Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2015/Candidates/Gamaliel/Questions

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Questions from Smallbones

Thanks for putting forward your candidacy. I'm just wondering how you'll handle the time and other conflicts with the Signpost?
I’m very proud of the work my colleagues and I have done on the Signpost over the last year. I think the Signpost plays a vital and necessary role in the community . But publishing the Signpost and maintaining a high level of quality is incredibly time consuming. I don’t think readers realize the amount of work that is required behind the scenes, and given our recent personnel shortage, more and more tasks have fallen on fewer people, including myself. Publishing the Signpost has been a crash course in project and personnel management for me, and while I’m very happy with the work that we’ve done, along the way I’ve discovered that some of these tasks don’t mesh well with my skill set and have left less and less times for the tasks that do. Well before I decided to run, we started working on a reorganization plan to restructure the work behind the scenes and recruit more contributors. I think the Signpost can be more effective if I step back to focus on the tasks I excel at and give other people a chance to shine at the tasks I do not. In the short term, that means taking a leave of absence from the post of Editor in Chief. I will continue to participate in a minor way with some writing and copyediting, but major decisions and anything to do with election coverage will be left to Go Phightins! and the rest of the Editorial Board. In the long term, I plan to continue a lower level of participation while we recruit more personnel and step down entirely from the role of Editor in Chief once a suitable replacement is found.

Questions from Antony–22

In general, does enforcing civility harm free speech? Does it help it?
Often free speech is invoked in defense of incivility. But one can have a strong commitment to free speech while simultaneously realizing that one needs to act in an appropriate manner towards other people in certain situations. No one thinks that it is incompatible with free speech to be unable to say whatever you want, whenever you want in the classroom or workplace. You can’t discuss your sexual exploits over Thanksgiving dinner (or perhaps you can, if you have an interesting family) and you can’t insult or sexually harass your coworkers. Wikipedia should be no different.

The fact that Wikipedia is on the Internet does not excuse it from normal human mores of behavior. Many of the Internet’s most avid users are strong proponents of free speech, and I think one of the most positive aspects of the Internet is that people can indulge in almost whatever kind of speech they want and be whatever they want to be, even if that means indulging negative aspects of themselves. But they should not be able to indulge themselves in this way on every single part of the Internet, and Wikipedia is under no obligation to provide a platform for this negative behavior.

Wikipedia is first and foremost an encyclopedia, not a maximum free speech zone. We have long recognized that you cannot say whatever you want here. We forbid offensive and libelous speech directed at living individuals. We forbid using pages as a forum for non-Wikipedia opinions and material. We forbid spamming, legal threats, and posting private information about others. It is a vital and cherished part of free speech that one can say whatever you want about politicians, for example, but if you speak your mind about those politicians here on Wikipedia, your comments will quickly be deleted. It is incomprehensible to me that one can accept all these restrictions and still argue that being terrible to other editors is somehow an important component of your personal freedom.

Civility, in fact, maximizes free speech for the most number of people and furthers Wikipedia's mission of creating an encyclopedia. The atmosphere of collaborative editing is only improved when more editors feel free to contribute without being attacked or harassed.
It's been pointed out that incivility and harassment are not precisely the same thing. What is the line between incivility and harassment? How much does incivility, when it doesn't cross the line into harassment, affect our ability to retain editors, including but not limited to its effects on the gender gap?
Arbcom's actions have come under scrutiny from the outside press lately. Do you think the Arbcom has a role in educating reporters about cases when they come under such scrutiny, to reduce the factual inaccuracies that sometimes creep into these articles? For example, do you think that releasing statements, such as been done once on a previous case, should be considered in the future? If so, how could they be made more effective?
Dealing with the press is always problematic, especially for non-professionals for whom this is not their primary responsibility. This is compounded by the fact that the English-language press has little experience with or knowledge of the inner workings of Wikipedia, a subject I discussed at my WikiConference panel and in a recent Signpost editorial. The statement released following the GamerGate case was especially problematic and was perceived by many as a justification for the decision instead of an explanation. Despite all of this, I am in favor of a limited engagement with the press on a strictly explanatory basis when absolutely necessary, perhaps with short, targeted statements in FAQ form that favor concise, unambiguous factual points over lengthy narratives.
This question is optional, since candidates don't necessarily like to talk about current cases. But imagine that you are a current member of the Arbcom and you are delegated the task of writing a succinct, neutral primer for the press, of no more than a few paragraphs, on the circumstances leading to the current case Arbitration enforcement 2. Write that primer below. Do not cover or express an opinion on the proposed or actual decision, but concentrate on how you would help a reporter understand what happened before the case was filed.
One last question. Wikipedia relies primarily on volunteer labor, and many are attracted to Wikipedia in part due to its countercultural, even transgressive nature of subverting traditional gatekeepers to knowledge. Recently there has been increasing participation by professionals from academic and cultural institutions. This is perhaps causing some angst that the community and its interactions may become "professionalized" to the exclusion of established editors. Do you feel this fear is warranted? How can volunteers and professionals with different standards of conduct be made to coexist on Wikipedia with the minimal disruption to our existing contributor base?

Questions from Gerda Arendt

Thank you for stepping forward!

Arbitration findings and the wishes of principal editors govern the use of infoboxes in articles. If you want to win my "neutral" please say how you would close the discussion at Talk:Joseph (opera)#Restore infobox?
In general, I do not believe that a small number of editors should be able to carve out a separate consensus in a corner of Wikipedia on an issue that affects a wide number of articles. This only encourages proxy battles on obscure articles over issues that should be decided on more widely read articles, and those decisions should be governed by the consensus of the wider community. There should be an infobox in all opera articles or an infobox in none, or clear rules describing when they are and are not acceptable. Until then, we are left with half-measures and bitter conflicts on obscure articles.

I do not understand why the issue of infoboxes has sparked such contentious debates. I studied metadata in graduate school and I recall it being a pretty dry subject. The fact that this issue has caused such fervor among a small minority means the larger community needs to resolve this matter. The Committee cannot compel them to do this, but editors who are involved in these battles should feel some obligation to direct their energies towards RFCs and other methods of gauging widespread consensus and hammering out potential policies.

In this particular discussion, I see mostly squabbling, proxy warring, and lashing out based on pre-existing grudges and little discussion based on policy, style guidelines, or reasoning. As a result, I would trout some editors and close it “no consensus”.

Good thoughts, thank you. However, "There should be an infobox in all opera articles or an infobox in none" doesn't work, unless we have a bot that makes infoboxes for all operas. {{infobox opera}} became available in 2013, and normal humans tried to implement it, as in this case. Compare Rigoletto.

An editor has been blocked for a month in the name of arbitration enforcement for having said that he creates half of his featured content with women. I find it kafkaesque and remember the opening of The Metamorphosis for an analogy. If you want to win my "support", please - on top of #1 - suggest improvements to get from arbitration enforcement ("not a fun place") to arbitration supervision, where such a thing would not happen. I offered some thoughts, wishing to see Floquenbeam's "no foul, play on" more often, or Yunshui's "The edit was unproblematic and actually made Wikipedia better."
If you are topic banned from something, you generally had to do a lot of work to get there. So if you make an innocuous comment in violation of that ban, there were many more not so innocuous comments that came before that. Let’s not forget the context of such incidents or the disruptions that forced a topic ban in the first place. I am not opposed to ignoring a minor, harmless violation, but neither do I generally object to enforcing a valid ban when that ban is violated. What is the alternative? Do we have a long discussion about every violation and debate whether or not this particular comment is harmless? Would this not encourage people to violate their bans and cause this kind of disruption? What about the people who have topic bans but do not have a vocal contingent of supporters? I cannot muster outrage over a popular editor blocked for such a comment while the same people are not outraged over less popular editors blocked in exactly the same circumstances.

All good thoughts, however no answer to my question: suggestions for a different style of AE.

Questions from Collect

Can a case be opened without presuming that sanctions will be necessary? Do you feel that once a case is opened that impartial arbitrators will "inevitably" have to impose sanctions?
No outcome is inevitable and Arbitrators have an obligation to review the evidence without a preordained outcome in mind. But for a case to get to the Committee, generally a lot has to happen - noticeboard discussions, administrative involvement, etc. - and if the conflict has gone through that and still has to go before the Committee, it seems likely that the conflict is so intractable or the behavior so egregious that sanctions will be the result.
If an administrator states (hypothetically) "You will vote however you like, and I am frankly not interested in changing your mind, but you should at least be honest about why you are opposing me. At the moment, you are not", would that administrator be considered "involved" or "impartial" in any way with the editor in whose talk space he made such an edit?
As I discussed in response to Gerda Arendt's question #2, single comments do not occur in a vacuum. Context is important and necessary to fully understanding the situation, so I would have to examine the entire conversation and know who the editors in question were and whether or not they had prior contact to be able to judge this particular situation. In general, I think that editors throw around "involvement" far too much and in ways that are not consistent with the actual policy. For example, I was recently called an "involved" party for asking editors to provide diffs to support their arguments in a noticeboard discussion. A single comment usually does not constitute involvement or indicate partiality.
Are arbitrators under any reasonable obligation to afford editors who are out of the country on a trip, or have other substantial reasons for absence from a case, any delays in considering cases concerning them? If such a person is given only 1000 words to rebut 1000 words from each of five or more "evidence providers", is that a reasonable limit to place on the defendant, or ought the limit be raised to allow rebuttal of each such section?
Reasonable concessions and accommodations should be made to editors whenever possible, but an Arbitration case is a long-running matter that involves multiple parties and is scheduled in advance. All of this can't come to a halt at a moment's notice because all of those other people involved also have their own schedules and obligations and vacations to deal with as well. Such concessions also run the risk of parties using absences as a tactic to avoid sanctions, as has frequently happened on Wikipedia. Arbitration cases usually involve editors who have a long tenure on Wikipedia, so in most cases finding time to write out a thousand words about something they are intimately familiar with is not an unreasonable thing to expect of them. Conflicts encourage verbosity and grandstanding, and the word limits are necessary to counteract that. I don't think it's unreasonable to grant extensions on a case by case basis, and responding to evidence from multiple parties seems like a reasonable scenario for granting such an extension, depending on the nature of the response and whether someone intends to post just diffs or a lengthy narrative rebuttal.

Optional Question from Pharaoh of the Wizards

Is Terms of Use a policy ? Do you believe that ArbCom can sanction undisclosed paid editors if there is evidence that they violated TOU ?
The Terms of Use have the force of policy and can be enforced accordingly.

Questions from Worm That Turned

Hi, I'm Dave, I was on Arbcom between 2013 and 2014. I can tell you now that being an arbitrator is tough - you become a target. Comments you make will be taken out of context, your motives and abilities will be insulted, you may be threatened or harassed. Have you thought much about the "dark side" of being an arbitrator? How have you prepared for this?
Unfortunately, I would bring a wealth of experience with this to the Committee. I have lost track of the number of times I’ve been the victim of these sorts of behaviors, on and offsite. After I blocked a minor political operative for his abominable behavior on the article of some obscure officeholder, he conducted a multi-year campaign of sometimes daily abuse and vandalism, cheered on by Wikipedia Review. (They did delete his death threat, so that was nice.) One of the achievements I’m proudest of is rewriting the article Lee Harvey Oswald from scratch many years ago. For this, I have earned the lifelong ire of the JFK conspiracy crowd as The Guy Who Is Keeping The Truth Out of Wikipedia, and I’ve been the subject of many blog posts, web pages (one of which has my face next to a Nazi flag) and even radio shows from the conspiracy press. A prominent conspiracy author even alleged that I had connections to the conspirators. And more recently, there was GamerGate. I even had a Brietbart article written about me for merely suggesting that one (apparently well-connected, as it turns out) GG troll be blocked, for once again Keeping The Truth Out of Wikipedia. So you might say I’m overqualified in this respect. If nothing else, it’s strengthened my resolve to do what I can to prevent other editors from being the victims of this kind of harassment.
Some people believe that Arbcom should lead the community on certain issues. Do you believe there are issues that Arbcom should lead on, and what form should that leadership take?
It can and it should. The Committee cannot set policy, but it can affirm that certain policies and principles should be enforced, setting an example for the rest of the community and empowering administrators and editors who are attacked for attempting to enforce such policies.

Questions from Guerillero

Thank you for running for the hardest and most thankless job on the project. Many of these questions are sourced from actual cases, discussions, and problems over the past year. Enjoy!

Subcommittees

The Audit Subcommittee was created in 2009 to investigate improper tool usage of our Check Users and Oversighters. Currently, neither the community nor the committee can decide how to handle it. There have been calls to completely disband the subcommittee, transfer its role to the functionaries en banc, and extend it for another year. The current auditors terms expired on 1 October, 2015 and they have been continuing in their roles without formal authorization. What would you do about the subcommittee if you were elected to ArbCom?
The Ban Appeals Subcommittee exists to hear appeals of community bans and long-term blocks. There have been moves to divest this role from the committee. What would you do about the subcommittee if you were elected to ArbCom?

Current Disputes and Cases

What are your standards for banning someone from the project compared to a topic ban or some lesser sanction?
Nearly every case involves violations of the civility policy in some way. At one time, a remedy call a "Civility Parole" existed but it fell out of vogue. Today, the only tools in the current Arbitrator's toolboxes to deal with civility issues are interaction bans, topic bans, and site bans. What new and creative ways would you bring to the table to solve this problem?
Do you believe that the Super Mario Problem exists? How would you fix it?
Yes, it probably does. Even if it does not, we should guard against it. The key is to view the roles of editor and administrator separately and judge a party's conduct by the standards of each.
Do you see value in Admonishments and Warnings as remedies at the end of a case?
Yes, I do, and I've logged several myself as Discretionary Sanctions. They can be useful to document cases of boundary pushing and other behavior that is part of a long-term pattern when the individual act isn't something that requires a ban or block. However, they should not be used to merely express the Committee's disagreement with actions taken by parties before them.

Insider Baseball

Does the workshop serve as a useful portion of a case?
Yes. It's always useful to hash out potential solutions before they are formally voted on and doing it publicly is good for transparency. There should be clearer rules about participation and clerks should keep a lid on the worst of it; the workshop of the GamerGate case was a circus.

Question from Biblioworm

Do you have any experience in successfully resolving disputes, either on-wiki or off-wiki?
Yes. Can't say how successful I've been at it in the aggregate over the years, but I always try to resolve them in the best interests of the encyclopedia and all parties involved, even if those parties are determined to be unhappy about the situation. I also have a number of years of experience as a classroom teacher, so that sometimes helps.

Question from Yash!

In the past couple of years, the ArbCom has closed various cases, passed motions, and such. Is/Are there any outcome/s that you disagree with? If yes, which? And, what result/s would you have rather preferred? Ya sh ! 20:19, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Question from User:Beyond My Ken

Can you please distinguish between "harassment" and legitimate inquiries into the background of suspicious editors? Do you believe that such inquiries should only be limited to SPI? If so, what do you advise long-term editors with a good feel for behavioral patterns to do about questionable editors when there is no clear candidate for who the master might be?

Questions from GrammarFascist

Please divulge as much of your demographic information as you are comfortable making public. Specifically: your gender, including whether you are cis, trans or other; your sexual orientation; your race and/or ethnicity; where you live (feel free to specify you live in Triesenberg if you want, but a country or continent will do just fine — even just "Southern Hemisphere" or "Western Hemisphere" is helpful); whether you have any condition considered a disability (even if you're not so disabled you're unable to work) including deafness, physical disabilities, developmental disabilities and mental illnesses, again being only as specific as you wish; and what social class you belong to (e.g. working class, middle class, etc.). ¶ If you prefer not to answer any or all of those categories, I won't count it against you. My intention in asking for this information is not to out anyone or try to force affirmative action. However, when deciding between two otherwise equally qualified candidates, I would prefer to be able to vote for more diversity on ArbCom rather than less.
I am a straight male Hispanic able-bodied middle class citizen and resident of the United States.

Please list at least one pro and one con of having non-administrators serve on ArbCom.
The Committee, or any group, benefits from a variety of perspectives, and the perspective of a non-administrator would be valuable. Most Arbitrators and potential Arbitrators are long-term administrators like myself, and it's easy for us to forget what it's like to be a editor without the tools. For all its many, many flaws, RFA is an incredibly thorough vetting, so candidates who are not administrators have not been vetted as well as administrators have been.

Question from Brustopher

Hi, and thank you for running for Arbcom. These questions focus on WP:OUTING. For the purposes of these questions please assume the editors' usernames are far more distinct and unique than the ones I have given.

User:Foo get's into an edit conflict on Wikipedia with User:Bar, and end up as parties to a large Arbcom case. Soon afterwards on reddit someone going by the username Bar begins posting lots of critical and disparaging threads about Foo. In these threads they claim to be Wikipedia user Bar. The Bar account on Wikipedia is older than the Bar account on reddit by several years, however the Wikipedia account had only really begun active editing a few years after the reddit account had been created. Foo notices these posts and complains on Bar's talk page and ANI. Bar responds by accusing Foo of WP:OUTING and claims that the account might not even be his. Is it OUTING to connect the Bar reddit account with the Bar Wikipedia account?
The appropriate way to handle this would be to email the Committee; the Committee already regularly receives private and sensitive evidence that shouldn't be posted on Wikipedia. We should not allow outing on the encyclopedia, but we should also not encourage trolling by pretending these accounts aren't exactly what they are.
User:Alice is a party in an Arbcom case. She is browsing the internet one day and decides to google her Wikipedia username. She finds that somebody has uploaded naked photos of another woman to a pornsite and labelled them "Alice of Wikipedia." She looks into the account that has uploaded these files and comes to the conclusion that it is owned by Wikipedia User:Bob, an editor she had clashed with heavily on wiki. In the process she also finds out his real life identity. She emails her evidence to Arbcom. Alice then decides to go to Wikipediocracy's forums, and makes a thread informing them of this porn site account. She asks them if they can guess which Wikipedia editor is behind it, and mentions that she also knows his real life identity. They independently come to the conclusion that it is User:Bob and figure out his real life identity without Alice giving the game away. Alice confirms that this is the case. Nobody in the forum finds it remotely questionable that Bob owns the account in question. In such a situation is it appropriate for Arbcom to pass a finding of fact stating "Alice posted inappropriately to an off-wiki website apparently with the objective of having the participants identify a Wikipedia editor by name." Furthermore is it appropriate for them to then use this supposed violation of WP:OUTING as part of their justification for site banning Alice?
Why pretend this isn't about Lightbreather?

Outing is not appropriate. There needs to be a bright line here, to protect all Wikipedia editors. Outing is frequently presented with a high-minded justification, but there is seldom an appropriate justification for personalizing a dispute and bringing potential harm to a person in this matter, and condoning justifications for violating this policy only encourages others to violate it.

That said, this may be one of the few times. Usually outing is part of a campaign of harassment, but here a harassment victim was seeking assistance against her harasser. A harassment victim is, in most cases, completely on their own. It is shameful that in the last fifteen years neither Wikipedia nor the Wikimedia Foundation has developed any systematic means of dealing with this issue. The Committee can't help you, the Foundation won't help you, the police will ignore you, and getting a lawyer presents a significant financial obstacle. Given these circumstances, I could not in good conscience sanction an editor for seeking assistance against her harasser.

None of this, of course, has any bearing on whether or not this editor's other behavior justified a site ban.

Question by Müdigkeit

How many hours per week do you plan to work on the Arbitration Committee?--Müdigkeit (talk) 19:01, 19 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Question by Snowflakw and sundry

I have a two part question.

On November 4th Kitsunelaine (a suspected sockpuppet of a banned user Ryulong) edit-warred to preserve their preferred version of a Kamen Rider page. Ryulong had edit-warred a number of times to preserve this same version
According to an administrator, Ryulong then contacted him over Skype requesting page-protection for Kitsunelaine's version; the administrator declined
Ryulong suggested to the administrator he would (or had) contacted you with the same request
Shortly after, you protected Kitsunelaine's (and by extension Ryulong's) preferred version of the page.

First part is a simple yes/no: Is there anything in the above summary you know to be inaccurate?

Second part I'd appreciate some elaboration: The page in question concerns the movie Super Hero Taisen. Have you seen this movie and how seriously should Wikipedia treat violations of the proxy editing policy?