The problem as I see it is that Johnny became a party to the fight, even if that was not his intention. And he engaged directly with Panic to argue on fine points.
After the initial moderation, Panic brought the fight to Johnny, not the other way around. Panic is petulant, something he's admitted to several times before. Johnny became a moderator at Panic's request, and when Panic didn't get what he wanted, he started a new argument with a new target. The fact that the target of Panic's aggression changed (from Darklama to Johnny) doesnt change Johnny's initial ruling in the moderation case, nor does it excuse Panic from the results of that moderation. It was decided that Panic could not continue to behave the way he had been, and when he did, Johnny blocked him.
Consider a parallel with you involved. If Panic loses this round of arbitration, he is going to start a fight with you as well. Is somebody going to jump in and say "Let's overturn Rob's decision, because he was engaged in a personal fight with Panic"? You may not care about your membership at wikibooks, but I for one would feel the loss if you stopped contributing all together (blocked or pushed out).
The main thing I wanted to do here is to avoid the same sort of mistakes that Johnny made, particularly as I don't think doing a user block is necessarily the best course of action when dealing with an edit war, except perhaps to cool things down a bit and make people pause to think for a moment.
The edit war wasn't the main rationale for the block anyway. Panic has a long history of biting newbies, being uncivil, and starting fights. Somewhere you have to draw the line and realize that wikibooks is about collaboratively authoring textbooks, not about dealing with Panic's particular brand of bullshit on a daily basis. We are all just volunteers trying to write textbooks, and people who can't follow the rules shouldnt be here in the first place.
As far as appealing up the food chain, so to say, that has always been an option.
My point was that it's a bad option. In general, I would prefer for wikibook's problems to be solved by wikibookians. Look at what happens when people from outside wikibooks try to "help" us: The portal is moved to meta where it's broken and unfixable, the logo is changed to something we dont need or want, etc. Look also at what has happened in the past when Jimbo has come in to mandate something or another: I would hardly say his ruling on the videogame guides was "absolute". If panic raises a big enough stink to these people, they will come in and take action (not likely in panic's benefit), but that can't be a good thing for our project in any way.
BTW, no, I don't think that my being involved here is going to have my adminship challenged if I recommend that Panic's account be reblocked, or set up some other sort of set of "probationary" conditions for him.
Not what Johnny thought either, and look at him now. This whole situation is poison in the water, and we risk losing some genuinely helpful people. What I dont want to see is Wikibooks get hurt any more then it needs to. Helpful and friendly contributors are the only thing that we have, and the numbers are preciously small.
--Andrew Whitworth (Whiteknight)
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