Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 00:10, 23 July 2014

This page in a nutshell: For years, I've been meaning to write a long essay about what I think is working well, and what is not working well, about different aspects of Misplaced Pages. Unfortunately, my aspirations for that essay have wildly exceeded my ability to block out the concentrated thinking and writing time that it would require. As a result, that essay has never gotten written, and I've finally realized there's no prospect of its getting written anytime soon, either. Therefore, I've now set a more realistic objective for myself, which is to write up a couple of paragraphs of my observations two or three times a week. My hope is that sometimes my comments on the issues of the day will lead to comments by others, and maybe even occasionally something will actually get done as a result. Topics here will range far and wide. I may lead off with a couple of posts about the Arbitration Committee, which I've served on since 2008, but I plan to reach far beyond that. I will use my best efforts to write this page in English rather than in Bradspeak, and to avoid the tl;dr syndrome for which I've achieved widespread infamy. On the other hand, I'm still me, so no promises on either count. Discussion of posts will be most appreciated; the talkpage is thataway. My thanks to everyone who gives some thought to my ideas. Newyorkbrad (talk)

The future of the Arbitration Committee and its role in dispute resolution

As most people who see this page will already know, English Misplaced Pages is about to elect eight members of its Arbitration Committee. This election will consume an enormous amount of the community's time. More than twenty editors will become candidates, and will spend ten or twenty hours apiece writing candidate statements and answering dozens of community questions. Another twenty editors will review all the candidates' statements and answers and contributions and prepare detailed voter guides analyzing the candidates' qualifications and recommending whom to vote for. Several hundred more editors will then review the twenty-plus candidates' qualifications, some in more detail then others, and cast their votes. Administering the candidacy processes and running the election also aren't trivial tasks. Doing some quick math and making some rough-and-ready assumptions, at least a couple of thousand hours of community members' time will be expended in this process. That amount of time will be comparable to that involved in every election since 2004. And it's a necessary expenditure of time, I hasten to add; I wouldn't suggest selecting the arbitrators any other way.

The primary role of the Arbitration Committee is to resolve on-wiki disputes—primarily user conduct disputes. The Committee is not supposed to decide content disputes, and it is not supposed to make policy, and it generally avoids doing both of these things, except operationally by defining what types of editing or behavior are so beyond acceptable limits that they will result in an admin's getting desysopped or an editor's getting banned. The Committee also has other responsibilities, such as dealing with situations that can't be addressed on-wiki because private or sensitive information is involved, and selecting checkusers and oversighters. But the core of the role is meant to be deciding arbitration cases, and the candidates run and get elected primarily based on their qualifications for that task.

ArbCom receives lots of attention both on-wiki and elsewhere, in part because of what it (as a sitting arbitrator, I should say "we") actually does, and in part because for better or worse, there is no other real wiki governance body and so ArbCom is occasionally forced to fill in and do a small part of what such a body might do.

The Arbitration Policy stresses that arbitration is the last step in on-wiki dispute resolution. This makes sense: an arbitration case is an (overly) complicated process, whch typically takes weeks (and in too many unfortunate instances months) to resolve, is often an unhappy time for everyone, and frequently culminates in one or more editors being excluded from the project. Editors are routinely counseled not to file requests for arbitration if there is any possibility that the dispute will be resolved "by the community." I have certainly cast my share of votes to decline a case request because the issues are being, or could be, discussed somewhere else.

The result is that a lot of disputes that might have been resolved through an arbitration case in 2004 (when the Committee was formed) or in 2007 (the year I was a clerk) are now resolved through other means. Sometimes, such a dispute is resolved by an individual administrator directly with a misbehaving user, such as by an indefblock. (Indefblocking, while recognized as a very serious step, is done much more readily now than in the project's early days.) Sometimes, it's resolved through formal dispute resolution short of arbitration, such as on one of the dispute-type noticeboards (BLP/N, COI/N, DR/N, and so forth). Very often, it's resolved on one of the administrators' noticeboards (AN or ANI). Since the demise of the Community Sanctions Noticeboard circa 2007, AN is the designated location for community sanctions discussions.

The result of all these changes is that although the arbitrators' workload remains quite significant—one could keep quite busy with banned-user appeals alone, and we receive double-digit numbers of e-mails every day—in its core function of accepting cases and resolving them through decisions, the Committee is actually underutilized. According to Misplaced Pages:Arbitration/Index/Cases, in its first full calendar year of operation (2005), the Arbitration Committee considered one hundred cases. To be sure, some of these were very easy cases that would never get as far as arbitration now, and some of them involved questions that were unsettled in the early days of the project but are have well-settled answers now. Still, 100 cases. In 2006, 116 cases. In 2007, 91 cases.

And then, it suddenly plummeted. In 2008 (my first year as an arbitrator, though there's no cause-and-effect involved), only 35 cases. (I've written before about the reduction in the Committee's caseload, but I never realized until this minute that it was quite that sudden—a three-fifths drop in a year!) In 2009, 30 cases. In 2010, eleven cases (another drop of more than 60%!). In 2011, sixteen cases. And through the first ten months of 2012, eleven cases (including none in the past three months, although we have had a steady diet of clarification and amendment requests arising from prior decisions).

My point is not that editors should rush to bring disputes to arbitration. Of course, if a dispute can be resolved in a much simpler, more straightforward, less contentious, less faux-legalistic way then it should be.

On the other hand—have the Committee and the community gone too far in accepting that resolving any issue on AN is better than resolving it in arbitration? The virtues of having (for example) a community sanction discussion on AN instead of an arbitration case are that (1) any interested member of the community can participate in the decision-making, as opposed to arbitration, where anyone can comment, but only 15 people can vote; and (2) the decision, whether a good one rather than a bad one, is usually made in a couple of days (almost never more than a week) rather than in several weeks or even months. And some critics of the Committee (on- and off-wiki) would of course add (3) it takes the decision away from those muddleheaded arbitrators (every one of whom, of course, was elected by that same community within the past two years.

But community decision-making of the type that happens on AN has its drawbacks too, many of which are well-enough known that I don't have to list them here.

Another means by which the Committee has reduced its caseload (as well as the number of findings and remedies within individual decisions) is the increased use of the discretionary sanctions regime. As a result, what might have been a new arbitration case against a user in a topic-area that was the subject of a prior case, instead becomes the imposition of a sanction by an administrator, perhaps followed by one or more threads on the arbitration enforcement (AE) noticeboard, which is handled by self-selected AE administrators rather than by the arbitrators.

Questions for thought:

• Should the Arbitration Committee be accepting and deciding more cases?
• Should the community be bringing more cases to arbitration?
• Should the arbitration process be changed to make it easier to bring cases and to get faster decisions in the cases that are brought? (An old perennial; undue delay in decision-making has been the Committee's biggest flaw since its inception, for reasons that probably warrant a post of their own sometime soon.)
• Should the community sanctions process on AN, or the procedures for AN and ANI more generally, be modified to ensure the perception and the reality of fair, open, well-informed discussions and decision-making?
• Is the net effect of transferring some of the workload from the arbitrators on RFAR to other administrators through discretionary sanctions and AE a positive one?

I welcome comments on these questions on the talkpage, and I also hope that they'll be discussed by candidates in this year's election. Newyorkbrad (talk) 01:32, 3 November 2012 (UTC)

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On having an article deleted

I'm about to have my first article deleted.

Although I've spent a too-high percentage of my wikitime for the past couple of years doing arbitrator and administrator work, I used to write new articles, and I plan to do it again in the future. The bulk of my new pages were law-related, including more than fifty biographies of judges, but there were others.

On a whim one rainy day in 2007, I wrote my least important article. It was about a very silly novelty song that I used to enjoy when it was played on the Dr. Demento Show, called "My Name Is Not Merv Griffin". (Enjoy that, as a bluelink, while you can.) It was a fun little article (I should say "stub") to write, because I got to use my best deadpan in describing the song: The song is based on the singer's lament that he supposedly resembles celebrity talk show host Merv Griffin, and that Griffin's fans are stalking him, with disconcerting consequences. Anyway, I wrote it, and someone categorized it and stub-tagged it, and it's sat there harmlessly for five years.

And I know it interested at least one reader, and as a lagniappe, I learned something I'd never known, when Scottandrewhutchins edited the article to add the source of the melody. I'd never known that under my breath, I was humming an old French song (that was used in a classic scene in a Charlie Chaplin movie, to boot!).

But even in 2007, I knew that My Name Is Not Merv Griffin almost certainly didn't meet the notability requirement for songs, and that it was living on borrowed time.

Obviously, we need notability criteria. Although I've written before that we probably put too much collective effort into policing the precise boundaries of notability in areas where having some borderline articles is harmless, a line must certainly be drawn somewhere. We can't be posting an article about every self-produced song recording that sold five copies. And even though I flatter myself that my instincts are generally sound, "Newyorkbrad really likes it" certainly cannot be an anti-deletion criterion.

My trivial little stub stuck around for five years, but now someone has spotted it and put it on AfD, and in a week it'll almost certainly be gone. I spent half an hour the other day looking for sources and references on the song, and came up pretty empty ... it's non-notable and therefore, under well-settled Misplaced Pages policy, out it goes.

The article will live on for awhile in any number of mirror sites and maybe a deletionpedia or two, but of course it won't be the same....

Will the Online Compendium of All the World's Knowledge really be a better encyclopedia without My Name Is Not Merv Griffin than with it? Newyorkbrad (talk) 02:02, 3 November 2012 (UTC)

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Help pick Newyorkbrad's FA project

A few years back, a couple of editors used to cast their RfA !votes on based primarily on a single criterion: "1FA". That meant that to gain their support for adminship, the candidate must have been the primarily contributor to at least one featured article.

That was, and would still be, a rotten criterion for adminship; lots of well-qualified administrators haven't written a featured article. But if it had been the prevailing wisdom when I had my RfA in 2007, it would have had at least one virtue, which is that it would have forced me to write an FA before I sought adminship, and today Misplaced Pages would have one more featured article.

In the past few years, I've spent much too much of my wikitime arbitrating and administrating. Too often I've said to myself that I need to spend more time in mainspace, and I've headed in that general direction, but typically to copyedit or to add a nugget of information. It's useful work, and nothing I'm ashamed of, but I can't say that I've exactly been helping to write the encyclopedia. And it hasn't gone unnoticed that I (along with a number of the other sitting arbitrators, though by no means all of them) have the authority to vote on sanctioning our best content contributors although my own best contributions lately have been of a very different kind.

So, whatever else I may or may not do on Misplaced Pages in the next couple of months, it's high time I got my first FA written. In order that it be on a topic that's familiar to me, I'm going to write about a deceased former Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

The question is which one, and I'm going to let my blogwatchers (since I now know that they are at least a non-empty set) decide for me. Should the mainpage someday feature someone of recent memory such as Warren Burger or Potter Stewart? Or someone well-remembered from longer ago like Oliver Wendell Holmes or the first John Marshall Harlan? Or a challenge such as Thomas Todd or Gabriel Duvall, each of whom was named as "The Most Insignificant Justice" in two famous articles in the University of Chicago Law review?

Post your preference on the talkpage, and I'll go with the flow as of a week from now and get to work. Newyorkbrad (talk) 02:57, 3 November 2012 (UTC)

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One approach to RfA reform...?

Ever since I started editing in 2006, the community has discussed how we might improve the requests for adminship process. There have been very few successful suggestions, and I haven't been able to come up with many myself.

But I do remember one time I thought one of the bureaucrats had done something bold....

We used to have a very good editor whose username was The Random Editor. (Unfortunately, he hasn't been around for awhile.) In 2007, he posted his RfA, which did very well, closing at 96/1/3.

So in due course, a bureaucrat closed the RfA as successful, and when he did it showed up on my watchlist, with the edit summary: "random editor promoted".

... And I thought to myself, "I suppose that's one way we could do it ..." Newyorkbrad (talk) 23:32, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

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On citation of Misplaced Pages articles in (real-world) court decisions

Coming soon

On the importance of getting it right

Coming soon

A surprisingly missing article

Now that I'm struggling with the fact of having entered my second half-century, my thoughts were drawn to a poem on the perennial subject of intimations of mortality. (I first came across it in a book by P.J. O'Rourke of all people, if memory serves.) It's the poem whose last stanza concludes:

For health, wealth and beauty, wit, learning and sense,

Must all come to nothing a hundred years hence.

That couplet, which is all I remembered of the poem when I went to look it up, struck me as evincing a modern sensibility; if I'd been asked to guess the author from what little I remembered, I would have suggested Dorothy Parker. It was surprised that it dates to 1637 and was written by a seventeenth-century English poet named Thomas Jordan.

I was curious to find out more about Jordan and searched on-wiki, only to find that Thomas Jordan (poet) is still to be started. Someone else has noticed that we need the article—it's listed (as a redlink) on the Thomas Jordan disambiguation page.

I suppose I'll start it myself if no one else does, but I know about as much about seventeenth-century poetry as I do about how to take my own appendix out, so I'd prefer to wait for someone more qualified.

(And if anyone's curious, here is a link to the text of the poem. Hopefully no one will dispute that a text from 1637 is public domain. :) ) Newyorkbrad (talk) 00:14, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

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Clear remedies, arbitration decisions, and AE

As most of you know, I've been an arbitrator on this project for awhile. As such, I've written or voted on dozens of ArbCom decisions, and I'm also called upon to comment on appeals from sanctions imposed under discretionary sanctions or on the Arbitration Enforcement (AE) noticeboard. (N.B.: This isn't a post about any particular arbitration decision or AE thread!)

Disputes sometimes arise on AE concerning the meaning of a remedy or sanction imposed in an arbitration decision or in some other wiki-forum. Sometimes the criticism is warranted, and the ArbCom (or whoever else wrote the remedy or imposed the sanction) could have been clearer. Sometimes a situation arises that couldn't have been anticipated when the remedy was originally written. And other times, there is simply the problem that some borderlines are fuzzy, and no attempt at precise wording can resolve in advance every potential situation that might come up.

It's important to realize that there is no way either the ArbCom or anyone else can craft remedies in a fashion that eliminates the need for those interpreting the remedies to use judgment in borderline or unanticipated cases. To stress this point, the classic law-school and philosophy hypothetical (Justice Breyer likes to use it) is an ordinance and a sign that says "NO ANIMALS ALLOWED IN THE PARK." That sounds clear and unambigous, right?

Well, now suppose you are the park ranger or the town magistrate. Which of these people violated the ordinance?:

• (A) Mr. A, who walked his dog in the park?
• (B) Mr. B, who drove his car on a road through the park with his dog inside?
• (C) Mr. C, who walked across the park carrying his small dog inside a container?
• (D) Mr. D, who walked across the park carrying his hamster in its cage?
• (E) Mr. E, who walked across the park carrying his goldfish in its bowl?
• (F) Mr. F, who ran rushing across the park carrying his seriously injured dog to the vet's office on the other side?
• (G) Mr. G, who walked across the park carrying a chicken sandwich?
• (H) Mr. H, who walked across the park by himself, but knows that humans are animals?

I suppose it might be possible to write the ordinance and the sign in such a way as to provide a clear response in advance to each of these possibilities, not to mention dozens more that the enterprising and litigious might think up. But lawmakers and judges and sign-drafters, and even the most long-winded of wiki-arbitrators (he typed, looking in the mirror) are still usually going to write "NO ANIMALS ALLOWED IN THE PARK" rather than 17 pages of (wiki-)legalese. So we are always going to need interpretation. The suggestion that remedies and sanctions be clearly worded is well-taken; but any suggestion that any latent ambiguity that arises in applying a remedy means that we must have done a lousy job in writing it is not.

If anyone wants another example of how clear-cut rules prove ambiguous in the real-world, please read and enjoy the best law-review piece on statutory interpretation ever .

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A question about searchability, robots.txt, and NOINDEX

Most pages on the English Misplaced Pages are searchable by search engines such as Google and appear as results (often high-ranking results) in web searches. One key exception is that Google decided several years ago (I believe on its own; I don't know of any Misplaced Pages involvement in the decision) that article talkpages are Not Of Any General Interest and these pages are excluded from search results. Another exception is that editors, acting within consensus, have the ability to exclude particular pages or categories of pages from web searching. I'm not sure whether there is a list of the types of pages that are so excluded, short of working through the massive category of unindexed pages, but there has been consensus over the years that internal pages focused on individual editors, such as RfAs, RfBs, RfCs, AN and ANI, arbitration case pages, SSIs, and the like, are among those that should not appear in search engines. (Proposals to exclude user talkpages from indexing have not attained consensus, although I've never understood why anyone would think that article talkpages would be of less interest to the general public than userspace pages. But this post is about a different issue.)

According to the conventional wisdom and as summarized on Misplaced Pages:Controlling search engine indexing, there are two ways of excluding a page from searchability: either a robots.txt tag or a "NOINDEX" template. As far as I'd been led to believe, these two designations were equivalent, and applying either of them to a page would exclude that page from searchability by all currently significant search engines.

However, a couple of months ago, I learned of a page in one of the categories that was not supposed to be coming up in searches, but was in fact coming up. Upon investigating, it appeared that this page simply predated our introducing non-indexability and no one had gone back and tagged it. However, in further reviewing the situation, my attention was drawn to this page on Google's site, which appears to reflect that the "NOINDEX" marking is more robust and reliable that the "robots.txt" designation. (See the discussion in the first few paragraphs of the page, through the highlighted seventh paragraph.)

Given that I'm among the least qualified of English Misplaced Pages "functionaries" when it comes to technical issues, I'm raising here the question whether we ought to reevaluate any of our technical practices for how we tag pages that shouldn't be searchable. This is probably a question for posting on the Village Pump/Technical, but if what I am describing is an issue that was addressed years ago, or if my description of the problem is completely incomprehensible, I'll probably be told so more kindly here than there, so I'm starting here first. My thanks to anyone who has relevant knowledge or suggestions to share.

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Forgery and Wikiality

We've all read about people manipulating their, or their friends' (or worse their enemies') biographies on Misplaced Pages. We also all heard about people molding Misplaced Pages to fit the world as they wish it were, rather than the world as it is—what Stephen Colbert, in exaggerated form, calls "Wikipediality."

Alex Wilkinson reported an interesting example of this phenomenon in his article "The Giveaway" in last week's New Yorker. (A link to the New Yorker article is here — full text for New Yorker subscribers, the first two paragraphs for others. I recommend it.)

The article is about a 58-year-old man named Mark Landis. Mr. Landis lives in Laurel, Mississippi. For a time during his childhood, he attended St. Mary's Town and Country School in London.

According to the article, dozens of times over past 25 years, Mr. Landis has walked into a museum and donated what he described as a valuable but previously unknown artwork. He describes the pieces as the work of a reknowned artist, though not one of the very best known artists (Paul Signac, Stanislas Lépine, Hans von Aachen, Alfred Jacob Miller are examples). And every time, it turns out that Mr. Landis created the artwork himself, and used classic art forgers' techniques to make the piece appear older than it was.

This sort of art forgery raises well-known questions ("is this work of art the less meaningful or beautiful because it was created by Shlabotnik rather than Renoir?"). But certainly the museum world sees quite a difference between the work of a great or near-great artist and even the most faithful re-creation or simulation of one, and does not appreciate his contributions. Since Landis never requested or accepted any payment for his donations, and apparently never even took a tax deduction for them, he hasn't been charged with any crimes. Wilkinson discusses Landis's motivations, but he workings of his mind remain unclear. What is clear is that Landis wants very much to be thought of as an art dealer, and as a philanthropist.

The relevance to Misplaced Pages? We have an article about this individual, Mark A. Landis, which details his history of art forgeries—but Wilkinson's New Yorker article doesn't mention that article. What it does mention is this:

One of the things likes to do is check the Misplaced Pages article for Laurel, where he was described as a notable resident, and the one for St. Mary's, where he was an art dealer and a philanthropist. Late in 2010, he saw that the listing under Laurel had been altered, "to something derogatory," he said....

And Wilkinson's article concludes:

After lunch ... Landis was in good spirits. I'd seen him happier only once, a few days before, when we checked the Misplaced Pages page for St. Mary's. He hadn't looked for some time. He almost winced as he scrolled down the page. Then his face broke into a grin. "Hey, I'm still there," he said. "Art dealer and philanthrophist."

He turned the computer toward me so that I could read the entry, then he leaned over to be sure his printer was on so he could make a copy. "Otherwise, somebody might say something bad about me and change it," he said. "And then I won't be an art dealer and a philanthropist any more."

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The quality of Wikiscience

There has been a good deal of discussion of the quality of Misplaced Pages's science articles in recent weeks. In particular, the accuracy of one editor's contributions has been discussed both here and on other sites, and several reviewers have concluded that unfortunately, a fair number of the articles require corrections and clarifications.

As I said last week in an ANI post, errors in Misplaced Pages not only affect our own site, but too often propagate all over the Internet. Many of us enjoy creating and developing our encyclopedia as one of our primary avocations, but all our work is of little use, and may be actively counterproductive, if our article content isn't based on a firm foundation of factual accuracy.

Yet for all that we read about errors in Misplaced Pages, there are knowledgeable people who seem to think that we do a good job. The April 3, 2014 issue of The New York Review of Books contains a letter to the editor by a man named Michael Konrad, addressing Freeman Dyson's review of the book Brilliant Blunders by Mario Livio. It would be an understatement to say that Konrad didn't like Livio's book and he didn't like Dyson's book review. The reasons for his dislike are interesting, but not especially relevant here. What is relevant is that Konrad concludes his letter by opining:

I would advise a student of science not to read this book or the review by Dyson, but to look up the scientists in Misplaced Pages to get a far more insightful (and correct) history of their careers. References for full-length biographies are cited for those who want more detailed accounts.

To which Dyson replies in part:

I am glad to be corrected when I go wrong, and I have written elsewhere in praise of Misplaced Pages.

I haven't seen Dyson's earlier piece "in praise of Misplaced Pages," and I'd like to. But in general, this is someone who knows what he's talking about when he discusses the history of science and the biographies of scientists. For all the mistakes Misplaced Pages makes—and gosh knows we make too many, in science and every other field—if Freeman Dyson thinks that on balance we are doing a praiseworthy job, I think that is an interesting bit of information.

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Misplaced Pages and the law of computer misuse

The other day, I blocked a banned user who was socking around his ban through the latest in a series of IPs and throw-away account. Exasperated, instead of just labeling the block "sockpuppetry" or "ban evasion" or the like, I wrote in the block log and on the talkpage exactly what I was thinking: "banned user unlawfully accessing and interfering with the site in breach of the terms of use." I've been asked to explain the thinking behind that summary, which I am happy to do.

This being a lawyer's post, it comes with several disclaimers. The first is that I didn't come to Misplaced Pages to be a lawyer. Thinking about the law should (apart from articles about law and lawyers and judges, and with occasional exceptions for copyright issues) be remote from the Misplaced Pages experience of 99.9% of editors. The second disclaimer is that I haven't discussed anything in this post with anyone in the Wikimedia Foundation office; the Foundation has a highly qualified legal staff, but I have no affiliation with them, and am simply a volunteer like most of the rest of you. (I'm also not writing in my capacity as either an administrator or an arbitrator on this project.)

With all that being said ... does a banned editor who continues to edit, in breach of a ban imposed by the community or its dispute-resolution procedures, thereby act in a legally impermissible manner?

Merely breaching a website's internal rules or "terms of use" (TOS), without more, usually does not give rise to either criminal or statutory civil liability under statutes such as the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, although it may be civilly actionable by the website owner under other theories. There are several cases (some briefly summarized here) declining to find liability for "computer abuse" where courts believed that prosecutors or plaintiffs sought to overextend the concept, including to TOS violations.

The best-known of these cases is probably United States v. Drew. The facts of this case are sad. Two young teenage girls quarreled, and one asked her mother, Lori Drew, to help find out what her former friend was saying about her. The mother created a Myspace account under the fictitious name of a nonexistent 16-year-old boy, who purported to flirt with the girl for some time, but then abruptly told her that the world would be a better place without her—. Heartbroken, the girl hanged herself. After state prosecutors investigated but decided there was nothing they could do, the federal prosecutor indicted Drew for (among other things) violating the CFAA by accessing Myspace's computers "in excess of authorization." The basis for this charge was that Drew had breached Myspace's TOS by creating a fictitious account, which according to the MySpace TOS is not allowed. The jury convicted on this count, but the District Court reversed and dismissed the charge, on the ground that a reasonable person would not expect a simple violation of the fine print in a website's TOS to constitute a crime.

Another interesting precedent in this area will be made any day now by the New York Court of Appeals (the state's highest court) in People v. Golb. Raphael Golb is the son of Norman Golb, a scholar who espouses a particular theory as to the origin of the Dead Sea Scrolls. More established scholarly rivals of Norman Golb, including a professor named Lawrence Schiffman, support a different theory. Over the course of several months in 2008, Raphael Golb signed onto computers in the library of New York University (which as an alumnus he was permitted to use), and sent hundreds of e-mails accusing Schiffman and others of plagiarizing Norman Golb's work and denying Golb credit to which he was entitled. Most troubling, Golb created Gmail accounts in Schiffman's and some other targets' names, and sent dozens of e-mails in which (for example) Schiffman purportedly confessed and admitted to plagiarizing from Norman Golb.

Raphael Golb was indicted and convicted for numerous crimes under New York State law, including multiple counts of identity theft, criminal impersonation, forgery, "aggravated harassment," and one count of unauthorized use of a computer. The Appellate Division, First Department affirmed all but one of the convictions in this opinion. Among other things, the court rejected Golb's First Amendment challenges to his convictions, finding that Golb acted with criminal intent and that his e-mails could not properly be characterized as "satiric hoaxes or pranks." The crux of the decision was that "Defendant was not prosecuted for the content of any of the emails, but only for giving the false impression that his victims were the actual authors of the emails. The First Amendment protects the right to criticize another person, but it does not permit anyone to give an intentionally false impression that the source of the message is that other person."

The Court of Appeals granted Golb leave to appeal and heard oral argument on March 25. Anyone interested in computer law should stop reading this right now and take the time to read the transcript or, better still watch and listen to the argument. It's a fascinating 40-minute discussion (with Ron Kuby appearing for Golb), fully accessible to non-lawyers. The questioning, particularly by Judge Smith and Chief Judge Lippman, raised a host of cutting-edge issues in this field: the overbreadth of the harassment statute (see Volokh Conspiracy post here); the availability or not of a parody defense; and (the driest issue but the one relevant here), whether a person is guilty of "unauthorized use of a computer" under New York law where he was, in fact, authorized to use the computer, albeit not for the specific purpose he wound up using it for. Is it really the case, the judges asked the prosecutor, that if an employee has the employer's permission to use the computer for work purposes only but signs onto Facebook, the employee has committed a crime? The prosecutor's answer was yes. The court's answer is going to be no. (The New York statute criminalizes "unauthorized" use of a computer but not use "in excess of authorization," and in that respect is narrower than its federal counterpart, so this will not become a direct CFAA precedent, but depending on how the court writes the opinion, it may still be instructive.)

So, merely socking around a ban, by itself, does not seem not to violate the statute. And this is as it should be. No one wants a system where every frustrated editor who socks around a block thereby becomes a criminal, so it's good that neither the WMF TOS nor the statute seems to contemplate such a result.

Are there, however, some limits? Does there come a point at which screwing around with Misplaced Pages actually crosses the line into legally impermissible behavior? Frankly, my strong hope is that we never need to find out the answer in a court decision. But if someone does press hard enough, he or she may find that the answer is yes.

Suppose a user is banned. (I don't plan to debate here the bona fides of the ban in question, although it was fully justified; one small piece of the saga can be found in my talkpage archive here, where the user said he was scrambling his password and leaving Misplaced Pages.) And suppose the user continues to post after the ban has taken effect. And suppose the user continues to post on-wiki with the avowed purpose of disrupting the site, voluntarily describing his behavior in words like these:

• "I have been creating accounts since September in anticipation. They just blocked about 60, but thats only the last few days. All I wanted to do was help the project and they threw me out so now I will be the most prolific vandal, troll and sockmaster in Misplaced Pages history."
• "So now if they want me to be a sockmaster, then fine, I'll pursue that with just as much enthusiasm as I did editing. I know they'll catch me eventually but in the mean time I will be a drain on resources and divert them from being able to do anything else."
• "nly about half those 60+ are me. The rest were just helpless well meaning editors. Same with the ones blocked and the IP that accused of being me. They don't all have to be me, all they have to do is be caught in the path. I don't really care anymore if Misplaced Pages likes me or not, they can delete every edit I did. They didn't want me there anyway and they made that clear as crystal. So, since they didn't want me there, I'll have some fun. And I haven't even tried to be a sockmaster yet. Pretty soon it will be 260+ accounts."
• "Since my help wasn't wanted, I'll just distract them with socking and trolling as I find the time. Days or weeks might go by and it may come in waves but it'll be fun."
• "I doubt they'll tremble of fear me and it really just amounts to a waste of time. But since they didn't want me to help, I'll just be a pain in the ass and a distraction. In the process though a lot of innocent editors will be blocked (several already have), time will be distracted form the project and I'll have some fun. The only way they'll keep me away is if they range block the whole t-mobile and Verison Fios networks. I doubt they have the desire to do that."
• "Case in point, recently got so annoyed with my pings he disabled the Echo pings. Others probably did as well but didn't post it. That means they are disabling functionality because of me. Good! They have continued to block and accuse editors who aren't me or my friends as being me. Largely because the checkuser app is crap. More good news! And that's after only 24 hours of being banned. Imagine the impact after a month. Maybe they ban editing from the Verizon network or t-mobile. Its hard to say what the long term effects will be, but its not going to be pleasant."
• "In less than 48 hours I have gotten 2 range blocks for Verizon Fios which means a lot of people coming from 172 or 208 will need to get an IPblock exemption to edit in which case most of them will assume its me and deny it. 1 for me, 0 for WP. I have also caused several users to turn off pings (Echo) and distracted several users. Childish perhaps but I am having fun."
• "Well I am up to 88 socks and that's not even counting the ones identified here which are mostly mine (but there are a couple that aren't). It also doesn't include my Bots Kumi-taskbot or A bot called bob so including those that pushes me over a 100. Plus the folks who turned of Echo pings, the range blocks of 138, 172 and 208 preventing editing to a large number of Verizon Fios and Us Navy users and the editors who weren't me that got blocked as collateral damage or several of my friends who have joined in. Not a bad start for 48 hours of naughtiness. Can't wait to get to the month mark."

... and that's just from the first two days, and it continues in that vein for week after week. (It's not a good use of my time to hunt down more diffs from on-wiki to go with those quotes from Wikipediocracy, but anyone who's followed this saga knows that I could come up with dozens of them, not to mention e-mails.)

It is not the case that any website is helpless to seek a legal remedy against a user who insists that he is going to continue to edit without permission with the admittedly foreseeable and intended effect of (1) causing the site administrators to have to spend the time dealing with his unwanted edits, and (2) triggering rangeblocks and thus interfering with access to the site by other users with whom he is unconnected.

I can readily fashion an argument that this type of conduct is against the law. I will not advance that argument in detail here, because to the best of my knowledge it has not been tested in application (I'd be quite interested if anyone's aware of any precedents; the DDOS cases may be the closest, but I acknowledge that this isn't that), and because there are far more direct means of dealing with the problem than invoking a statute. (The Wikipediocracy thread on this topic, in particular, has completely missed that "unlawful" can refer to civil as well as criminal law.)

I very, very much hope that all of this will remain in the realm of academic discussion. And in that vein, I'm going to take off my lawyer hat and remind the banned user in question, and everyone else who is reading here, that almost all of us came to Misplaced Pages as a hobby. And ... when a hobby stops being fun for you ... or when for whatever reason you're asked to leave the club ... the rational thing to do is to step away and find another hobby. You don't stick around and complain that everyone else is doing a lousy job enjoying your old hobby ... and you certainly don't destroy the clubhouse or scrawl graffiti on it and leave a mess for everyone else to clean up. And you especially don't outlast your welcome to the point that even one of the notoriously most relaxed and lenient administrators on the site, who is not especially hard-assed even against banned users quietly returning and doing good work (those who doubt that should carefully review this thread) is thinking, even fleetingly and metaphorically, about calling a cop on you, or to wonder whatever happened to the old Abuse response process, a page I had hoped never even to have to read.

Kumioko, I'm sorry you are so disaffected with Misplaced Pages. You had high hopes for the project and for your role in it, and for whatever reason (this isn't the place to find fault), your hopes were dashed. But you really, really, really need to step away now. Goodbye. Newyorkbrad (talk) 23:35, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

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