Jonathan, I think there's a bit of talking past each other going on.
Rehashing details of one of the many dramafest Arbcom cases is not
worthwhile.
systemic is happening here. As a result of those cases and many
other
examples Wikipedia now has a terrible reputation for being sexist."
Improving reputation and recognizing that there is a systemic problem
is a far more useful direction to take. Think about a bit of
"reframing".
P.S. I was approached by the Atlantic due to my work in the area of
revert-wars and the potential relationship to bias. I did a little
digging around it, but my thoughts are too slow to satisfy
journalists' deadlines. ;-)
Fae
On 22 October 2015 at 18:12, WereSpielChequers
<werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Sarah,
I'm not a "functionary" so I haven't seen the evidence - clearly it
convinces you, but it did not quite convince the functionaries. Reading the
result and for example Yunshui's comment I would simply prefer that the
record shows we were not fully convinced by the evidence, rather than that
we were convinced, but chose not to act. I think what we have here is more
than a detail difference. If the decision had been, as reported in the
Atlantic, that Arbcom had decided this "on the grounds that it may “out” the
editor that had posted the pictures, or link his username to his real name."
Then I would have supported a change in policy, or Arbcom membership, so
that future Arbcoms in similar situations would be willing to risk outing
someone, or just ban them without public reason, rather than leave a
harasser unpunished. But if the issue is not that, but instead that the
evidence was inconclusive, then I think we have a very different problem to
work on. As for the broader picture I don't dispute that Wikipedia has
several problems around gender, and some terrible publicity, but if one took
that article at face value the obvious next step would be to get a change in
policy so that if Arbcom were convinced of the evidence they could and would
have acted.
Jonathan
On 22 October 2015 at 17:37, Sarah (SV) <slimvirgin(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> WSC, the evidence as to who posted the porn images was, I would say,
> conclusive. We nevertheless ended up with a situation in which a man who had
> been engaged in harassment (much of which was onwiki and had been going on
> for about a year) was let off the hook, and the harassed woman was banned.
>
> There was a similar situation in the GGTF case, so the Lightbreather case
> was not an unfortunate one-off. For example, the man who was blocked for
> harassment during the Lightbreather case should have been blocked for it
> during the GGTF case, but wasn't. He only ended up being blocked during the
> Lightbreather case because he admitted that he had done it. Otherwise he
> might still be editing.
>
> Something systemic is happening here. As a result of those cases and many
> other examples Wikipedia now has a terrible reputation for being sexist.
> (See this selection of stories.) Rather than arguing about which details
> various journalists got wrong, we should focus on what they got right and
> how we can fix it.
>
> Sarah
>
> On Thu, Oct 22, 2015 at 8:45 AM, WereSpielChequers
> <werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Thanks Francesca,
>>
>> It seems a shame that an Arbcom case in which one person was blocked for
>> offwiki harassment and another would have been if the evidence had been
>> conclusive has been reported as if they'd decided instead to spare the
>> harasser for privacy reasons.
>>
>> As Thryduulf put it "there is no doubt that had we been able to
>> conclusively connect the perpetrator to a Wikipedia account that action
>> would have been taken (almost certainly a site ban)."
>>
>> You could point her to
>>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Lightbrea…
>>
>> A story warning mysogynists that Arbcom will and has acted against those
>> it catches would have made it easier to attract women to wikipedia and deter
>> misogynists.
>>
>> WSC
>>