[Wikimedia-l] [Wikimediauk-l] The situation with the chair

[Andreas Kolbe]

On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 7:26 PM, Charles Matthews <
charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:

> The point really is who actually cares about ArbCom decisions
>

I am really surprised to see a former member of ArbCom say this. Everybody
on this list cares about ArbCom decisions, most of the time, and so does
the entire body of administrators in the English Wikipedia. For the record,
ArbCom members derive their authority from 300 to 600 supporters' votes.
Wikimedia UK board members, from 40 or 50.

ArbCom had a number of reasons for their decision to ban Fae. These
included that he operated about a dozen different accounts, refused to
disclose all of them to ArbCom, and had in their view attempted to deceive
both the Wikipedia community and ArbCom itself.

Fae used commercial porn sites as biographical sources in Wikipedia. In one
case in June last year, he linked directly to a video clip showing the
biography subject, a black woman author, having sex (these were scenes from
a video she had tried to suppress), and vigorously defended that BLP
sourcing. He has since apologised for this error in judgment, but this must
be seen against the backdrop that it was Fae who, only a few weeks later,
told Parliament and the Charity Commission that the English Wikipedia had
an effective BLP policy, which was being effectively maintained by the
site's administrators, such as himself.

Refusing to acknowledge any problem, and beating up on ArbCom instead,
really is the least well advised strategy to deal with this situation.