Andrew Whitworth wrote:
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).
I'm not going to let that happen. First of all, what decision have I made so far? All of this complaining about the choices I've made and the dictitorial inquisition that I've started seems (at least to me) to be much ado about nothing. The only action I've done is to unblock Panic, but after a strong assurance that he would try to stay away from editing in the C++ Programming Wikibook. With the sole exception of posting a reply on a talk page there (and no other page moves or reformatting), he has done exactly that. I'm watching his user contributions page closely, but so far I havn't seen anything in the past couple of weeks that really seems out of place.
And the only editorial actions I did on the C++ Programming Wikibook myself was to post a general notice about the location of the arbitration discussion. I neither froze any pages, nor have I actually even read for that matter much of what is written in this Wikibook. I'm trying to let this play out and try to investigate what actually happened here, and to clarify what exactly did happen here to cause this to get out of control. And the editorial control over the C++ book does indeed seem to be a central issue to this whole arbitration.
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.
From the tone of this, it seems you have already tried and convicted
Panic as being irredemable and a menace to Wikibooks and not worth having around.
I am also very, very confused by this comment, and what "rules" need to be followed here that you are refering to. There are certainly unwritten rules of social discourse that would imply giving deference in many situations that perhaps Panic isn't doing, but that isn't necessarily a project policy here. Some people simply have a much more abrasive personality. That is also something hardly new to Wikibooks either, nor something held exclusively by Panic. I know Wikibooks admins with as abrasive if not more so personality than even Panic.
And this does indeed seem like a content fight, particularly when the "charges" are being discussed, as everybody involved seems to have an axe to grind about how Panic was moving content (including apparently talk pages) and "reverting" changes in various ways. And in this situation, many of these same individuals who are complaining also "fought back" and encouraged even more of this behavior by extending the fight where Panic would do one thing and they would go back and do something else that would go around and around again.
To me, that sounds exactly like an edit war. As far as "who started it", that is in many cases irrelevant and won't solve the problem at hand anyway.
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.
Ideally, I would have to agree that Wikibookians should try to solve the problems within Wikibooks, rather than getting outside authority to force the issue to a conclusion.
I can think of three major instances last year that outside authority on Wikibooks caused a huge amount of trouble: The deletion of the "three books" by Jimbo, the removal of Video Game books, and the whole mess with the Wikimania proceedings. The last one actually resulted in wheel warring going on with the same pages being deleted and undeleted by multiple individuals. All three of these issues resulted in huge defections from Wikibooks and a general halting to the growth of the project. Perhaps these were needed, and that can be debated, in terms of focusing Wikibooks on some fundimental core philosophies, but it wasn't an easy process or well liked.
BTW, in regards to the Wikibooks logo, it is Wikibookians who initiated the idea for a change. That they may not be en.wikibookians is irrelevant, and to think that English Wikibooks is the only Wikibooks project that matters here is really missing the larger picture. I wasn't too happy with the methodology to select the new logo, and I expressed some grave concerns about how it was handled. And the fact that for the most part many Wikibookians weren't really aware that the new logo was in the final stages of being selected is IMHO unfortunate as well. We do, however, need to come to a concensus if the logo that has been selected on Meta will actually be used on en.wikibooks... and I hope that this issue won't be declared by executive fiat either. It would be unfortunate if the other language Wikibooks projects use a logo that en.wikibooks is not using because we are stuck on this issue.
As far as moving the portal page to Meta, I expressed a very pointed concern about that issue, and it seemed as though my thoughts and concerns fell completely on deaf ears, as though my opinion on the subject was completely irrelevant. I'm not even really sure who agreed to the idea, as I don't recall any sort of general concensus occuring about the topic. It was a "bold move" to try and conform to be like the other Wikimedia projects, I guess, or something the developers came up with on their own. Or was that admins on Meta trying to dictate Wikibooks policies? I certainly didn't see any major cry from the other language Wikibooks projects complaining about this issue or any substantial technical merits to the current approach that justified such a change.
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)
I also don't want to set up a situation where we are spawning Wikibooks-specific vandals that are already familiar with editorial philosophies and vunerabilities for this project.
Yes, this is a tough moral tightrope to walk, but I also don't think it is completely impossible to come to a concensus here.
I also want to point out that I am trying to seek some sort of general concensus among all of those involved here about what course to take, and to try and avoid forcing an arbitrary decision, such as unilaterally blocking another user from editing or deadmining somebody. That is the last thing I really want to do here and I would like to avoid that if at all possible.