plotted to get their revenge for years on end. (The squad has seen these emails as they made the distribution list so large the emails were seen by folk who weren't true deletionists, one of whom forwarded to us after being overcome by guilt.) Just to be clear, Kww who started the threat you linked to wasn't on the dist list, but some of those supporting his ban proposal were, as were several behind said arb cases & other older attacks that had set it up. It was death by a thousand cuts.

Getting back to Framgate, not all the Foundation's work on AI / machine learning was done behind closed doors. Many big name Wikipedians knew about it, e.g. see comments on this blog by Cullen, Carrite, Doc James, etc. WMF doesn't have to recruit the best data scientists, as they run collaborations with folk from Google etc. Also, some of their recruits are top line talent, for example Ironholds himself. Interestingly, Ironholds is now a data scientist at University of Washington, where team behind the June 11 Harrassement & Gender gap Vidoe are based. I wonder if he had a hand in compiling the study? As another coincidence, Ironholds was also present at the 2010 meeting with Sue Gardener & the Colonel. And so were you Carcharoth. We had a 5 minute conversation about the imminent threats facing the once mighty rescue squad. It would be amazing if you remember that or even the various things Sue was saying about the Del/Inc history, as you were mostly discussing other pressing matters with fellow Arb Roger Davies. But just goes to show it's a small world. FeydHuxtable (talk) 19:37, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

There are many words I could use to describe Ironholds. "Top line talent" would definitely not be one of them. The WMF talks a good game on AI but is all lead and no whippet; any time playing with their showpiece product will give you a sense of just how ropey their systems are. (Install this script which theoretically provides a "quality assessment" for articles you visit to get an idea of the level they're at. In their own words, the metrics used for assessing 'quality' are How many sections are there? Is there an infobox? How many references? And do the references use a {{cite}} template?.) ‑ Iridescent 19:47, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

There are also many words I could use to describe Ironholds - and with the support of many users. But if I did, I would be dragged off to ANI for PA. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:33, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Back to the original question

• Going back to the original question, I'd say that, yes, that was a very major crossroads for the WMF. It was a time where I had a bit of additional insight, as I was actually in the SF offices in November of 2015 for FDC deliberations (comments about the WMF by the FDC are here), and I was back again as the invited speaker at the staff all-hands in January 2016. I think anyone from the FDC would agree that there was the impression that the WMF was experiencing serious internal problems when we were there in November, and my view was that it was in full-fledged crisis mode by the time I was there in January. This was an organization that was in very serious trouble; while I won't go so far as to say its demise was imminent, it was certainly the first time that I thought its demise from anything other than senescence was a real possibility. I'll also point out that it was almost all happening in the background; few "community" members were consciously aware of the extent of the problems happening at the "head office", although the increasingly high profile resignations were starting to raise eyebrows. (Aside: I've seen a surprisingly large number of quiet but significant resignations and terminations in the last several months; while some are undoubtedly for positive and personal reasons, it's certainly made me start looking more closely. Many of those resignations were not announced in any public forum, and their staff list hasn't been updated in at least a month.) By mid-March of 2016, the Lila era was over, but it has taken a very long time to right the ship, so to speak. The WMF had already been largely leaderless for almost a year after Sue Gardner announced her resignation, and then we had that long stretch with Lila in the ED chair; during that time, the WMF had no strategic plan of any significance, no medium- to long-term direction. It is only the past 18 months that it's started to do that kind of planning, with a medium-term plan now approved, and the major long-term movement strategy development in progress right now. It is the latter process that is the current crossroads, and one that could take the "movement" in a lot of different directions. I'm involved in that process, as a member of the Roles & Responsibilities working group, and it's not going to be easy to come up with recommendations that make sense and will get global buy-in. There are a lot of pressures, from affiliates, from the WMF, from "marginalized group" stakeholders, from the technology perspective; unfortunately, the group that seems to be least involved/interested/vocal in this process are the content-contributing communities (all the wikipedias, wikisources, etc, including Commons and Wikidata). There have been a few points where I almost had the impression that the projects are considered the least important part of the "Wikimedia movement"; certainly the outreach to the projects has been very limited compared to other groups. I suspect a big reason for that is that it's easy to reach out to the affiliates and chapters since they all have an identified point of contact, as do various committees and semi-formal groups, but there's no such thing with the content communities. Risker (talk) 18:07, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  Things like meta:Talk:Community health initiative/User reporting system consultation 2019? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:41, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  To me that "Community Health Initiative" stuff is emblematic of the WMF approach, of trying to find a technical fix to everything. They're so dominated by programmers, they constantly lose touch with the fact that these are people they're dealing with here. I never thought this would be a sentence I'd ever write, but while I don't think it's likely I at least now think it's possible that Larry Sanger's latest wheeze could inflict genuine damage on Wikipedia; it will be a case of who scrambles fastest to get a collaborative environment working instead of constant tinkering with look-and-feel. At the moment the trickle of resignations is still only a trickle, but I know for certain that quite a few people are holding their breath from the Board before they decide whether to jump ship. We only have ≈500 active admins; when you're looking at 6,842,411 articles it wouldn't take that many to abandon ship for the seams to rip. ‑ Iridescent 18:57, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  Given that "Larry Sanger's latest wheeze" claims to have already forked the entire English Wikpedia, it may soon only be Google's search rankings that keep Wikipedia afloat. It hasn't been done very well of course, and Sanger obviously isn't being entirely open, as contrary to the hype about getting paid to edit, in reality the business model only makes sense if most editors actually pay to edit. But it ought to serve as a warning shot across Wikipedia's bow nevertheless. Eric Corbett 00:00, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  (Pointing out here that after seeing the latest Everipedia thread on the Unnameable Site, I checked two articles, and both had substantial text missing from the introductions that made for nonsense; in one case the cut left a pair of unclosed square brackets visible. Bad, bad, bad job. Yngvadottir (talk) 11:50, 23 June 2019 (UTC)))[reply]

  Don't get me wrong, I think Larrypedia has no chance of success; their business model relies on people paying to add advertorial and have it locked in place against reversion, and why would anyone volunteer to write something neutral when someone can just come along and overwrite it with spam with no redress? Plus, unless Larry has had a total personality transplant he won't be able to resist the temptation to interfere and micromanage and will end up annoying all his writers. One of Wikipedia's strengths is that Jimmy, the Board and the WMF management generally have the sense not to try to interfere unless they feel they genuinely have no alternative (if the WMF had submitted MediaViewer, Project Winter, Flow or even Knowledge Engine or Enforced Civility for community discussion and restricted themselves to offering technical support and explanations of what they saw the benefits as, there's a good chance that they'd all have been accepted with appropriate modifications). What Larrypedia does have an outside chance of doing is creating enough of a dent that Wikipedia ceases to look invulnerable, and one of the big players decides it's worth their while working on what an Encarta or Knol for the social media age would look like. I don't think it's likely, but on 9 June I would have thought it impossible rather than unlikely. ‑ Iridescent 07:09, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  Incidentally, seeing as I can't find African humid period at all and Payún Matrú is still in a stub state, I would qualify "already forked the entire English Wikpedia" a bit. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 07:58, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  As I understand it, their fork was a copy of the database as of 2017, but their site is editable they can't now update when our articles change, because doing so will overwrite the changes their own editors have made—consequently they still retain all our subsequently-remedied errors and omissions. (That's not so unusual; the WMF did exactly the same when they "liberated" the contents of WikiTravel to create WikiVoyage.) ‑ Iridescent 08:06, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Sidetrack about the WMF's corporate culture and office

...the WMF approach, of trying to find a technical fix to everything, echoes what I have been saying for years. Software programmers are not sociologists , psychologists, marketing, or CRM specialists, and they are very often notoriously poor communicators (at least in my experience). Instead of being allowed to attempt to identify non technical problems themselves so that they can justify their jobs by developing technical solutions, they need to be told by experts what problems need to be addressed from a technical aspect and just get on with writing the code. If the WMF can't be encouraged to understand that, then maybe they could accept a technical solution to the deep rooted issues within their own management and hierarchy. Then it would take a very astute individual to explain to them why that can't be done. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:32, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

These are people who can hear someone say I had begun visualizing open knowledge existing in the shape of a universe. I saw the Wikimedia movement as the most motivated and sincere group of beings, united in their mission to build a rocket to explore Universal Free Knowledge. The words "search" and "discovery" and "knowledge" swam around in my mind with some rocket to navigate it. However, "rocket" didn't seem to work, but in my mind, the rocket was really just an engine, or a portal, a TARDIS, that transports people on their journey through Universal Free Knowledge. and take it seriously. There are some excellent people at the WMF but my respect for either their organizational culture or their collective ability to relate to normal human beings is not high. ‑ Iridescent 08:15, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

They have no organizational culture. It's partly due to them being so global (probably with people who believe in fairies from the wisps of mist deep in Siberian forests) - there are too many cultural dichotomies on the SF office floor for anything cohesive to crystalize. Decades ago when I was a teacher, I have seen kindergarten children in a schoolyard organise themselves better into work groups with self-emerging leaders and workable hierarchies. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 14:59, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, they definitely have a culture; things may have changed as I don't really know any of the current crop, but in my experience when they're off the record their staff consistently talk about an atmosphere of bullying, senior management who expect their peons to treat them with deference, and a stereotypical Californian attitude of enforced fake civility. (They even have a page on their website boasting about it, which to anyone outside the West Coast bubble—and certainly anyone outside North America—reads like an excerpt from the manifesto of a particularly crappy 1970s hippy cult.) The cynic in me says that the fact their own recruitment website lists "snacks to fuel your thinking, monthly massages, gym, yoga classes, weekly farmers market, gender neutral bathroom, monthly staff lunch, and more" as supposed perks says all one needs to know about their organisational culture.

I'd be willing to bet that at any given time the SF office contains at least three out of: toy animal mascot with a comedy name; "If you sprinkle when you tinkle be sweet and wipe the seat" sign in the toilet; signup sheet to sponsor someone's charity fun run; noticeboard with photos of Z-list celebrities the staff have met; employee sitting on a couch in the reception area staring blankly into the middle distance. ‑ Iridescent 15:28, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I genuinely laughed out loud when I read that because it's exactly the image I have of them. These ageing and not so ageing leftovers of a mix of hippy and yuppy who have moved from smoking dope to a culture of people wearing 'Don't photograph me', 'Don't touch me', 'Don't look at me', 'Go away!' buttons and hiding precisely behind that attitude of enforced fake civility which isn't actually confined to California. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 15:49, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Conducting my own "deep dive", I find File:Wikimedia Foundation Offices in San Francisco.webm. As far as I can tell every single one of them has the expression and general demeanour of Aeroflot cabin crew c. 1988. An interesting list of names visible on the whiteboard at 0.32 in. ‑ Iridescent 16:08, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, that's an old video; Erik was still there, and the Wikipedia Education Program still existed, so I'd say 2014, 2015 at the latest. They've since moved from those offices to one that is reportedly about half the size (I've never been in the current offices); more than half of the people who are seen in the video have left the WMF, although I suppose that's fairly commonplace for just about all workplaces in the US/California nowadays. The last couple of times I was there, I think every single element you described in your post above was present. Keep in mind that until about a year ago, they used to include photos of the stuffed animal mascots in the staff list. Risker (talk) 17:01, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Dated March 2014, so would have been just before Year Zero began on May 1. Looking more closely there's still a stuffed cat in the staff list.

Commons:Category:Wikimedia Foundation offices is the gift that keeps on giving if you want an excuse to roll your eyes. The new office looks fairly grim, if this is the best spin they can put on it. ‑ Iridescent 17:35, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Sometimes I was thinking of going to the USA at some point. Not San Francisco though, I don't care for this at all. These images don't look like "inviting" either. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:16, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The climate in SF isn't as bad as those photos make it look—it's fairly similar to that of England or northern France. Unless there's something there in which you have a particular interest, I certainly wouldn't say it's worth going out of your way to visit. What I always tell people is that if you're only going to visit one US city make it Chicago, which is the equal of anywhere else not just in the US but in the world when it comes to visitor attractions, museums and general things to do, but is cheaper and friendlier than NYC or California, has a superb transport system, and is much more walkable than most US cities. If you want a "various cultures of North America" tour that doesn't involve travelling huge distances, Chicago–Detroit–Toronto–Ottawa–Montreal takes you through five wildly different places, and can be done in easy drives or by public transport without any need for internal flights. ‑ Iridescent 08:54, 25 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hey now... not everyone in North America is that... err.. something. Get away from the big cities, and you'll often find genuine civility even in areas where the culture is very conservative. Although rural areas are often looked at as bigoted, they are often very much "live and let live" - if you want privacy, they won't push themselves into your affairs. Although those seat signs are common in areas where there is only one public bathroom for a business...usually when the business is mostly female but has occasional male customers...<�/small> Ealdgyth - Talk 15:54, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'm from North America away from the big cities; you don't need to tell me. It's not even all big cities, but specifically the coasts; Houston, Chicago, Denver etc manage to still have people who are actually polite rather than "have a nice day" polite. ‑ Iridescent 16:08, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I am now disinclined to cut them any slack, but my skin would crawl if someone slowly filmed my workplace without me having a chance to run and hide. And I am mentally hitting myself to keep from liking the stuffed animal thing. I bet many of them wish they were here in Silly Valley instead of dealing with all the poop in the streets in SF. And those perks aren't great; what are the office snacks like? Luckily they are very tolerant of working from home. But they are (or were) over Kaplan; that's sort of appropriate and I believe I know people who work there. However, that's as far as I'll go in extending sympathy to them. They chose to work for that awful outfit and get paid for getting in our way. Yngvadottir (talk) 20:08, 24 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It was filmed by commons:User:VGrigas (WMF), who I've never heard of but to judge by the userpage appears to be the WMF's Leni Riefenstahl, so I assume the filming was all done with consent. The WMF are so paranoid about their own security—until relatively recently they wouldn't even publicly admit where the head office was—I can't imagine them filming people without permission. ‑ Iridescent 09:04, 25 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

"someone we're trying to negotiate with"

Do you actually think there is any real point in negotiation with the WMF/T&S team at this time? Negotiation reguires that both parties actually want to work together to resolve something. I dont see either the WMF or the ENWP (or DE for that matter) communities have any real common frame of reference to start from now. Only in death does duty end (talk) 18:10, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The announcement is somewhat buried in the chaff because is was only a one-liner and posted in the middle of the page, but T&S are apparently now speaking with Arbcom about this. We're all still digesting and considering followup could be taken either to mean the talks broke down and they're debating whether to go back, or the talks were constructive so they're deciding how best to follow up, but at least T&S have opened the door of the ivory tower a crack.

In either case, something is going to happen at some point; the Mythical Board Statement seems to have been punted into the long grass, but I assume the arbs are all watching WP:BN and are aware that those who've walked thus far are the tip of the iceberg as there are a lot more admins and editors who don't like the idea of serving as the militia of Vichy Wikipedia but are still sitting on their hands and holding off "officially" walking in the hope that this can be resolved amicably but will resign en masse if it becomes clear that there's neither a satisfactory explanation provided to the board or arbcom for why the block was made, why it couldn't be public and why it couldn't be appealable; or an admission that T&S exceeded their authority and a return to the status quo ante. I presume none of the arbcom, trustees or employees is particularly keen to go down as "the one who broke Wikipedia". ‑ Iridescent 18:35, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

When a veteran of the WP creation big bang speaks out, and follows up with this (which would have had more impact had he posted it on the FRAMBAN page), then it really is time to cut the repetitive cackle and speculation there and do something - like a total shake-up of the WMF and Arbcom and preferably by consensus of the unpaid volunteers. But after all these days of Jimbo limbo it's unlikely for anything new to be forthcoming apart from the demission of those responsible (which is unlikely to happen), and more admins and 'crats handing their bits in (which might happen), a chat with James and a few privileged visitors and invitees in Stockholm (at least I sincerely hope Risker will be there and banging with her gavel), will take place when all the hooha has died down and everyone will be trying hard to forget it ever happened. That's what happened with the ill fated IEP which cost millions in squandered funds with the only people benefiting being those who escaped the office in SF to enjoy yet another salaried junket to an exotic location, and leaving the volunteers once more to clean up the mass of rubble in the war zone. All I can say is: does it ever end - what's next year's major WMF disaster going to be? Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 13:09, 26 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

At the rate at which responses aren't happening, it might still be this one ;-) Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 13:20, 26 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding "admins and 'crats handing their bits in" I assume there are quite a few others in a holding pattern, not taking any administrative or maintenance actions until this is clarified but not jumping as long as there's even the slimmest possibility the WMF was in the right. There's still as slight but not zero chance that the ban was enacted for good reason and the silence and stonewalling is the result of Legal ordering staff not to disclose anything. If it does transpire that both the ban, and the unwillingness to talk, were for good reason, then every functionary who's resigned will be taken by the WMF that Wikipedia is dominated by a group of hotheads who can't be trusted to run their own affairs, and needs T&S to install a viceroy to keep the natives in order.

Regarding "what's next year's major WMF disaster going to be?" I'll say Wikimedia Space will be a fairly safe each-way bet. ‑ Iridescent 2 13:29, 26 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I doubt it. Another Wikiversity in the making, or full of notices of meetups and museum "partnerships". Johnbod (talk) 14:04, 26 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The FRAMBAN page is an echo chamber of outrage. There's no point in trying to persuade the community of anything because the community can't fix this. WMF is willing to exercise the ultimate authority that comes from control of the servers, and has made it clear that they will not back down. It's clear that WMF is united behind this internally. The only way to fix that is to change the leadership and get someone who doesn't want to turn Wikipedia into something like a Social Knowledge LLC community, or Facebook, or Youtube, or Amazon Marketplace, or any of a dozen other commercial ventures who arbitrarily ban people and content for all kinds of reasons or no reason at all. So it is really up to @Jimbo Wales: and @Doc James: at this point because they are the only ones connected to ENWP who get a vote and therefore the only ones who have the power to do anything. I'm keeping my bit in the hope that I'll wake up one morning to read that Jan Eissfeldt has resigned to pursue other interests. Otherwise it isn't much good, because the real power will be vested in a couple dozen paid reviewers responding to the flood of complaints that will come once everyone figures out that mobilizing T&S over a TOS violation is the best way to get the upper hand in any dispute. We're now seeing the thin end of the wedge, and that's where it's going. UninvitedCompany 21:26, 26 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yes Risker has agreed to try to make it to the meetings about this at Wikimania. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 17:42, 26 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Mention in upcoming issue of The Signpost

Just wanted you to know your name is included in a report about FRAMBAN in the upcoming issue of The Signpost. If you have any comments you can leave them on my talkpage or other Signpost official channels. ☆ Bri (talk) 19:01, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Bri, why are you talking about harassment of non-majority editors in that article? That's not something that's been alleged either by the WMF statements or by the emails released by Fram (the full allegations are collated in detail at Wikipedia:Community response to the Wikimedia Foundation's ban of Fram/Summary#What has WMF effectively told us?); unless you're privy to information that hasn't been shared, this comes across as a baseless insinuation. There have been many, many allegations made against Fram over the years—many of them made by me—but that's certainly never been one of them to the best of my knowledge. ‑ Iridescent 19:03, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the feedback. The E-in-C is going to take specific allegations in a separate writeup; I'm mostly interested in the community/WMF interactions in the Discussion report I'm working on. So I'll trim that to make it clear I'm talking here as a background issue where historic issues where exclusion of minorities, women especially, has been of concern. If you can point me to the genesis of the gamergate DS, maybe I could work with that. ☆ Bri (talk) 19:48, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Bri, women are not a minority; in fact, in the world, they are a majority. They're under-represented in the editing community compared to the general global population. Please be careful how the term "minority" is used, because we do have some *real* minorities editing on this and other projects. Risker (talk) 19:54, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

"Underrepresented" may be a better expression of what I was trying to get at. Also, women as minorities is a non-controversial thing, is it not? ☆ Bri (talk) 21:00, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Bri:, the article you link to above has enough "problem" tags on it to question anything written there. The single link to the assertion in the article inferring that "many" social scientists have studied women from the perspective of being a minority goes to a study that, in its opening paragraph, says "...there has been little serious consideration of women as a minority group by sociologists...". I think you can safely say that it's at least a somewhat controversial subject. Risker (talk) 21:21, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) I read that as "no, we insist on retaining this insinuation despite a total lack of anything to suggest it has any relevance" which is deeply concerning. Given that you don't know Fram's gender, ethnicity or sexuality (we use "he" as a pronoun because Fram has long been vocally opposed to singular they and novel pronouns, so the use of anything other than generic he would come across as a deliberate insult), I find your insinuation particularly problematic. Nothing in any of the material provided by anyone—and there are some people who really hate Fram in those threads—has made any claim of anything remotely related to "harassment of non-majority editors", which is a fairly meaningless phrase in any event (are you trying to claim that it's Fram who is being harassed? Belgians are certainly a "non-majority"? If you're using it to refer to women, they're certainly not a "minority" in the world, and even the evidence that they're a minority on Wikipedia is based on WMF research which could politely be described as "problematic"). ‑ Iridescent 20:01, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Fram has long been vocally opposed to singular they and novel pronouns, so the use of anything other than generic he would come across as a deliberate insult Huh - I got used to using singular they because I keep bumping into people whose username reflects the wrong gender. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:11, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

So has everyone; for most editors you have no idea of their age, gender, race etc unless they choose to make it known. In Fram's case Fram was literally just involved in a very noisy argument about gender-neutral pronouns before Fram was banned—it's one of the only four things anyone has been able to find in Fram's history that could even theoretically be considered the mythical "last straw" that led to Fram's ban, and unless we're going to have every discussion that mentions Fram refer to Fram as "Fram" and consequently have sentences that look like this, generic he is the only option that doesn't look like baiting. You presumably know better than me, but IIRC Dutch speakers often find 'singular they' annoying as there's no equivalent in the Dutch language. ‑ Iridescent 20:23, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I don't know anything about Dutch...Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:38, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I made a similar comment here. That's why what Raystorm said was so outrageous. Enigma^msg 21:23, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Don't you have the same grammar and they just have more vowels and fouler beer? ‑ Iridescent 20:46, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Close. I am a dyed-in-the-wool teetotaller in Switzerland. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:48, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Huh, I could have sworn you were Austrian. Must have just assumed from all the mountains. ‑ Iridescent 20:51, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Austria and Switzerland are close and both are mountainous, so yes. I prefer it warm and dry and open landscapes, though. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 09:50, 24 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Bri, why is the Signpost even raising the issue of Gamergate and harassment? None of these allegations have been substantiated. We know ... exactly nothing. At this point T & S has torn down trust project-wide, yet the Signpost will claim, "oh, it's a Gamergate issue?". This is seriously problematic. Sorry, Iri for butting in. Didn't know where else to post. Victoria (tk) 20:35, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, good gods ... is the Signpost REALLY going to drag Gamergate into this??? REALLY? Talk about throwing fat onto the fire... Ealdgyth - Talk 20:39, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

TK don't apologise, I entirely agree. This looks like an exercise in flinging enough mud in the hope that some of it sticks. The issue here isn't Fram or anything Fram may or may not have done, it's that the WMF have self-granted themselves to disappear editors without apparent cause on the basis either of personal grudges or of allegations which taken on face value without investigating. ‑ Iridescent 20:44, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Just going to put these here for reference before they're lost in the archives:

Possibility 1: Amitamitdd. Fram moved three of their articles to draft space (Draft:Hyderabad Custody, Draft:Wetalwadi, Draft:Anand Vidyalay) and criticised them for creating pages in mainspace that were not up to snuff ([11]). They would later take them to AN/I (Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/IncidentArchive1010#User:Amitamitdd), where Lourdes indef'd them due to their total and utter uncommunicativeness.

Possibility 2: CyrilleDunant. Cyrille took the opposite position of Fram in the Rama arbcom case, and appeared to be convinced there was a conspiracy to sanction Rama (WP:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Rama/Evidence#Evidence presented by CyrilleDunant, WT:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Rama/Evidence#Comments by CyrilleDunant). Fram directed four comments on the talk page to their allegations both on the evidence subpage and the talk page of same (WT:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Rama/Evidence#Comments by Fram), but did not submit any evidence in the case that I am aware of.

Possibility 3: The gendering dispute with Fae. While we know that Fae did not ask for a ban, it's not unreasonable to assume a T&S user (or someone unrelated, given T&S did not investigate the issues at WMBE) saw the conversation and interpreted it (in good faith) as harassment.

Possibility 4: The totality of the edits Fram made to WP:Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard on 04 May, of which the "Fuck ArbCom" post was only the first. Fram made 9 posts to that page (not counting the T&S-cited diff: [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19]), all of which were scathingly critical of ArbCom and the new deopping policy. They also got into a bit of a spat on BU Rob13's talk page, with Fram's opening edit summary there being "Perhaps shouting will get the message thru?".

The above from Jéské Couriano, but my and AFAIK everyone else's investigations have not found anything else other than routine NPP and adminny stuff. ‑ Iridescent 20:44, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

We might add this edit to (4). Too confrontational? Might be ..... ∯WBG^converse 09:52, 25 June 2019 (UTC) [reply]

@Ealdgyth, that would be the Chair of the Board of Trustees who tried to drag Gamergate into this. ‑ Iridescent 20:51, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Iridescent, this needs to be in the report. ☆ Bri (talk) 22:06, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Buzzfeed News article about the Fram drama!

[20] Benjamin (talk) 01:35, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Look up. ‑ Iridescent 14:29, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I was 3metres away when Mahers's position as ED was confirmed by Wales in Esino Lario. For the reasons stated (cost over $3,000), I will be 5,500 miles away from Stockholm, but I'm with TonyBallioni on this, I will expect to hear the announcement of her resignation. The buck stops somewhere, and it be on her desk. Sorry to say, but her comments today reveal that after all these years with the WMF and the last 3 at the top, she doesn't fully understand how things work. Time for her to earn the salary that our volunteer work generates or move over. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 15:54, 29 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Yeah, they’ve bungled this to the point where only new blood can move forward. The issue isn’t who is right or who is wrong. The issue is that we can’t move forward with current leadership in place. Even if they were 100% right, the current position is untenable. And that’s coming from someone who has recently been taking a wait and see approach to this. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:02, 29 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Also, just to clarify, while I think Katherine resigning could solve the problem, I think Jan would be the more obvious choice. That’s why I said her or Jan. The issue is that trust needs to be rebuilt, and it can’t be done without a leadership change. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:21, 29 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• It depends; a head needs to roll, but I don't know if it should be hers. I do believe that my earlier comment that it seems entirely plausible to me that an over-zealous employee was intercepting and deleting all the incoming emails of complaint and that the Board hushed things up from her because they didn't want her involved until they'd agreed on a common position, so she was never aware anything was going on until suddenly people started asking her for a response to the Buzzfeed article is likely to be correct, and whatever rumblings she heard she just assumed were the usual handful of malcontents, and genuinely didn't know she had a crisis on her hands. If blame is being apportioned, then based on the limited information we have I'd think it more likely lies with Jan Eissfeldt for failing to appreciate that he'd created a situation that was beyond his competence to handle, and not escalating the issue upwards sooner. (Someone said that Maggie Dennis is away; I'd be willing to bet we wouldn't be facing this if she'd been there.) AFAIK the job of ED is primarily flying around hob-nobbing with potential donors and occasionally passing on the Board's decisions to the staff, rather than day-to-day management, so I wouldn't necessarily hold her responsible for something that happened on her watch. That's not to say I think she's doing a good job—despite Lila and Sue's flaws, I would think either of them would have instantly seen what a bad idea T&S planning to start intervening directly in en-wiki's internal affairs was, and told them immediately to stop—but I wouldn't necessarily hold her responsible for having an incompetent employee. Besides, replacing the ED would be difficult; anyone competent would baulk at taking on a job where the last two holders had been forced out by internal revolts. ‑ Iridescent 16:16, 29 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Personally, I've always thought that jobs like the ED are to a large degree professional fall guys rather than people who are actually responsible for stuff. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:36, 29 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Iridescent, with very kind respect, I don't think the idea that Maher knew nothing about the gravity of this crisis until the BuzzFeed article dropped holds water. The reason I say this is according to this time line, WMF board member Doc James was aware there was a serious problem as did Jimbo Wales as of June 11th. The Buzzfeed article dropped June 27th, more than two weeks later. I can not imagine a scenario in which an in-charge CEO of an organization would have not known about this crisis as anything other than "rumblings" until the BF article dropped. There simply is no excuse. If the position of CEO of the WMF isn't a day-to-day involvement in management of the organization, then in the very least Janeen Uzzell as COO of the WMF should have been aware and directly involved in managing this crisis. Either the CEO and COO knew and chose not to manage this crisis and demonstrated in the very least a complete lack of appreciation of its impact, or they did not know and the communication pathways between the board and the WMF are woefully inadequate. In either case, the responsibility of this lies squarely on the CEO and COO either for inaction in the immediate case or inaction in the extended case of not putting in place appropriate management and communication structures. They can't have their cake and eat it too. --Hammersoft (talk) 17:54, 29 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • We have a deadline now of the afternoon of July 5th, and I'd recommend to everyone waiting to see what appears then. If it's another block of meaningless boilerplate, or another variation on "peasants, how dare you question the nobility?"—or worse, if nothing appears at all or there's another attempt to kick the ball into the long grass—that's the time to break out the pitchforks and start calling for heads on poles. To judge by Katherine Maher's string of non-answers I'm not hopeful, but that may not be her fault; she may have been ordered by the board to stall and not to commit to anything until they've made their statement. ‑ Iridescent 19:15, 29 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
      • I'm sure Doc is doing his best. But that's not a deadline in the sense of "With respect to a timeline we will have a statement within a week." It sounds to me more like another example of corporate damage limitation speak. Martinevans123 (talk) 19:23, 29 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
      • I like Katherine Maher, but only as a decoration, which is undoubtedly what she was hired for. Nothing of any significance will happen on July 5th, and I'm sure we all know that. Eric Corbett 22:04, 29 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• I have known for a fact for almost two years that Katherine's job is mainly that of a ambassador on a high salary and expense account and has little to do with the actual day-to-day management except as CEO occasionally having to sign a few papers and stuff. I was told once privately by a WMF staff that she is deliberately shielded from the community and the staff will not allow any direct communications between her and the community. A far cry from the days between 2009 and 2015 when Gardner used to hold the weekly Office Hours on IRC (something I never joined in with because I can't abide IRCs). Hence my article in The Signpost and Cullen328's comment: ...this is a major WMF scandal that requires an immediate and substantive response. Katherine (WMF) should get off her transcontinental jet, sit at a desk for a few days, and fire the responsible people. And then report fully and frankly to the community in a transparent way. (albeit on a different scandal). Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 21:28, 29 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]