Wikipedia community reacts to an editor being temporarily banned
buzzfeednews.com
buzzfeednews.com
Kudos to the journalist and buzzfeed for putting in an effort to understand the relative dynamics and for linking directly to the underlying discussions.
Wikipedia is one of the few very large venues online that I feel really had moderation done right (HN isn't in the running due to not being very large. :))-- sites like reddit, twitter, facebook just get capricious bans handed out essentially at random--- on those sites earnest and serious harassment usually goes unaddressed while petty staff qualms or favors for connected parties are about the only thing that reliably gets addressed. (And I am speaking directly from experience)
Having a community that governs itself is really the only thing with a chance of scaling, but for that to work the community has to also own itself: Few will invest the labor required to maintain effective self-governance if they feel they are facing capricious overrides, creating an environment where they're working for someone else (without compensation) rather than for themselves.
For a long time Wikipedia was a shining example here, but this incident suggests to me that it may not be anymore.
Fascinating... there are several historical examples of “revolutionary” bodies that succumbed to these dynamics. Curious to see if there’s some layman’s literature on the subject
> “The community is currently blaming the foundation for their own mess, in my opinion,” he wrote, “which was caused by our abject failure to develop procedures to enforce civility without Foundation intervention.”
reminded me of something Gustav Landauer said:
> You don’t know what order with freedom means! You only know what revolt against oppression is! You don’t know that the rod, discipline, violence, the state and government can only be sustained because of you and because of your lack of socially creative powers that develop order within liberty!
In this case, the editor in question had a longstanding dispute with Wikimedia connected party (a party whom, had, in fact been sanctioned by the community for their actions).
I understand that monarchy is now in fashion in communities, but the arguments for democracy in its various forms as opposed to various kinds of dictatorships remain strong enough that I'd want to see some pretty good evidence that self governance isn't a good trade-off. I don't think that anyone would argue that community self-governance won't make errors, all systems of governance will. The abject failure of centrally moderated large web communities certainly do not argue for that approach.
[Of particular interest: this case has all the marks of having received attention through influence (the banned user had a longstanding dispute with a WMF connected party who also quit the project at the same time)-- maybe that actually wasn't a factor here but WMF has not been forthcoming even TO the arbcom in private with a detailed justification for this actions. As a result of the apparent of impropriety and the largely unexplained secrecy it doesn't make for a particularly good argument that it's actually fixing a failure.]
To clarify in case this gets read as a greater accusation than I intended:
I have some personal experience potentially similar to the persons involved in the potential conflict of interest in this case: My partner was previously chair of the Wikimedia foundation board.
I was made uncomfortable on a number of occasions by staff whom didn't otherwise know me from Adam being unusually responsive to me compared to other contributors with similar or greater community standing but less luminous connections. ... and this happened even though no one asked for it and though I tried to carefully avoid invoking it.
No explicit corruption is needed to end up with an undue and improper influence, that's just how people work. I addressed it by reducing my involvement.
I can only imagine that now-- with greater distance between WMF staff and the community since many of the old time community originated staff left during Lila's tenure as ED-- that this sort of issue is even worse, since staff members that knew me as a community member didn't act that way as far as I could tell.
I’m not into monarchies nor do I think most do, sounds like a bit of a straw man...
Just a passing observation: looks like several bottom-up movements, revolutions, alternative “emergent communities” tend to leave enough leeway for manipulative actors to play with the new weak norms without the rest of the community noticing how they’re being played. I’m curious if there are studies on the subject
Two bureaucrats (out of 20), 18 administrators, an ArbCom clerk has already resigned, and now 4 out of 9 members of ArbCom is planning to resign.
For years Wikipedia has given a pass to abusive harassing arseholes because those people were also prolific editors.
That puts at risk the main principle of wikipedia - the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, because lots of those anyones are driven away by those toxic but prolific editors.
And wikipedia just isn't very good at acknowledging they're bad at dealing with toxic editors. A bunch of admins will see clear pattern of abuse and will excuse it. "That's not so bad", "it's pretty bad but it's not as bad as it used to be", "no-one has told that person to stop" (despite there being many requests to the person to stop), "it's pretty bad but they're prolific", "I don't think it's bad and so anyone else who think's it's bad should toughen up". (We see most of these in the Fram discussion.)
The worst thing about wikipedia (and we also see this on HN) is the refusal to trust process unless every single intimate detail is litigated in public, and that's something that often cannot happen when you have a person harassing others.
Can you suggest a similarly large service that does better?
I can tell you first hand that reddit and twitter absoltely give not the slightest shit about constant harassment, impersonation, and posting threats and personal information: Except when I pick up the phone and directly apply pressure to the legal or executive staff via connections.
> is the refusal to trust process unless every single intimate detail is litigated in public,
This isn't the case here. Wikipedia has a established governance process for dealing with trouble making administrators, who regularly handle highly private confidential information-- and they're equally in the dark here. There is a process, but it isn't the users who aren't trusting it-- It's the WMF that is not trusting, bypassing the process, and not acting in a transparent manner.
Makes sense. I do not know from were the 'freedom' argument comes from our relates to this.
Now ArbCom is a bit irrelevant, the Foundation decides guilt in secret and hands out punishment as they see fit.
This is an intervention that realistically should have been dealt with by the community. If he had posted "Fuck Wikimedia" as well, there could have been another perceived conflict of interest. Sooner or later you run out of conflicted groups of people and what happens then?
Right.
There was another recent incident which generated some drama due to the lack of transparency by Wikimedia, but it ultimately fizzled because the banned user in question was silent and so absent any alternative people assumed that the ban was well justified.
In this case, the banned user has written a calm and clear description of events from their perspective, including paraphrasing the communication they received from Wikimedia.
This discussion has essentially foreclosed the possibility that it was something like child pornography in question-- and, in fact, the specific citation of a rude remark towards arbcom stands out in particular because arbcom apparently had no involvement in the ban.
The community had years to deal with fram, and they decided not to.
Freedom from any consequences? That isn't a thing.
Should somebody go to jail for saying "fuck the DOJ"?
But I see this is going to be a "it's a private organization, you mustn't critique it" thread.
In your situation what if I now had misspoke and when expecting a temp ban, somehow get perms banned due to new rules? Their was no due process and the wikimedia foundation is no better than an authoritarian government.
If the person in question needs formal rules to not behave anti-social, maybe staying a year off wikipedia is a good opportunity to figure that out.
Seriously we're dealing with adults here, not children. Which actually goes to the root of the problem, the type of personality that spends so much time on editing the website seems to have a problem with very basic civility.
The purpose of free speech is to speak without free of being reprimanded for saying the wrong thing in order to communicate more effectively.
Only insecure organizations ban dedicated community members for speaking out of line. In a more open and democratic organization, the governing committee should just acknowledge statement and move on with the shared goals of the community. Especially with Wikipedia where controversy is expected, admins should not self censor with fear of being reprimanded for “thinking/talking” out of line.
And with regards to your chess club, that is your insecurity speaking - your chess club leader may welcome the feedback and try to understand what made you say that in the first place. If the organization is open to feedback and criticism, and if you are a valued member then it should be concerning why u spoke out, since it may affect others too. A club is only as valuable as its members - please remember that.
Behavior matters in society, and we're not talking about the government here. If you want to behave like an asshole you will have a hard time in a lot of places, and that's a good thing for the most part IMHO.
Just the fact that all these weasel words have to get added should answer the question without them. Of course nobody would even give a shit if you said it once, like said admin said it once. And the best part is, it's totally speculation whether the ban has anything to do with it. So it's basically just a bunch of people saying "I don't know or care why this happened, because I know something for which they would deserve it", which is saying "fuck arbcom" -- not that we know or care about any of the context, at all. Not even saying "fuck you" to a person. I guess if he had said "fuck wikipedia" it should have been more than one year, because after all, that includes arbcom by definition.
I'm pretty sure I said "fuck HN" in other words before, one time I was so mad I actually took a break from posting, and after a year came back with a lot of upvotes on my last comment and a supportive reply.
> Behavior matters in society
This includes the ban, and arguing "my chess club owner would throw anyone giving them lip out instantly, so" with a straight face.
edit: actually, while we don't know for sure what the ban is for, it's pretty obvious it has nothing to do with "fuck arbcom":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_response_t...
> What we can say in this case is that the issues reported to us fell under section 4 of the terms of use, as noted above, specifically under the first provision entitled “harassing and abusing others.”
My description of much of this as "I don't know or care why this happened, because I know something for which they would deserve it" is correct - it's just not flattering.
In this case a closer analog would be someone saying "Fuck you" to a judge in court (arbcom), and then the property manager of the courthouse comes (WMF) unbiden by the court and evicts that person from the property and declines to provide any detailed explanation for their actions either to the public or the court.
It might well be that the judge would have eventually found the party in contempt and no one would have had an issue with it... but as it is the public is left confused and concerned about the property manager's use of their right to prevent trespass effectively undermining the authority of the established system of governance.
There is a flaw in your logic above "I personally don't like the self censorship approach. You must come from a more authoritarian culture" this is a deduction and assertion with no support; the GP may come from anywhere and it is perfectly reasonable for them to come from a very libertarian culture and yet hold opinions that are contrary to your opinion.
Wikimedia simply promised to be better than that. The ban isn’t the problem, the process getting there is.
The sustained pattern of behaviour that the community failed to deal with was what caused the ban.
"Fuck arbcom" is the reason the ban was handed out by WMF and not arbcom.
Is this what happened? Maybe. It certainly sounds a plausible, but without any transparency, it’s hard to say.
No, IMHO the central office had already decided the ArbCo had already failed to defend itself and the platform from skilled manipulation.
I would expect reforms are on their way
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/MediaWik...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration_Com... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration_Com...)
If my employer demanded I use TFA (they do), and I defaced one of their public web pages, I’d be fired.
I doubt that comment is the issue.
Some other admins didn't like that treatment and quit. So what? If you see that kind of behavior as something acceptable and the organization doesn't, maybe you shouldn't be there either.
Sounds like much ado about nothing.
USA has started the political campaign and with it there is an increase in manipulation. What should be a matter of politeness - don't insult people - becomes an opportunity to push against moderated discussion. :(
Please HN review this thread carefully as this is what comes for the next year.
Wikipedia's community has a long established set of processes for self-governance, but they were bypassed in this case.
The administration in question was banned by staff of the Wikimedia foundation, the 501c3 non-profit created by the community for the purpose of the operation of the infrastructure of Wikipedia, and have done so without providing a clear justification both for the circumvention of the project's governance and the specific. This is a highly unusual though not completely unprecedented event.
99% of the people who are up in arms about this would have had no issue had the arbcom banned the user in question, the constitutional issue is what has people so concerned.
This is untrue.
The processes were used and they failed to work. They failed to protect people from this abusive admin. Read the discussion about fram - there are plenty of people there saying "he's a bit of an arsehole but he edits a lot". Clearly the existing processes were aware that fram was abusive.
People in the discussion aren't for the most part arguing that fram shouldn't be banned-- the discussion is almost exclusively about the constitutional issues and accusations of impropriety. ... but "bit of an arsehole" could mean a lot of things and doesn't necessarily mean abusive.
Edit: The arbcom has issued a statement-- a fairly strongly worded one, by arbcom's standards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_response_t...
Is conduct relevant if someone is otherwise a good contributor of good work output in service of the project?
Many, including a significant fraction of HN upvoters, have cheered on Linus and Theo over the years for conduct perceived as both hostile and contributory. Fram, too, has for many years had conduct perceived as both hostile and contributory.
Therefore, it should come as little surprise that Fram has supporters. The question raised near the end of the article is relevant: Why did Fram’s peers allow Fram’s conduct to continue?
To answer that question, we need only look inward: Linus is taking conduct training, so that he can continue to contribute usefully while conducting himself respectfully (but not necessarily politely). This change is not universally liked, as there are many who feel that they should have the right to disrespect anyone, and this is a critical turning point of sentiment against their “freedom”.
The advent of codes of conducts in open source invoked the same problem and the same reaction, at a larger scale: people who swear they will boycott contributions to any project that restricts their freedom of conduct in any way.
HN openly restricts the freedom of conduct of commenters, so I always smile when I see people post here that they’ll boycott some project over having their rights abrogated - they don’t see the irony and pointing it out would be inflammatory, so I keep it to myself.
But it’s absolutely not “much ado about nothing”. It’s right at the core of whether “the right of free speech” includes “the right of speech perceived by others as inconsiderate, disrespectful, derogatory, and/or harmful”. HN commenters don’t yet agree on this point, and it’s no stretch to consider that Wikipedia editors don’t either.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#New_Buzz...
Okay then, if we have a fully decentralized info network, which decision-making entities are installed as the prime movers? What contracts exist to operate such a decentralized governed network, facilitating elections and whatnot? (Assuming we want a “fair” and “just” decentralized state).
In other words, someone’s always gotta be in charge. Just a matter of who.
Anyway, democracy is either good or it isn't. I'm of the opinion that it isn't, but it's queer to me that one could champion democratic ideals and then complain about the demographics. I vehemently disagree with the idea that white men are somehow incapable of cataloguing the world's knowledge, purely because they're not black or Chinese or women or something else, for obvious reasons.
It's interesting that this seems to be connected to the usual group of troublemakers, people who are easily offended, but we'll see where this leads.
Can someone please explain why they do this? You'd think that with $100M/yr in donations, hosting stubs wouldn't be a problem.
As you note, obviously the concern has nothing to do with hosting bandwidth or similar. The concern driving the removal of stubs and other undermaintained pages are (1) editorial, relating to the quality of Wikipedia as a resource and (2) the efficient expenditure of maintenance labor.
The effort by volunteers to maintain Wikipedia utterly dwarfs monetary donations to the foundation even by the most conservative estimates. Similarly, the amount of potential harm caused to the world (or an individual, or to the public's goodwill towards wikipedia) due to an article which is grievously incorrect or malicious due to being unmaintained also dwarfs petty operating considerations.
The concern is that articles that no one cares about are potentially places where damaging content could fester and dealing with them, even inadequately, requires expenditure of editorial resources which could be better applied elsewhere.
There are contributors at both extremes of this ideological split, though most people are somewhere in between. The political dynamic has created something of a impasse where contributors more on the extreme end of include-everything oppose the addition of tools that would allow less aggressive handling (such as making those pages accessible only to logged-in users, whom are presumably better informed about the sausage making) because of the justified concern that these measures would also be applied to more borderline cases which are currently included.
That could describe the bulk of the millions of articles, why single out stubs for the axe specifically
It has a million behaviors that few can explain clearly-- some are historical baggage, others have critical subtle interactions. There are historical reasons for sure-- e.g. relatively early in WP's history there were a number of editors that mass created all sorts of quasi-random articles using automation. But are there good reasons to keep doing it? Dunno. Maybe someone more active than I has a better idea.
If the meta of wikipedia is interesting to you, you might find these notes I made for a talk I wrote in circa 2008 or so which addresses why WP's behavior is often kind of inexplicable to humans and why that isn't a problem or at least why it's not avoidable: https://people.xiph.org/~greg/zen.wp.txt
> The concern is that articles that no one cares about
I wonder how they determine which articles no one cares about. A page about a notable person on Pitcairn Island might be accessed once a day by every single one of its inhabitants but that would only show as 1500 page views by 50 users per month.
Like everything on Wikipedia the answer is some messy mixture of formal and informal processes, automation, and 8.2 kilotons of thinking meat ... which often gets it wrong but gets it right often enough to produce something truly great.
I haven't been involved in wikipedia gnoming for quite a while but I think: I think in practice what happens is that various editors who care about such things go around proposing stubs for deletion based on whatever criteria they think makes sense, and then other people sometimes oppose those proposed deletions (or moves to draftspace) with arguments and improving edits. So the criteria essentially is a measure of literal care put in by editors to preserve the article.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy?oldi...
Nor was it what Fram did. Fram proposed deletion, of newly created articles (that had not sat dormant, moreover), and put the articles up for community discussion. The people who actually did the deletion were other people. Here's one such stub deleted by David Gerard, for example.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Leone_national_cerebral...
One of the reasons why they should have communicated better is seen in the following abstract. It also demonstrates how toxic the community is and reminds me a lot of how GamerGate started: The ex-boyfriend of the game developer of "Depression Quest" alleged, in a very long rant, that she was sleeping with a game journalist for a good review in order to profit from it. Of course, that was complete bullshit as, even believing she slept with him, (a) he did not write a review for the game and (b) the game is for free. It is and was never about actual misconduct on the side of the victim of harassment but rather about their identity and how that upsets the community because they're an "Other" in "their" space (here, a woman and a transgender editor)
> Those dynamics are central to Fram’s ban. Egged on by Fram’s insistence that the foundation had actually banned him because of a grudge, and stymied by the foundation’s refusal to name the complainant, Wikipedians began to scour his history on the platform, looking for someone to blame.
> Much of that blame fell, perhaps predictably, on a woman and a transgender editor. In 2017, a fledgling Wikipedian accused Fram of monitoring her activity on the site to such an extent that felt like harassment. The editor, whose contributions focused on women athletes, lesbian history, and abortion rights, felt that Fram’s pattern of correcting her spelling and deleting her stubs — short, unfinished articles that are culled when they sit dormant for too long — demonstrated a lack of good faith.
[...]
> More recently, Fram had an acrimonious semantic debate with a high-profile transgender editor over whether referring to them as “xe” constituted misgendering. It culminated in an ugly claim by Fram that he would not be misracing a black person by calling them the n-word, only being racist. "Please, stop being cruel to individuals whose names have come up in the course of this issue"
> On Wikipedia and in the forums of Wikipediocracy, a site where Wikipedians gather to discuss and criticize Wikipedia, users speculated about a secret romantic connection between the woman editor and a member of the Wikimedia Foundation board and about whether the trans editor might’ve been pretending to be trans to win a fight with Fram. The vitriol toward those two users grew so intense that Risker chastised some Wikipedians in her critical note about the ban.
Much of that blame fell, predictably, on the one and only person we know that the Wikimedia Foundation had taken the essentially unprecedented step of bypassing the standard community process to intervene against Fram on behalf of. (Because she publicly said so on her userpage, and Fram also confirmed this.) Framing it as though folks were just picking on some random woman because of misogyny is downright dishonest.
This framing is especially dubious since this seems to involve an area where the Wikimedia Foundation has had conflict-of-interest issues for a long time and where people's distrust of the Foundation demonstrably has nothing to do with gender or sex - the Wikipedian in Residence program. The Gibraltapedia fiasco, for example, involved entirely white cishet men so far as I can tell.
"WP editor gets unprecedented temp ban, community taken aback" would be rather factual IMO.
"he had received two previous “conduct warnings” from the foundation’s Trust and Safety Council for his incivil style toward other Wikipedians"
"In 2017, a fledgling Wikipedian accused Fram of monitoring her activity on the site to such an extent that felt like harassment" and
"It culminated in an ugly claim by Fram that he would not be misracing a black person by calling them the n-word, only being racist"
As for that description of an accusation, anyone who naively created stub articles ("this is what I know, hopefully others will add to it", I've been there) might know how quickly having stuff deleted and being berated on your talk page can go. That can "feel" like all sorts of things, but if there was really something undue going on, I would like to hear it from more than one person, because this is more about patterns in the data of WP in contrast to other data on WP (e.g. how admins normally behave), not how it feels for a WP newbie.
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_response_t...
> Endorse with an additional request: if and when an editor with an instance of problematic editing such as WP:CopyVio is identified, en-WP admins and editors – including Fram – may scrutinize other edits of that editor. WMFOffice accepts that this is neither stalking nor evidence of hostility or harassment, rather such efforts are in good faith and necessary to maintain or improve the "Quality and Reliability" of the en-WP.
> he would not be misracing a black person by calling them the n-word, only being racist
How is that not true, technically? I mean, without the context of the actual dispute, this is the weirdest form of gossip. from the same WP page:
> I came here after reading some quotes which show a surreal level of straw men and evidence fabrication against Fram: a post where he said writing the n-word is unacceptable was labeled a racial slur! (I hope I dreamed that.)
so I clicked on the link there, and finally found the orginal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:No...
Reading comment and the discussion before it... to say this was "an ugly claim" is silly to me, and it only "culminated" in that because the other party didn't respond. Too much spooky language, no meat.
Merriam-Webster defines toxic as "extremely harsh, malicious, or harmful", and I think the disconnect is that in my mind, I associate "toxic" with malicious and harmful, not with "extremely harsh". I mean, was George Carlin a toxic comedian? He certainly was extremely harsh, but he meant well, he actually had a point, and so on. Of course, he wasn't always harsh.
I simply don't know if it's true for said admin, but if he was just a dick to everyone, the community would be relieved, not upset, and the charges wouldn't need to get trumped up like this, how it "culminated in an ugly claim", as if that was him being toxic, rather than being treated in a toxic manner, which would be my reading. Right at the beginning of that thread Fram said:
> The repeated statements you made that people "misgendered" you, that they "declared that they personally hate" you, and so on, from those discussions, are much worse personal attacks than what you are now trying to raise here. As far as I can see, no one adressed you with "Peh" in those discussions either. While yo may prefer "they" and it would be more courteous if people used this, there is no misgendering happening if they instead use "xe", which is explicitly intended to be gender-neutral. Your constant misrepresentation of what others said and constant playing the gender / minority / prosecution card is rapidly growing stale
But it's constant bait and switch from there, and that's not Fram's fault.
When I see "almost always being right on the underlying merits in a dispute, but going about it in a fairly obnoxious way" with regard to an editor I imagine things like finding someone doing something in violation of the policy then systematically going around and reverting them (instead of fixing the edits) and leaving them impersonal meat-bot "Your edits are bad and you should feel bad" notes, then when target flips out and starts accusing the correcting-editor of a vendetta, instead of backing off and bringing in help they just cite policy chapter and verse, escalating what could have been an education into an argument-- not because they get off on arguments, but because they suck at interacting with other humans online... Stuff like that.
There is a super wide range for potentially less than great behavior on Wikipedia much of which doesn't overlap with what you'd otherwise consider unprofessional or uncivil conduct.
For me toxic means unpleasant and harmful. It's slightly a stronger term that obnoxious (although I read "fairly obnoxious" in the British reading of the work "fairly", meaning "extremely"), but it's definitely on the same continuum.
Both mean rude, difficult to work with and likely to be harmful to the community because people leave rather than deal with them.
Also, what is your take on this? Why do you think the foundation, that usually only steps in when someone is posting something highly illegal like child porn etc., bypassed the orb committee this time? Why is the complaint being shrouded in secrecy?
There's definitely something funny going on, and this is the only line of reasoning that makes sense to me. But I'm open to other ideas.
I've seen no explanation in the article or in any of the discussion which would justify keeping the arbcom in the dark here. It's quite surprising, but not the first recent incident of WMF doing this.
You're expressing an interesting observation but then ruining it with an overly politicized generalization that reflects poorly on you and your position.
Every single sentence in your comment is without a factual base - and you still manage to make massive leaps of logic between them. It is clear that you are motivated by an anti-feminist standpoint that has little connection with actual reality or contemporary feminist thought. And for some reason, you deem it justified to harass users for it. If a substantial portion of Wikipedia's user base is like you, then that's pretty unhealthy.
Added: I'm not sure that we can know why the Foundation chose to act on this basis. It could have been personal in the way you imply, but this was a controversial editor who had strongly opposed Foundation initiatives before (Media view, Visual Editor, "next-gen" discussion platform to replace wiki-like talk pages, etc.) So I'd rather not speculate - the Foundation didn't need anything more than a flimsy pretext, and a formal complaint could certainly serve that purpose.