Durova wrote:

Alec, I appreciate that you're giving me some credit for stepping forward

to

take the heat for my own mistake.

Well, I appreciate your kind words. I'm a little confused by your statement of "You're wrong, but I'm not going to tell you how". Obviously, you must know that I can't actually take that on faith, but I will keep looking. ****** Fair enough. I hope you also suppose it's also fair that the drubbing I've gotten is a very strong disincentive against anyone else stepping forward, or against me saying more than I already have. There is already enough information on the table to disprove your hypothesis.

Now if you want to know why I'm on that cyberstalking list, there are several reasons. Have the decency to suppose that it is what it is, and leave the good people alone.

The cyberstalking list, problematic though it is, isn't as enigmatic as the investigations list. The investigations list was clearly formed just for the purpose of gathering evidence to support bans. The cyberstalking list might have a claim to being "support-group-esque", but the investigations list, by its name, summary, and the content of its messages, certainly appears to be a place designed to influence on-wiki actions. ****** The investigations list didn't even exist yet when I sent out the e-mail. And remember that no community standard existed, except general agreement that certain things shouldn't be discussed onsite. Even though certain methods of parsing information look obvious and trivial once they become generally known, one thing an investigator counts on is finding that kind of mistake.

So on a really basic level - something every sysop deals with - there's the newish user with a particular interest in one article who gets a 3RR block and thinks he's very clever to just register a new account. He's never heard of WP:SOCK and thinks we never have either. So he goes right back to the same article and reverts again. Sock gets blocked too. Most people come around if we talk to them at that point, but a few would rather outsmart us again. So that fellow decides to evade 3RR by doing some of his edits logged in and some of them unlogged on his underlying IP address. Yeah, we catch that too. If he continues down that path he's eventually going to get to tricks that take real effort to address. And the handful who become long term vandals are dedicated people.

you're failing to recognize the possibility of alternative explanations that place the whole thing in a

much

different light. That was a key mistake I made. You're making it too.

Well, that's a very valid possibilty. I would like to point out two critical differences though:

1. I'm not accusing you or anyone else of bad faith-- merely poor judgement. !! was suspected of actually trying to subvert it. The wpinvestigations-l sleuths are merely suspected of exhibiting poor judgment. Nobody is suspecting you of subversion, we're just suspecting you guys of inadvertantly causing more harm than good. ****** Remember, that list didn't exist yet. See above.

2. I'm not trying to ban anybody. I'm just saying-- administrators of this project obviously rendered judgments on your evidence-- we should be able to see those judgments, so we can better assess how to help those individuals better contribute to the project. Worst case scenario, they have to return to the community and ask if they are still trusted. ****** Point well taken about you not trying to ban anybody. As for the rest, as I've said before, these were individuals who were missing the same piece of evidence I was missing. I'm sure any of them would have discarded the hypothesis immediately if any of them had it. Also bear in mind that I was the investigator, and that I was attempting to build upon a part of some work that had been very successful in the Burntsauce and Dannycali investigations. The Burntsauce investigation was far more extensive than this one and had numerous smoking guns. Dannycali was also a much clearer instance, although someone else acted while my evidence was at earlier stages. And no, that person isn't someone who saw the bad report I later wrote. There could very well have been a general respect for my successful report on Alkivar (which had many smoking guns) and Eyrian's own reaction when I blocked his sock spoke more than any evidence I could have mustered. And I want to emphasize, this really was a much weaker report than the kind of thing I usually do.

The onsite discussion got too heated to hold any real discussion of "Durova, what were you thinking?" Well I'd been pretty successful at what I had been doing and wanted to systematize it. The long term sockpuppets I'd successfully found had been working in concert with other editors who were either banned or gaming the system very seriously. And remember I had tried to ban Burntsauce half a year before, and I had been absolutely right, and he had done a lot of damage since then. When I returned in the fall and really looked into it closely, I regretted having waited so long because so much damage had occurred. In fact, I'll give a barnstar to anyone who restores the damage to ten articles he harmed.

I really wanted to find a way that would address the problem more proactively. And remember, JB196 has driven people to frustration until they quit the project. Curse of Fenric was a good editor, and others had come to me for advice when they were on the fence about leaving too. SirFozzie knew the JB196 case even better than I, but he had distanced himself from it. It was just too cumbersome. So I was the person who had by far the most experience in this particular area. So I tried to distill the common points between Burntsauce and Dannycali and some other accounts I'd been watching quite closely but not acted upon, and I selected a test case that raised my antenna a little and I hadn't examined before. I thought I was being impartial and objective, and I was surprised to see that the correlations lined up. Eureka! The moment of hubris.

So yeah, the people who read that report all knew I had been on a roll and had some background on why I thought this kind of thing was worth attempting. Don't lay it on their shoulders. It was a bad report, not up to the level of my usual work, and it was attempting a new kind of approach I hadn't tried before. With no disrespect for the real human being who didn't deserve the hassle my mistake caused, I'm like the pitcher who threw a wild curveball and got a drubbing in the sports pages. You don't fire the catcher and the first baseman for that.

There were in-depth deliberations about [[User:!!]] that led to his blocking. Since that block was in error, we want to be able to look at the conversations that led up to his blocking, so we can see who all was at fault, where the system broke down, and how we can fix it. This shouldn't be a controversial request, it should be a commonplace one. In every erroneous block, people go back over the discussions to see what went wrong. The only thing that's different in this case is that you guy took your deliberations off-wiki, and are not trying to prevent the community from reviewing what precisely went wrong. I realize that may feel like an invasion of privacy, since you guys thought the deliberations would be secret when you held them-- but sadly, that's your own fault for doing admin investigations in a secret venue. ****** That's easy to blame after the fact when no clear standards existed. Even though Alkivar overturned my block on Burntsauce in April, no one raised a protest that I asked for off-wiki evidence review then. Most of the community just didn't pay attention to this for a long time. In the THF-David Shankbone case I asked the Committee to make a ruling on fair play practices regarding use of onsite name disclosures, and nobody really picked up on why I thought that was important. Since I couldn't even spark their interest on one of the clearest examples of the subject and it had played into more than one case they handled, it seemed well-nigh impossible for me to start a community dialog.

Nobody gets angry with the pitcher as long as he keeps throwing strikes. And, per the developing Privatemusings decision, you really ought to be going easier on people who were acting in good conscience in an area where policy was silent.

It's noble of you to try to assure us that, if we could see the evidence, we would see that you are the only one at fault here. But surely you must understand, given the recent history, why we aren't going to be willing to take your word for what the evidence will and will not show. Alec ****** I've been thinking of posting my evidence from the Alkivar case. Can't release everything because it includes private e-mails, but there's a trusted user version I've shared. Do you think it would be a good idea for me to put that in user space alongside my Joan of Arc vandal report?