Open Letter to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
They completely bypass the community procedures in place, deal out arbitrary sanctions without any explanation or justification and simultaneously refuse to deal with real issues that the community(ies) really can not deal with.
Quoting a Wikimedia steward (Rschen): "I know for Croatian [Wikipedia] we stewards point-blank asked T&S if they would do anything about it and they said no."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_response_t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_response_t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_response_t...
The open letter itself acknowledges this fact.
If processes aren't working, sometimes a shakeup and ensuing drama is required to improve things.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration_Com...
It seems fair towards both parties.
One could maybe fault the article for bringing up names and personal information about an issue that the Foundation clearly wanted to keep out of the public discussion.
But it also presents a sizable amount of information that the complaints against Fran could very well have had merit, without drawing any kind of conclusion.
I still don't have much insight into this issue, but I worry about "too white, too male" being used as a standalone reason that change is needed. When race and gender make-up leads to bias, conflicting interests, or myopia on some issue, then it's a problem that needs addressing. It very often is, but it has to be demonstrated --we can't reason by analogy that all things demographically imbalanced are unjust.
While discussing an individual, nuanced community upheavel in a important part of the modern web is interesting, there are better public forums for generalized, socio-political topics.
(You also picked a single quote , while, as I stated, the article provides much more context)
No they didn't. From editing it, perhaps; and using one specific persona. Anyone can read wikipedia without being logged in, and it's trivial to create a new account on any site.
That is likely against some part of an overly large ToS.
It’s telling that the Wikipedia community’s response is “How do we deal with WMF” and not “How do we deal with this admin”
1. I would consider it inappropriate for the Linux Foundation to remove Linus without the involvement of the community. They're there to be stewards of the project, not to run it, and while I have problems with Linus, I also have (different, unrelated, not directly comparable) problems with the corporate control of LF, and it would set a precedent that other decisions are in the hands of LF. And besides there's the practical problem that if Linus is still wanted by the community, banning one toxic asshole won't change the culture. If LF wants to advocate for the community to decide they no longer want Linus, that would be fine (and I'd honestly support it) and they should implement the community consensus if it emerges. (If they want to no longer pay Linus upwards of a half million dollars per year, that would certainly be within their rights, too.)
2. Along those lines it seems difficult to believe that Wikipedia's culture problem is a single dude. If we admit for the sake of argument that we do want WMF to ban assholes (which I can see the merits of), that's likely to translate to mass bans, which the existing community governance structures should at least be consulted in. (Even if one of the possible conclusions is "the existing community leadership are all asshole enablers and need to be stripped of power," make that decision after having the conversation.)
3. From reading around https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:FRAM it seems like he's one of the most vocal opponents to new features being pushed by WMF that the community seems to not be enthusiastic about. See the comment starting "In the absence of any explanation, the cynic in me guesses...."
So what did he do for him to get a Wikipedia "restraining order" against him?
AND... he broke that restraining order by mentioning her in some comments.
I mean, this isn't some statement about "banning all assholes" so much as action against a single person who refused to stop harassing another person.
This is why the Open Letter is so elegant written. It does not speculate. It addresses the core issue which is the lack of solid evidence and community process.
But then it re-raises the question of why community governance couldn't handle this, since the worry of the existing community leadership being assholes themselves doesn't apply. Banning users from harassing other users, and enforcing it, seems like a good chunk of what ArbCom already does, no? If WMF wants to take this role, that seems likely beneficial and fine (to me, as a non-Wikipedian observer) but shouldn't they coordinate with ArbCom?
(Also, they should say that, because there are now a dozen other theories of what Fram did, as you can see from these comments, the open letter, the BuzzFeed News article, etc. If you punish someone for X and don't say X was the offense, you're wasting an opportunity to dissuade others from doing X.)
Fram wasn't out harassing anyone.
Edit: To whoever downvoted me: The WMF T&S team (which banned Fram) did not say what was Fram banned for, neither was there any actions against him before the Arbitration Committee, there were not even any public complaints. What is happening to Fram on this thread is unjustified lynching.
Notably, having a discussion in a forum allows you to say, "Ah, thanks, I was wrong." Lynching does not.
What use is free speech if I only grant it to people who agree with me?
That's quite serious. How does someone get a warning like that from WMF?
Essentially you are trying to say that Fram is a harasser because he got a warning from T&S. But that is not how T&S works. They (as far as is publicly known) react to any reports of misbehavior with (without investigation) trying to deescalate the situation by asking to stop interaction between concerned parties. Usually this only applies to Wikimedia staff, contractors, participants at Wikimedia events, etc. The fact that Fram even got a "warning" from the T&S is quite damning for T&S because they usually do not meddle in such stuff as was happening between him and LauraHale (for the uninitiated, she was writing a lot of, let us say it bluntly, crap articles and edits [0]; and he was, as a good editor, trying to fix those edits repeatedly), because of the implicated power that you can have over the Wikimedia communities by knowing someone on T&S and/or the Board.
[0] She was writing duplicate paragraphs and mistranslating from a language she does not speak in an absurd manner.
Edit: I deleted unfounded speculation I made against LauraHale. Sorry.
"To be clear, we are not placing an interaction ban between you and Laura at this time".
"We remain convinced that the activity on Laura’s articles listed above was not intended to intimidate or make her feel uncomfortable".
The statement before the one you posted was quite clear. Do not interact with her in any way. At all. Nothing. Don't even contact other admins and ask them to do it.
The problem with the accusation of cherry picking is that I don't have an issue if you would include the full text. In context it is pretty clear that what they wanted was to prevent any further friction between the two editors. If they thought it was harassment and they intended to issue a punitive action then they would have done that. WMF is quite cable to call out harassment without needing to wrapping it up with false statements of "To be clear, we are not placing an interaction ban" and "We remain convinced that it was not intended to intimidate or make her feel uncomfortable".
I know what I've been told by WMF, which is that he was a harasser and that en:wiki failed to stop his harassment.
I know also what I've read in the fram-gigantathread, where a bunch of admins describe him as kind of an asshole, and say that it's being going on for years, but then go on to excuse that because he makes a lot of edits.
There is another thing wrong with your comment: how could the English Wikipedia community attempt to stop Fram's alleged harassment if no harassment is known. Whether you want to sanction someone or just improve that someone's behavior, you have got to give an indication of what is wrong with their behavior.
> told by WMF
No comment.
> I know also what I've read in the fram-gigantathread, where a bunch of admins describe him as kind of an asshole, and say that it's being going on for years, but then go on to excuse that because he makes a lot of edits.
Harasser =/= asshole.
There is a war on between the truth and the sensation of the high horse.
From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/895438118, linked by
"And then a few hours ago, they posted my one year ban, and helpfully gave the actual reason. Which is one edit, this one. That's it."
From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_response..., which is "Fram's response on Commons."
In the Fram case the closest we got is that he said the word "fuck" in regard to a statement that all admins who refuse two-token authentication would get banned, and that someone felt harassed after several stub articles had been deleted, although that is mostly speculations as WMF has explicitly said they won't give out specifics because of privacy concerns.
No it isn't. WMF said that they had allegations of harassment, that they weren't going to release details of that harassment to protect the accuser[1], and that after having looked at several _years_ of fram's edits they decided to take action.
[1] and looking at this thread and the wikipedia thread they were right to do so.
"And then a few hours ago, they posted my one year ban, and helpfully gave the actual reason. Which is one edit, this one[1]. That's it." - Fram
""This decision has come following extensive review of your conduct on that project and is an escalation to the Foundation’s past efforts to encourage course correction, including a conduct warning issued to you on April 2018 and a conduct warning reminder issued to you on March 2019. With those actions in mind, this ban has been triggered following your recent abusive communications on the project, as seen here [1]." - WMF
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Ar...
The _factually matter_ is, the only explicit proof we have as justification of creating this ban is the evidence that WMF gave. The warning on March 2019 was about the alleged harassment, which WMF said "We remain convinced that the activity on Laura’s articles listed above was not intended to intimidate or make her feel uncomfortable".
The speculation is that the provided diff with the word "fuck" is a false herring and the actually reason for the ban is something like them changing their mind of on the March 2019 decision, or something completely else where the they want to protect the accuser. We don't know, the information is not given, its not out there.
We have to decide if we believe fram or wmf.
I know I don't believe fram.
I see no reason to suspect that and I do not believe that WMF would not say something if a Wikipedia Administrator wrote a fake email in their name.
> We have to decide if we believe fram or wmf.
That is a false proposition. People can choose to believe different speculations, but there is no evidence that the statement from Fram are not written by Fram and the statement from WMF is not written by WMF. I see no evidence to doubt the authenticity of each parties statements.
FUD.
The issue with the WMF T&S team's actions is that they are completely unaccountable, not appealable, not backed with any kind of justification or proof. And they bypassed the Arbitration Committee.
> It’s telling that the Wikipedia community’s response is “How do we deal with WMF” and not “How do we deal with this admin”
The response did include heavy scrutinization of Fram's activities to find any possible reason for sanctions against him.
The communities reaction is probably due to seeing the value he brought to Wikipedia.
"He is a toxic asshole" is a very subjective opinion compared to the arguments brought forward.
Personally, I don't think there is any problem with Linux/Wikipedia that isn't in the eye of the beholder.
The inability of ANI and arbcom to do anything is the long running issue. They had their chance, they fucked it up, it's entirely unsurprising that WMF is enforcing the most basic wikipedia conventions.
There's a power-struggle going on where one body is taking an action another body feels they should have control or at least input into.
That this power-struggle occurs and especially that it happens in public is healthy, IMO.
But ArbCom should really be looking itself in the mirror right now. The fact is, under their watch Fram was free to be a huge asshole to contributors for some 15 years. ArbCom suggests that someone should have told them they needed to do something. But that seems like a very weak excuse for the senior conduct body. You are the ones who need to be setting and enforcing the rules that allow for contributions!
IMO no organization should tolerate assholes, so they got the result right but clearly did not do it the right way. I think ArbCom needs to handle these cases, at least a decade quicker than in this case.
My main point is ArbCom should have already handled this, perhaps a decade ago.
So they are broken. If they want a healthy Wikipedia their first priority should be fixing themselves. They should understand why a toxic asshole was running free for many years under their watch and how they can prevent it from happening again. Maybe they are doing this behind the scenes, but it's not clear to me they even understand they have a problem.
(BTW, no one seems to be disputing that Fram is an asshole. Maybe I missed it, but if true, then there's no question that in a community-driven site, something needs to be done about it. Some people seem to want to believe that it could be simultaneously true that Fram could be a big asshole AND be a good editor. In the context of a community-driven site, those people are wrong. Driving off potentially valuable contributors is cardinal sin.)
Edit: I did not down-vote you, nor would I do it if I could.
It's also wrong to suggest that fram was only abusive to people who shouldn't have been on wikipedia. Read the thread and buzzfeed articles linked here: even people on his side describe him as toxic.
Quite a claim, maybe give some evidence for that? I saw no example of such behavior.
> even people on his side describe him as toxic.
I am tempted to call you "toxic". Terms like "brusque", "rude", "asshole", "harasser", "toxic" are not equivalent, but you repeatedly try to assign some of those labels to Fram based on others.
"Brusque, bordering on rude sometimes" is not even a bad thing for a Wikipedia user. And "like Inspector Javert at times" is not really as strong as "toxic".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
Can you give an actual example where Fram was abusive, harassing, whatever? This link contains (as far as contra-Fram material goes) only unsubstantiated accusations (concerning a medium where public examples should be relatively easy to find).
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=895438118
Do you think that's good for a community?
Obviously words like "asshole" and "toxic" include value judgements". But I don't think it's a very strong value judgement in this case.
Fram's edit you linked is on point criticism of the Arbitration Committee and I think it may have been good for the community. It would have been better, more efficient in transmitting its intended message, more influential if it were written in a better style (the kind exhibited on HN).
I concur that there is danger of Fram's edits promoting bad style in other Wikipedia editors; but there is a tradeoff here that must be made, because good style takes effort and time (both for practice and execution), more so when one lacks relevant education; and some things need to be said (often saying something sooner is more effective than saying it later, too).
I guess some people place most blame on the use of the word "fuck", but using it was warranted. Think about what such profanity can accomplish, it has the power to give a certain tone to one's message. Those who wield language with great command and effectiveness might think of ways to accomplish the same or better tone without using profanities, but for the rest of us profanities are a sometimes necessary shortcut through all the time and exertion needed for better style.
Anyways, let us suppose you want to make Wikimedia projects more "civil", how long of a ban/block do you think profanities should warrant? Two days? A week? Certainly not a year, at least not the first time such a sanction is used.
All the scrutiny Fram has been given during this scandal really ought to have found some more serious violations by Fram to warrant a year long ban.
But let us not forget that nobody outside the WMF employ even knows why Fram was actually banned, nor what should they do not to be banned themselves. The T&S is a complete unknown. They refuse to fix some huge issues (like with the Croatian Wikipedia), but hand out apparently unwarranted unexplained unappealable bans across some Wikipedias (like what happened to Fram). The fact is that Foundation employees mysteriously attacked the community that produces value for the Foundation, of course it is going to raise big questions, which the Foundation is not even bothering to answer!??
The thing is, the community volunteers to produce valuable content for the Foundation, thus trust in the good intentions of the Foundation employees and governance is needed. Ironically the Trust and Safety team made that trust implode and a shroud of fear rise by issuing unexplained bans that well may be malicious or misguided or corrupted, but the community just can not judge the T&S team's actions, because they are unexplained, not supported by any evidence. Even as rulemakers the T&S team does not work, because their actions are totally unexplained, they give no guidance as to how one should act in the aim of not being banned.
It might turn out in the end that Fram was rightfully banned (maybe the issue is something like child pornography), but that will not matter, because the issue is not Fram, the issue is that Foundation employee (or contractor, which is what most of T&S are [0]) actions are not accountable to the community.
Without stretching, IMO, the post is angry, aggressive, stupid, arrogant and abusive.
Anyway, you asked for an example and you’ve been given one. If it hasn’t penetrated by now I don’t think it will, but you have it.
To be honest the fact that profanities themselves are not the thing that bothers you is even more unsettling to me than if it were the case. Suppose your standards (what they are is not at all clear to me) were imposed on Wikimedia projects. Who would be capable of judging by them and making heads roll? And what would be implications for free speech?
One thing that has not been noted up to now in the discussion, is that even if T&S has, say, decided to impose standards like your's on Wikipedias (which does not appear to be the case, although as I have said already, everything regarding their action is murky), how would it be fair to arbitrarily, without notice or warning start imposing them on Fram specifically.
Again, while you are attacking Fram you are spinning the discussion away from greater issue of a charity corporation being nontransparent to the extreme in making heads roll in the community its value is based on. How are the Wikimedia project communities (some call it a movement, actually) supposed to keep their spirit necessary for volunteering with such arbitrarily capricious and totally unexplained bans happening?
One of the things that has made me better has been people who were willing to tell me "please stop", "you seriously screwed up", and "good job"- but if you listen to the wrong people, you won't get anywhere.
Fram seems like one of those people that's actually worth listening to, and that his criticism and praise have some merit.
You can be blunt and direct without being an asshole. It's not that hard.
Storytime!
I'm teaching introductory science at a regional college somewhere in the Southern US. Admission standards are low, especially for the nursing school. Somehow there's a large number of students from a disadvantaged background who have been directed into nursing by family or their guidance counselor or whoever. This describes half of the kids in my class.
Preparedness in math is a great problem, especially for kids from rural or urban ghettoes. Many students have no clue about basic algebra, some can't even do fractions. There is a prerequisite math course that kids must take before the science course, but it fails to fix these deficiencies.
I demand that my students solve multiple-step word problems, simply because it's a needed skill that will come up in later courses and in their careers. Math and reading isn't my concern, teaching science is. Besides, medication errors are the third-leading cause of hospital deaths. Someone who can't read or calculate dosage has no business being anywhere near a patient. Without hyperbole, it's a public health issue!
That's what I told my students, but they don't care. In their minds I am the obstacle between them and a lucrative career. I force them to continue in poverty. If someone has advice I'm glad to hear. It's an institutional problem that the institution comprehensively fails to address. Administration's main interest is tuition income and student satisfaction.
EDIT: For the downvoters, my question is because I'm tired of being manipulated by parties on both sides of any issue only disclosing what interests them.
Fram explained that he had received two previous “conduct warnings” from the foundation’s Trust and Safety Council for his incivil style toward other Wikipedians.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/wikiped...
Personally, I'm reminded of Linus Torvald's "voluntary" leave of absence.
With great power comes a great need to act with civility?
I, for one, would prefer a world of people who act in good faith, even if they address issues in a coarse and gruff manner at times; to a world of petty, passive-aggressive crybullies who ultimately contribute nothing of value, nothing but a veneer of shallow procedural "niceness".
These aren’t the only two options available.
That goes well beyond merely being blunt or rude.
>BU Rob13, a former member of ArbCom who recently retired from administration, said that Fram’s behavior toward him, including “taking shots” at him in an edit summary and following him to unrelated cases, felt like harassment.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/wikiped...
The statement the powers that be released would seem to bear this out.
>In a statement to BuzzFeed News, the organization said it had leveled the ban to maintain "respect and civility" on the platform. "Uncivil behavior, including harassment, threats, stalking, spamming, or vandalism, is against our Terms of Use, which are applicable to anyone who edits on our projects," it said.
Presumably those who felt stalked by him are wary of making the accusations public, since at this point that may invite additional harassment from others.
[1]: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/wikiped...
The community does have systems to handle such situations though (e.g. the arbitration committee which has produced this letter).
Of course, these systems may or may not be adequate - I am not qualified to say, but it seems to me that the chief complaint here is that the WMF did not involve any community systems without having previously expressed concerns about them.
This suggests that either the WMF does not consider the systems adequate, in which case the arbitration committee is quite right to request that the WMF communicate this to them, or the WMF has some genuinely top-secret reason to ban someone that even the arbitration committee cannot be trusted with (which for a matter as light as a 1-year ban due to community reports doesn't seem likely).
In a community driven effort, those are contradictory statements.
If you care to any extent about the issue, going down the rabbit hole and looking for yourself would be the best course of action.
If it seems tedious, pointless and gossipy, asking for other people’s super biased TLDR wouldn’t help anyway, so perhaps ignoring this event could be a course of action (that’s what I did after reading 2 pages of finger pointing BTW)
Wikimeida foundation thinks it's cute that their unpaid content worker bees have a governance system. But we just saw what always happens when an autonomous decision maker with delegated authority makes the wrong decision.
[The Wikimedia Foundation’s (WMF) Trust and Safety team] have reiterated that they are not willing to reconsider the ban, nor will they turn the full evidence over to the community or ArbCom for review.
I assume there have already been attempts at decentralized, more democratic versions of it?
Imagine two people arguing about the validity of climate change, with one of them citing ExxonPedia.org and another citing GreenPeacePedia.org. It would be a nightmare.
True, but one of them will be loved by Google, so their side will be widely visible, while the other will not. I don't see any incentive for the side in control of Wikipedia to not want this.
> I am interested in Wikimedia communities
Sorry to disappoint, I wasn't very involved even before they started gutting the non-politics stuff. I just saw the good articles start disappearing and picked up enough discussion to know what the people at fault were called.
The math and science articles seem to be holding out, at least, although I notice they axed Binary_lambda_calculus a couple years ago, so I'm not optimistic.
Did Fram harass other editors?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
A constitutional crisis hits English Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
Mysterious ban, admin resignations, Wikimedia Thailand rising: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
> A troll on an offsite forum posted a graphic written depiction of myself engaged in sexual activity with another editor. Fram repeatedly posted a link to this depiction on Wikipedia, even after it was revision deleted.
If Fram did this then there should be a log viewable by a Wikipedia admin.
There are apparently over 1,000 admins. At least one of them should be able to scroll back through Fram's activity, find the case cited, and report publicly that they can corroborate this anonymous accusation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
Snark aside, it really looks ugly from the outside.
EDIT: I was misinformed, as geofft correctly point out in a comment below.
Any member of the Debian community (even just a user) can file an RM bug against ftp.debian.org, if they provide justification. That is the standard procedure. The FTP masters perform the removal, but in the majority of cases someone else (the package's own maintainer, a member of the release team, a member of the "QA team" which is also everybody) files it, and says "request of maintainer"/"QA"/etc.
It is clear from the linked bug that antiharassment requested the removal and ftpmaster performed it. That's normal procedure. And the text was clearer than usual that ftpmaster should make their own independent judgment about whether it was justified (even though they always can).
Also, I now see that Wikipedia’s T&S committee had a plausible reason for not referring the matter of Fram back to ArbCom: It could be argued that ArbCom might be biased against Fram, considering Fram’s comments on record about ArbCom.
Like when OJ was on trial. Or Bill Cosby and Louis CK were found to be creeps.
So this Fram gets a few warnings about his behavior crossing the line, but continues on. Who's going to take him on?
Just the difficulty of enforcing rules on people who are extremely popular. Couldn't think of any better examples.
People read, get riled, takes sides and form poles.
Lots of wasted energy.
Fram. Banning Fram. Local vs central cabal governance. WWF can play the bad cop and take the hit. There are more Frams, more ArbComs and more WWFs to take their place.
Some day bots will rule, grafting in disparate knowledge graphs.
Is the internet gonna stop using Wikipedia?
If the humans are smart, best stick together and (start) build consensus and trust networks.