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Revision as of 04:26, 19 April 2008

Such is the all consuming hatred and anger, I feel for the Arbcom and their condoning of the repeatedly bad behaviour in IRC#admins, I feel, for my own sake and sanity, at present, unable to edit Wikipdia. The undercurrents fostered by both factions undermine the project, and betray its supposed founding principles. I may be back sooner or later, at the moment, I just don't know. I have never felt so disgusted and slapped in the face by such people as those I have encountered in the last few days. To those who have agreed with me, or helped me, thanks and good luck.

Please do not post anything further on this page, I just do not want to encourage any more edits from FT2 of justification from the IRCAdmins. I am truly sickened.

Thank you. Giano (talk) 07:14, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Comments on recent events

Note to those watching this page: My message below is posted with Giano’s permission, in response to his request that I address several issues that have arisen over the last few days. The words are mine, and any concerns about them should be addressed to me.

I was going to write a long comment with timestamps and chronologies and who said what to whom—actually, I did that, but decided it isn't what's needed here. Instead, I'll simply look at the effects of this particular block, executed on April 14 at 23.01, and the key events and realities leading up to it.

Effect on the Arbitration Committee

• The use of broad-brush remedies giving any administrator authority to carry out punitive actions to enforce Arbcom decisions has come under heavy criticism, particularly so-called civility paroles, in both the Tango/MONGO case and this block. There is no way that 1500 administrators are going to come to a common ground on what is and is not civil. While some uncivil remarks are obvious, many remarks that pass the civility test are extremely insulting. There is a huge middle ground, where context and interpersonal relations play a major role. There has been some discussion on the special ANI thread about having "spokespersons" for valued but hot-tempered contributors, creating special enforcement teams, and Werdna (showing a wisdom considerably in excess of his elders) has written an essay, Ignore personal attacks.

• Arbitrator FT2 seems to have taken on a crusade to try to have Giano behave "according to norms", writing long convoluted posts that several editors have found completely baffling; several of these posts appear to psychoanalyse Giano to the point of personal attack themselves. Most distressing to me, he has used a rape analogy to explain the harm of calling someone names. It was suggested he reconsider his words - so instead of removing the rape analogy, he changed the word "skirt" to "clothes". There's a problem when an arbitrator cannot see the huge gulf between sexual attacks on women, and using a standard on-wiki and on-IRC expression ("stalker") that is misinterpreted due to private information of which the speaker is unaware.

Effects on User:Kwsn

Kwsn is a young administrator, still a student. He made a bad block. It was a bad block because, for the very same behaviour, the person blocked had been both praised and warned already within the previous half-hour; he did not include any diffs for others to determine exactly what he found to be blockable; and due to real-life commitments, he was not available to discuss the block when it was immediately questioned. These were all poor decisions, but they were all essentially resolved by the unblock. (The drama wasn't, but we'll get to that in a minute.) Kwsn has perhaps taken this far too much to heart, as he first posted he was taking a wikibreak and blocked himself for a week; and then, after a misinterpreted attempt to set things right (the IRC transcript with DragonflySixtyseven), retired from the project. Giano attempted to reach out to Kwsn once he knew the facts late yesterday, but Kwsn may be understandably wary of him right now. I can only hope that Kwsn's friends will continue to reach out, and that he will return to the project in the near future.

A greater question is why Kwsn felt the obligation to review Giano's editing and make the block in the first place. He does not normally carry out arbitration enforcement and had had no interactions with Giano before the block. He was, however, in #admins-IRC when another administrator complained about Giano, said he was involved, and that someone else should make the decision, just not "per IRC."

Effects on Giano

First, a bit of history and fact-sharing here. There is no question that previous blocks involving Giano have been cooked up in IRC, and he continues to be a periodic topic of discussion there, despite the much-touted reforms of 18 months ago, and of March of this year; it should be no surprise that he holds it in contempt.

For a lot of difficult-to-quantify reasons, many people consider Giano a community leader, or at least a high-profile editor. He edits in a fishbowl that many of us cannot imagine. His talk page averages 175 hits a day—more than many of us (including many arbitrators) get in a month—and on Tuesday it went all the way up to 1200+. With the eyes of the wiki on him, any tiny misstep is magnified beyond all reasonable value, and the reaction is equally excessive. When he tried to make a joke about being wiki-stalked, he got blocked. It isn't just one admin stalking Giano's edits, though. He can't write anywhere on the encyclopedia without someone else showing up, be it an admin, an arbitrator, or another editor.

Right now Giano is angry. When he tried to work out his anger in a constructive way by writing a personal essay, he got a warning on his userpage. When he tried to express his opinion on ANI, his perceived personal attack was compared to rape. He is told that he is not conforming to community norms, when some of the things he is trying to bring forward within the community are exactly those norms and why they are not appropriate, a perception that is more widespread than many care to admit.

Effects on the community

The community has started to realise that its dispute resolution mechanisms are rarely effective in the way they are intended. User and admin RfCs, because they are non-binding, become attack pages that linger for weeks and months without resolution, and never really go away. Arbitration fails to resolve the root causes of the disruptions that bring cases before them, in part because they do not permit decisions related to content, but also because of the haphazard way in which evidence is developed and presented. There is often no analysis of issues that drive the case, and only rarely are serious attempts made to resolve them.

The result of this dysfunctional dispute resolution system is that almost every editor who is involved, often just to a peripheral degree, is damaged. There is no effective way to heal those wounds. Once tainted, their contributions are devalued, often without conscious thought.

We need to stop this cycle. We need to let people function in this community without every keystroke being scrutinized. We need to find ways of listening when questions are asked without assuming bad faith on the part of the questioner. We need to get back to the project's goals and leave the rest behind.

--Risker (talk) 21:59, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

the death of a thousand cuts

I wrote to an arb the other day to ask if its was the arbcom's intention to allow this situation to continue until the community is entirely polarised into the two intended camps - or whether other solutions were being thought about.

The answer was they're pretty much out of ideas. Giano is sanctioned to be civil - but as Geogre has so eloquently argued, civility is an entirely subjective idea, subject to constant flux, cultural values and at root, indefinable. Anyone seen Gordon Ramsey recently? Is our standard of civility on WP as subject to the US systemic bias as any article? Puritan at heart, middle class, young rather than old? People claim Giano trots out blaming IRC as a smokescreen for these subjective "civility" indiscretions - but equally, claiming Giano's supposed incivility is paramount rather than the issues he raises is equally a smokescreen. I live in the UK - home of Gordon f-in Ramsey and the The F***ing Fulfords, where "fuck off arsehole" can easily be construed as a term of endearment, or just a forthright challenged to explain yourself. We seem to have an awfull lot of shrinking violets here, but really I don't believe them. If you accuse Giano of gaming the system for whatever reason, then what of the poor, faux-injured offended? "Gnome like stalker", please - as Gordon would have it "Grow a pair".

Being offended has become a gambit - the possibility of offence is cause for warnings. So if you want to obscure the issues Giano has raised, what better way than to further exploit the notion of "normal standards of civility to your own ends". And what a sad bunch we are for claiming a false sensitivity as a gambit for empowerment - do we have no pride? But really - anything please rather than deal with the issues. Carchorath - I respect you quite a bit - but see how your offer to provide stats on blocking and who did it to established users, was eagerly picked up - they call that kicking it into the long grass. So instead of the divisive outright banning of Giano, which his detractors doubtless have argued for - he gets the death by a thousand cuts - any prat with a badge and an ill-formed sense of duty may block him at will, and that's just dandy by the community.

Well that's just daft as arseholes and twice as nasty - as my grandmother used to say - really, she was from the East-end, heaven forbid! she probably wouldn't be accepted into a 50's middle class dinner party, but this is the 21st century and we're a global virtual community - so rather than continuing to propogate our middle class exclusions, what's needed is a better formed view of cultural values - and some considerable latitude in the way people deport themselves - being offensive isn't criminal - threatening people with realistic harm, the sort of harm other than text on a computer screen, clearly is - let's get some perspective here - life, the world and certainly wikipedia can never be some blissful nirvana where we all strut around with flowers in our hair, people just aren't built like that - no-one is.

I'm completely fucked off with hearing about the technical intricacies of why IRC can't be brought under WP control - the simple truth is it suits all the vested interests to keep it that way - if our place to discuss BIO issues and concerted disruption attempts can't reform itself, the community will do it for it. Let's fuck off freenode and set one up we can be confident of, where we can post logs if necessary - or they can at least be routinely logged - let's have our IRC complaints board - on wiki. Let's have less faux offence and more fucking dissent please - from the moment Giano was endicted for the ludicrous 'hate speech' incident, we've had a process of increasing radicalization from both camps that now threatens to rip the community asunder. Let's have an end to the ridiculous voting system where someone gains the second place in the for votes in an election and yet gets no reward - controversialness shouldn't be a bar to power, it's representive of an opposing view and should be included. Giano isn't the problem here - it's a culture that allows ludicrous extremes of political correctness go unchecked. --Joopercoopers (talk) 00:03, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

For the process wonks amongst you I note WP:CIVIL is personally targetted behaviour - so unless you are user:process wonk - spare me the fucking civility warnings thanks.

Amen. People talking about "civility" seem to be doing so against the idea of a community and for the idea of control. The two are almost antonyms. Utgard Loki (talk) 12:39, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

In my experience— since September 2003— WP:CIVILITY has never been employed by any correspondent who has been displaying any. It is in each case a weapon of personal attack as Joopercoopers says, though to say so to the abuser of the guidelines is always countered with a reflexive cry of "personal attack". Editing Misplaced Pages, which should be like getting trapped in an elevator with an interesting cross-section, is too often like being trapped on a subway car. A New Yorker knows not to answer cat-calls: Giano's fatal flaw.--Wetman (talk) 12:58, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

My comments, which were previously posted on this page, are now here. Please leave any comments on that page. Risker (talk) 13:13, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

They're beautiful comments, too. Highly endorsed. (Can't say "amen" again.) Utgard Loki (talk) 16:15, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

The obvious problem with calling Giano's comment incivil is that it appears that the ArbCom is applying the "incivility" standard so unfairly. The recent JzG RfC shows that established admins aren't held to the same standard. Also, the Zareaph and Mantanmoreland ArbCom cases illustrate that other admins (SlimVirgin among others) also have not been as heavily scrutinized as Giano. If the rules were being applied fairly and equitably, then there wouldn't be a controversy here. But, unfortunately, they're not, so sanctioning Giano is problematic. Take care of all the other existing issues consistently first, then put your eye on Giano. If the rules were being applied equally, then there wouldn't be a problem. Anyone disagree with me? Cla68 (talk) 17:27, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

I think that rather wonderfully exposes the Arbs actions to Giano - irritated by his pushes for reform, 'his manner' is the only thing they can hang on him - what a fraud! Perhaps we need to petition the Arbcom on his behalf to get this obscene sanction lifted, and while we're there - why they've done sod all about IRC? --Joopercoopers (talk) 18:44, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

I wish you would JC - please try for the sake of us all. In the meantime, however, I am restored to you. I sincerely appolagise for reverting Risker and Doc last night, as I'm sure you can all appreciate, I just felt if I read one more word concerning me, I would smash the computer, so reverting them was the cheaper option. So, I am back - was I ever gone? - I had to feel I was, just to re-charge. I see FT2 is wiggling on now about faked logs - so I just posted on his page to inform him the current logs are proven genuine - poor FT2, poor Arbcom - it looks like I'm here to stay! Giano (talk) 18:55, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Can I make a comment as an individual who happens to be an arbitrator? I do not "want to see the back of Giano". I want to see a lot more wonderfully detailed articles about glorious buildings. But at the same time I also want discussions about policy and about users to be carried on in a constructive fashion, and to do that the community has endorsed a policy on civility. Arbitrators apply community policy so even if I disagreed with the policy (which I don't) I would still apply it. Joopercoopers' argument above is a clear demonstration of WP:SOUP in action.

The problem, simply put, is that Giano often chooses to make his case in terms which are borderline incivil. The substance of the arguments put has no bearing on the civility of the terms in which they were put. The reason why there is a policy on civility, though, is that other editors who may have useful contributions to make will be put off if they think they will be insulted by those who disagree with them; also it is very easy to find the debate distracted from the substance of the argument into a discussion of the civility. Remember that all editors are volunteers.

As arbitrators we are explicitly tasked with another responsibility which is to look into "unusually divisive disputes between administrators". One consequence of the large number of editors following Giano is that almost every administrative action relating to him becomes unusually divisive. This is partly a function of the consistent skill which Giano has of making edits which are on the borderline of policy. I wish I could say this was a series of coincidences, but I do not believe it is. To speculate for one moment on why, it may be that causing administrative confusion is thought to help draw attention to the underlying issue; it may be a way of testing the water; and it may be a more simpler wish to discredit any administrator who is waylaid into taking action. Or it may be a combination of these reasons.

Whichever is the case, for the good of the project we must avoid a situation where one user gains acceptance of their views on policy issues by becoming a martyr by being blocked or sanctioned. Unfortunately I am afraid that this can become learned behaviour; leaving aside whether the outcome was right, Giano did succeed in having a block log entry erased, significantly advanced the desysopping of Durova, and put reform of IRC on the agenda, by causing a big fuss over the issue which got him blocked and then produced a meta-debate over whether the block was wise. Each time this happens the pattern becomes clearer and it's not the way things get done. There will come a point when causing this sort of fuss will be an active disincentive to act on the underlying issue because to do so is rewarding bad behaviour.

Can I finish by taking up one particular comments by Joopercoopers? We cannot ignore the 'technical intricacies' of proposals to reform IRC, because these details may quite easily render the proposal unworkable. Sam Blacketer (talk) 00:03, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Sam, I do understand where you are coming from. Giano can manage to infuriate his friends as well as his opponents sometimes; we usually take the option of hitting the "email user" button to tell him, just as most of us would for anyone else, which is why people don't see it on this page. Once again, though, you are talking big picture, instead of driving down to the root causes of the very issues you mention. So let's drill down on what actually happens in respect of this specific block.

At 19.14, we see Giano asking a discrete, perfectly civil question of FT2 about a very odd edit that FT2 makes to the checkuser policy, which FT2 blanks from his page, saying he will respond by email. Nothing happens for 2.5 hours; Giano does not go ballistic, he doesn't edit war, he behaves perfectly civilly. Giano only starts "edit warring" after he has received the email and pointed out that the information it contains should actually be on-wiki. And, rather than agreeing that reasons for changes to policy should at minimum be explained on-wiki, FT2 and Until(1==2) play hide-the-perfectly-legitimate-message. When Until(1==2) shows up, Giano writes those now-infamous words. Now...as it turns out, after a few hours I remembered why 1==2 might find a very common on-wiki and on-IRC term to be so offensive, but Giano had absolutely no knowledge of that term being personally sensitive for 1==2. Why would he? Probably 99% of WP editors have no knowledge of it, even now. Finally, Giano de-escalates the edit war on FT2's talk page by posting his request at Wikipedia_talk:CheckUser. At 22.38, Until(1==2) tells him that is a good move, Giano acknowledges and says he's going to edit normal pages, and that should be the end of it. Unfortunately, as we all know, a few minutes later 1==2 goes to IRC and talks about the remark he found personally offensive. Coren pops up at 22.52 and issues a warning to Giano for the behaviour that has already stopped, and Giano acknowledges the warning and says he is going to bed. Eight minutes after the warning with no intervening edits, Kwsn blocks Giano.

Now...who escalated the situation? Giano pushed, yes; a reasonable case could be made for a block for edit-warring, except of course that had finished some time beforehand, resolved with the apparent approval of an admin, and edit-warring is not implicitly part of the civility parole but would be covered under general blocking policy. But over the course of 23 minutes, he goes from being told by Until(1==2) that he made a good decision, to being warned by Coren, to being blocked by Kwsn, without any intervening edits except to acknowledge the comments of administrators. The problem is that three different administrators reviewed the same series of edits, and came up with three different responses, which they each implemented separately and serially, without any improper behaviour whatsoever in the interim.

Perhaps the most important thing to note is that precisely the same question that Giano posted to FT2 discretely on his talk page was being asked by SlimVirgin, also on-wiki, at the same time about the same edit. The information that FT2 removed was reinstated into the policy, where it remains as of this writing. Thatcher answered Giano's and Slim Virgin's questions on the talk page of the checkuser policy, it turns out there was no problem posting the answer on-wiki, and everyone was happy. Except, of course, for a little intervening block and several hundred thousand bits of nonsense that could all have been avoided if FT2 hadn't wanted to keep secret what could have easily been answered on his talk page, and if three different admins hadn't reviewed the same edits and decided to take different actions.

In my line of business, we have an expression about situations like this: we call it setting people up for failure. This problem doesn't just apply to Giano, it applies to every editor under a similar remedy; most of them run into similar trouble. The Arbitration Committee has established a remedy that implicitly encourages administrators (including those who have personal differences with an editor) to follow editors around, watching for the slightest misstep. The blocking policy is overridden by the remedy—not blocking when the situation is already resolved, or trying to de-escalate situations, for example. The learned behaviour is on both sides, I think. Treating any editor dismissively is, well, uncivil; and the imposition of what is clearly an unfair punishment ought to get a lot of people riled up, regardless of who the punished editor is. Nobody is coming off well in this case, and everyone has been set up for failure - the Arbitration Committee, the admins whose radically different interpretations of the same situation inevitably results in much drama, Giano, and most importantly, the community. We have to find a better way, for all our sakes, because this one isn't working. Risker (talk) 04:02, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

So will someone set out on-wiki rather than the obscure mailing lists alluded to on FT2's talk page, why the most successful online encyclopedia in the world finds it beyond its resources to host a private irc channel for 70 people which we can control to out own satisfaction without having a hand tied behind our back by the rules of freenode? - if there's a will there's a way. --Joopercoopers (talk) 00:17, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Sam, to suggest that undefinable notions of civility has resulted in bad law is hardly questioning the nature of the universe as you imply with your alphabet soup. Lawyers earn big bucks attempting to make statute law clear in practice, so if you find an unusually divided admin community because of this issue, perhaps you should review the task you have set them - I'd start with the legal model - provide tests.--Joopercoopers (talk) 00:36, 19 April 2008 (UTC)