[WikiEN-l] Missed Opportunities to have avoided the Durova Case

[Durova]

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?