I agree with Dragontamer (although I'm sure everybody already knows my opinions on this matter). A user was blocked for misbehavior, and he complained about it. I can't imagine any user (besides a vandal) getting blocked and not complaining. This doesnt mean that every instance needs to become some kind of arbitration nightmare. What I don't see, besides Panic's plea, is a reason to review or even overturn SBJohnny's decision. People who make bold decisions to benefit the project should be rewarded, and I dont think we should be introducing unnecessary oversight into our system.

--Andrew Whitworth (Whiteknight)

*Sigh* it was only a matter of time. Get a bunch of people working together, and people will suddenly not want to work together for whatever reason :-/

I have not looked at the current issue (in fact, this is the first time I have heard of it. But I feel that in this specific case, community consensus may be a bad thing. Eventually, there may be groups of users vs other groups of users. Maybe Jimbo or some other person would have to step in there.

Oy, this is a whole new can-o-worms in Wikibooks policy...

--Dragontamer _______________________________________________ Textbook-l mailing list Textbook-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/textbook-l

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John McC wrote:

I don't object to either oversight or arbitration (in fact I think both are necessary), but the format here is truly appalling. For one thing, the "plaintiff/defendant" structure is unnecessarily hostile, made even more so because it's really unclear who the plaintiffs and defendants are. Are we reviewing my block? Panic's behavior? If (as it seems) we are reviewing Panic's behavior, it seems a bit strange to name me as the "plaintiff": I'm not involved in an editorial dispute with Panic... my role has been as a mediator and later arbitrator of a dispute that's been going on for years without any previous arbitration of constructive mediation.

Worse, this has devolved into what looks more like an inquisition than anything else.

What I've done here is turn this into a formal debate. While prehaps we can change the terms "plaintiff" and "defendant", the purpose here is to allow everybody to air their concerns and grievences in a public manner that can be reviewed later on by all parties involved, and by those chared with oversight of this project, including other administrators, stewards, and ultimately the WMF board of trustees. Without this information being collected, nobody can possibly really know what has happened without a very tedious investigation.

A key part of this is also to "equalize" the situation between administrator and registered user. Normally an admin is sitting in a very much stronger position, particularly when it gets to edit wars. By having a formal setting like this, everybody can spill their guts out and try to explain what is going on without fear of reprisals from the other parties involved.

This format also gives a cooling off of the issues at hand as well, as it is completely removed from the content where the edit war is taking place. Far from being an inquisition, what this is trying to do is to find the truth about what is going on. It is also forcing the parties involved to put to words their emotions, and try to stick to the facts rather than wear their emotions on their sleeves. This would only be related to the [[w:Spanish Inquisition]] if it were set up in such a manner that Panic had no opportunity to defend his actions at all, nor allow those sympathetic to his point of view to support him. Nor is this a witch hunt to go after SB Johnny either.

While I intend to also add my opinion on this whole issue, what I'm trying to do is allow the two parties involved to come up with a concensus on the ultimate course of actions after they have said their piece. Only if there is a strong disgreement on the ultimate course of action is a formal arbitration decision going to be made, and even that is available to appeal and reversal.

If you have a reasonable alternative, I am willing to hear about it. Mind you, the reason why this seems like a judicial proceeding is because that is a format that has worked to resolve political disputes for litterally thousands of years, and is something I'm drawing upon to help out in this situation. I'm also trying deliberately to set this up so that when it is ever invoked again, that it won't be taken lightly and will be something that all parties will want to avoid if at all possible.

What we will suffer in the long term is an even stronger reticence on the part of administrators to get involved in content disputes (I for one will certainly say "no" next time around). This particular dispute had gone on unaddressed for far longer than it should have been, and while this arbitration might end up bringing a resolution to this particular issue, it's going to make it a lot harder to address the next one.

--- Andrew Whitworth wknight8111@hotmail.com wrote:

One huge problem that administrators face at all times when an edit war is taking place is that we are also very much human. It is very easy to get caught up in the moment and "choose sides", in effect becoming a party in the dispute rather than somebody who is seeking a resolution. You should be reluctant to try and get embroiled in such a manner. When it was requested that I try to come in and mediate this particular issue, I felt it had reached the point that the more information method of writing on the user talk page and trying to find a bit of middle ground would have been completely ineffective and that going that route would have put me in the position of being yet another voice in the fight but no more. And perhaps turning the fight from a mere edit war to a full all out wheel war.

That is clearly something I want to avoid.

I hope that when all is said and done, that this will actually strengthen the position of administrators, as it will give us an additional "tool" to fall back upon when editorial disputes are starting to get out of hand. As an administrator, you can say "if you don't like my suggestion, take it [[Wikibooks:Arbitration|here]] instead." Hopefully those who have a cool head will think twice about that suggestion and try to resolve the issue first.

What I've done here is turn this into a formal debate. While prehaps we can change the terms "plaintiff" and "defendant", the purpose here is to allow everybody to air their concerns and grievences in a public manner that can be reviewed later on by all parties involved, and by those chared with oversight of this project, including other administrators, stewards, and ultimately the WMF board of trustees.

I want to make this perfectly clear right now, I do like the way you are going about this process. This arbitration hearing has been set up in a clear, well-defined way that does give everybody a shot to talk. Barring the use of some specific terminology, I think the process is a good general model to use in the future.

What I don't like, (and what Johnny has been pointing out), is that Johnny himself served as a moderator in this situation (between Darklama and Panic). Panic asked Johnny (and myself) to come in and moderate the discussion. Johnny's decision was that Panic was in the wrong, and his continued bad behavior warranted a block.

What this arbitration hearing is doing, is essentially punishing (or threatening to punish) Johnny for acting as a volunteer moderator for Panic in the first place. Panic didn't like the outcome, but that's tough beans: He asked for a moderator because he wanted to maintain unilateral control over his book, but what he got was a punishment instead. We're creating a precedent where moderation and arbitration can be appealed ad infinitum until everybody gives up or storms off. Somewhere we need to say "A decision has already been made on this issue, and we need to stand by our decisions". Don't think for an instant that if you agree with Johnny and have panic blocked, that he won't appeal higher up the chain (WMF intervention?) to have you de-admined as well. Maybe he won't succeed, but tell me having your adminship on the line over this won't upset you pretty badly as well?

--Andrew Whitworth

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Andrew Whitworth wrote:

What I don't like, (and what Johnny has been pointing out), is that Johnny himself served as a moderator in this situation (between Darklama and Panic). Panic asked Johnny (and myself) to come in and moderate the discussion. Johnny's decision was that Panic was in the wrong, and his continued bad behavior warranted a block.

What this arbitration hearing is doing, is essentially punishing (or threatening to punish) Johnny for acting as a volunteer moderator for Panic in the first place. Panic didn't like the outcome, but that's tough beans: He asked for a moderator because he wanted to maintain unilateral control over his book, but what he got was a punishment instead. We're creating a precedent where moderation and arbitration can be appealed ad infinitum until everybody gives up or storms off. Somewhere we need to say "A decision has already been made on this issue, and we need to stand by our decisions". Don't think for an instant that if you agree with Johnny and have panic blocked, that he won't appeal higher up the chain (WMF intervention?) to have you de-admined as well. Maybe he won't succeed, but tell me having your adminship on the line over this won't upset you pretty badly as well?

--Andrew Whitworth

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.

I will conceed that Darklama seems to have taken the brunt of most of the attention by Panic, and that Johnny was trying to step in and help resolve the issue. It was a valiant effort, but it also blew up and went out of control as well. 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. A content freeze would have been almost as effective to do the same thing, and there are other options available that may not have been nearly as controvercial.

As far as appealing up the food chain, so to say, that has always been an option. And Jimbo has indeed come into Wikibooks on a number of occasions and tried to establish policy based on promptings from some users trying to resolve one sort of fight or another. The problem with appealing to Jimbo or the WMF, is that once the decision is made it is absolutely final. Besides, they don't have the time to have to review every little petty user edit war that blows up with Wikimedia projects, which is why it is important to have some trusted users to be able to sit in between the foundation and users in this situation.

My long experience in dealing with stewards is that they don't want to get involved with these sort of disputes either. It isn't so much that they can't do this, but it is more an apathy regarding projects they are not generally involved with on a more regular basis. Both that and for a steward to get into the dirty details of a project they aren't familiar with is likely to get them into a mess that just causes more problems where they are likely to be drawn into the fight.

As far as appealing this "ad infinitum", that would imply that after I'm done that he could appeal to another Wikibooks admin. Because of the way that I've structured this, I highly doubt that any other Wikibooks admin is going to touch this issue at all, so Panic has no other realistic avenues of appeal left in that regard. At best all he can do after this is to appeal to the stewards (appeal 1) and then directly to the WMF (appeal 2). That doesn't sound like an infinite number of appeals to me. Besides, with the way that all of this is structured, it will be easy for a steward to review this matter quite quickly and be able to see if the actions taken were justified. And he can't keep appealing from one steward to another, as they will be pretty much unified once a decision has been made here as well.

I will note, however, that because this is available for appeal, it keeps any power that either I or any administrator acting in the future with a similar situation in check. Administrators simply will never have absolute power. I also think it is very important to remember that admins are not infallible, and that mistakes can and do happen. You should feel as comfortable questioning the actions of an administrator as you do questioning an edit.

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. I'm not directly challenging the content itself, and I'm trying very hard to stay out of this fight. I don't want to be a party in it.

If I have a concern, it is that the rest of the admins might think I'm supporting Panic and get into a wheel war fight with me instead, with me being deadmined and my account being blocked. As far as maintaining my adminship on Wikibooks, I really could care less. My purpose in being as a human has no relationship to my status on Wikimedia projects, and I don't want to game the process. I have a desire to genuinely help out, fight vandalism, and assist to help grow Wikibooks by using some of the tools available to administrators, that is all.

What I do love is the ideas behind Wikibooks, providing free as in freedom books (aka GFDL and FOSS philosophies), and I have very much enjoyed being able to participate in the development of much of that content. If all I am able to do is simply write in those books as an anonymous user, then I'll be fine with that as well. Oh, I might be grumpy about having to go to that extreme situation, but it wouldn't be the end of the world for me.

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.

I prefer not to do this, but for clarity I will discuss some points individually.

While I may agree that this edit war is getting out of hand, the justification for performing a user block is definitely one of a grey area rather than something as clear cut as Johnny seems to be implying here.

It may be difficult to see it in hindsight, but as these things were happening, there was certainly plenty of rationale to go around. People had looked to me originally to perform the block myself (I was deemed neutral to the issue), and I refused initially because there was no precedence nor policy on this matter

The more I started to dig into reviewing Johnny's actions, and to see explicitly what exactly Panic did, the more confusing to me that it became. In addition, apparently some very heated exchanged happened on IRC that have tainted this whole process and precipitated some of this action, independent of what was actually done on Wikibooks. While I can appreciate some individuals being offended by a particular user due to some very crass and pointed remarks on IRC, that by itself doesn't justify a user block on the Wiki as a result of those heated exchanges.

As a matter of clarification, Panic never came onto IRC (as far as I know), and all the discussion in the chat room was between SBJohnny, Darklama, and myself. There were no logs on these discussions, but I can attest that they centered around us discussing panic, and determining whether a block was warranted. We discussed the matter at length, and it was a collective decision to block him. I mention these IRC chats only to show that proper forethought and discussion went into the matter before the blocks occured, and that it wasnt a rash decision by SBJohnny.

I know Wikibooks is not Wikipedia, but the policies simply havn't been established at all for Wikibooks on this topic.

If this case wasn't happening, what do you think are the odds that the wikibooks community would accept an Arbcom, or create a policy on the matter? If you look through the list of rejected policies (you can find them on [[WB:PAG]]) you will see that the community has already rejected a proposed creation of a mediation committee (which is far less imposing then an arbitration committee). Using arbitration in this case is essentially an attempt to shotgun the creation of such a mechanism into practice, when the community at large generally doesnt need or want it.

More to the point, I just want to know what is going on. Simply logs like the block log and page move log (apparently one justification for a user block) doesn't seem to from my viewpoint provide justification or a clear explaination for what has happened. It is for this reason and others that I simply requested some additional information. Based on IRC chats I've had with Johnny, there did seem to be a strong motive for the block, but it wasn't apparent right away.

I can understand this, even with all the history pages and archives and whatever, it can still be very difficult to follow a wiki-discussion from beginning to end. Unfortunately, the problem with Panic is very old, and extends very far back into the history trail. It was only brought to light with Darklama's problems, and those alone almost dont warrant a block. However, given his history and his actions with Darklama and James Bennett (being the two most recent), a block seemed warranted. Darklama probably knows most about this.

BTW, some comments here seem to imply that we should (seemingly) always accept what the other admins are doing. It is one of the key responsibilities of administrators to police each other, and make sure we aren't stepping over the line. I have been critical in the past of the actions of some administrators, although in the case of Johnny I've never had any real cause to have concern in the past. Certainly in this situation it needed to be reviewed.

I'm sure you're referring to my comments, so let me elaborate. En.wikibooks is one of the most strict projects in terms of the creation and maintenance of admins. I know we've received lots of criticism from people because of our policies. to become an admin on our project recently, candidates must be nothing less then vandal-fighting, content-contributing supermen. These are people who are, i think, worthy of some trust.

Beyond that, the current admin staff forms a pretty tight-knit group, and we do tend to discuss actions among one another in advance. A little planning in this manner reduces our need to police actions, because we have already agreed on most actions that occur. To reiterate, several of us discussed the Panic block before it happened, and we all tended to agree on the matter.

Sorry for the long email.

--Andrew Whitworth (Whiteknight)

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