There are many issues with the WMF T&S team's actions.
They completely bypass the community procedures in place, deal out arbitrary sanctions without any explanation or justification and simultaneously refuse to deal with real issues that the community(ies) really can not deal with.
Quoting a Wikimedia steward (Rschen): "I know for Croatian [Wikipedia] we stewards
point-blank asked T&S if they would do anything about it and they said
no."
I don't have a skin in this game either way, but the discussion about the open letter [1] has multiple, mostly unrefuted and partially acknowledged posts claiming that the arbitration process was not working, lead to negative behavior remaining unmitigated and is in need of improvement.
The open letter itself acknowledges this fact.
If processes aren't working, sometimes a shakeup and ensuing drama is required to improve things.
Sure, the Arbitration Committee and the processes associated with it are not perfect. But is an unaccountable, invisible and all powerful judge, jury and executioner institution like the T&S a good or fair thing? If you look at the context apart form just the Fram case, you will see that T&S behaves very strangely.
I usually do not consider articles which blame the evils of the world on a group of people identified by gender or race or skin tone to be "fair". But that's just me.
One could maybe fault the article for bringing up names and personal information about an issue that the Foundation clearly wanted to keep out of the public discussion.
But it also presents a sizable amount of information that the complaints against Fran could very well have had merit, without drawing any kind of conclusion.
"A picture has emerged over the past half decade of a platform controlled by a small group of white men that is unwelcoming, if not hostile, to newcomers and women."
I still don't have much insight into this issue, but I worry about "too white, too male" being used as a standalone reason that change is needed. When race and gender make-up leads to bias, conflicting interests, or myopia on some issue, then it's a problem that needs addressing. It very often is, but it has to be demonstrated --we can't reason by analogy that all things demographically imbalanced are unjust.
This particular - mostly US centric - discussion is something that is best kept off Hackernews, IMO.
While discussing an individual, nuanced community upheavel in a important part of the modern web is interesting, there are better public forums for generalized, socio-political topics.
(You also picked a single quote , while, as I stated, the article provides much more context)
After re-reading my comment above, I feel I need to clarify that the "But that's just me" quip was directed at the article. But even to me it looks now as if I was directing it at you, which was not my intention. Sorry for that.
"On June 10, the Wikimedia Foundation did something unprecedented in its decade and a half history: It banned a user from the English-language Wikipedia for a year."
No they didn't. From editing it, perhaps; and using one specific persona. Anyone can read wikipedia without being logged in, and it's trivial to create a new account on any site.
That's nitpicking. When someone says they're banned from Twitter it means their account can't be used to make tweets, not that they cannot read Twitter while logged out, or that they can't make a new Twitter account.
Well, from where I sit, it's a huge difference in terms of how much I should care about it. I have a limited amount of outrage and try to ration it to the issues that are the largest societal problems.
The point isn't that there isn't a difference between the two ideas: it is that clearly the word "banned" means the latter, not the former, and so it is strange that anyone could possibly have misinterpreted the sentence.
Fram (wiki mod in question) is apparently the Linus Torvalds of the old-guard Wikipedia community. “He’s a prolific genius!” vs “He’s a toxic asshole!” and much like the Linux community there have been no effective systems to deal with someone like that.
It’s telling that the Wikipedia community’s response is “How do we deal with WMF” and not “How do we deal with this admin”
I am generally on the side of Linus being a toxic asshole, but,
1. I would consider it inappropriate for the Linux Foundation to remove Linus without the involvement of the community. They're there to be stewards of the project, not to run it, and while I have problems with Linus, I also have (different, unrelated, not directly comparable) problems with the corporate control of LF, and it would set a precedent that other decisions are in the hands of LF. And besides there's the practical problem that if Linus is still wanted by the community, banning one toxic asshole won't change the culture. If LF wants to advocate for the community to decide they no longer want Linus, that would be fine (and I'd honestly support it) and they should implement the community consensus if it emerges. (If they want to no longer pay Linus upwards of a half million dollars per year, that would certainly be within their rights, too.)
2. Along those lines it seems difficult to believe that Wikipedia's culture problem is a single dude. If we admit for the sake of argument that we do want WMF to ban assholes (which I can see the merits of), that's likely to translate to mass bans, which the existing community governance structures should at least be consulted in. (Even if one of the possible conclusions is "the existing community leadership are all asshole enablers and need to be stripped of power," make that decision after having the conversation.)
3. From reading around https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:FRAM it seems like he's one of the most vocal opponents to new features being pushed by WMF that the community seems to not be enthusiastic about. See the comment starting "In the absence of any explanation, the cynic in me guesses...."
Quite clearly, Fram was told to stay away from a user named LauraHale (in March 2019) - to avoid any interactions with her or her content completely. Essentially, it's a restraining order.
So what did he do for him to get a Wikipedia "restraining order" against him?
AND... he broke that restraining order by mentioning her in some comments.
I mean, this isn't some statement about "banning all assholes" so much as action against a single person who refused to stop harassing another person.
Fram has also clashed with LauraHale who is the girlfriend of the WMF chair and has made noises about going to the Trust and Safety people before. No one knows if WMF chair was recused from decision to ban Fram. Pretty much everyone sees an obvious conflict of interest.
I'm not sure there's any solid evidence that she's the girlfriend of the WMF chair - that mostly seems to be a salacious rumor. However, there does seem to be evidence that the WMF chair and Laura Hale directly worked together over at Wikinews on the same topic area that Laura Hale and Fram ended up in conflict over on Wikipedia (sports in Spain). That seems like a better thing to focus on than juicy gossip.
The only solid evidence is that Fram used the word "fuck", as that was the diff provided to him. Everything else, including the incident with LauraHale or any potential relation between her and WMF is just speculation people are rushing into in order to find an explanation to WMF action.
This is why the Open Letter is so elegant written. It does not speculate. It addresses the core issue which is the lack of solid evidence and community process.
I have no idea either. Thinking about it though, maybe there is a corollary to Hanlon’s Razor “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”: Never attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by conflict of interest.
I will not post links for obvious reasons, but it definitely seems like Laura Hale and Maria Sefidari are close, looking at some pictures of them together that are relatively easy to find on the Web.
Ah, that makes a lot mote sense, thanks - and I wouldn't describe that as being Wikipedia's Linus. (Linus's known public behavior, at least, does not include singling out an individual for harassment.)
But then it re-raises the question of why community governance couldn't handle this, since the worry of the existing community leadership being assholes themselves doesn't apply. Banning users from harassing other users, and enforcing it, seems like a good chunk of what ArbCom already does, no? If WMF wants to take this role, that seems likely beneficial and fine (to me, as a non-Wikipedian observer) but shouldn't they coordinate with ArbCom?
(Also, they should say that, because there are now a dozen other theories of what Fram did, as you can see from these comments, the open letter, the BuzzFeed News article, etc. If you punish someone for X and don't say X was the offense, you're wasting an opportunity to dissuade others from doing X.)
Very much so. Normally, such a restraining order would be issued through community governance; this one was from the Wikimedia Foundation, which itself was an unusual step. Also, I don't think there's any evidence of Fram breaking it?
Edit: To whoever downvoted me: The WMF T&S team (which banned Fram) did not say what was Fram banned for, neither was there any actions against him before the Arbitration Committee, there were not even any public complaints. What is happening to Fram on this thread is unjustified lynching.
I don't think "lynching" is a reasonable term here to describe being banned for a year from editing a single Wikipedia instance, even if the thread were not mostly leaning in favor of Fram as it is. TFA makes it clear that they didn't say what he was banned for and that there's no public info.
It is not literal lynching (as in throwing stones at a person), but I am not the first to use the word in that manner. Substitute lynching for character assassination, if you will.
He was told (in 2017 and 2019) to completely avoid interacting with her and her content. The notice Fram posted himself was quite clear - don't report her content, don't edit her content, don't interact with her in any way.
That's quite serious. How does someone get a warning like that from WMF?
Your comment is problematic for responding to because it is not clear if it is asking a question (and which question) or is it trying to say something between the lines. But I will try anyway:
Essentially you are trying to say that Fram is a harasser because he got a warning from T&S. But that is not how T&S works. They (as far as is publicly known) react to any reports of misbehavior with (without investigation) trying to deescalate the situation by asking to stop interaction between concerned parties. Usually this only applies to Wikimedia staff, contractors, participants at Wikimedia events, etc. The fact that Fram even got a "warning" from the T&S is quite damning for T&S because they usually do not meddle in such stuff as was happening between him and LauraHale (for the uninitiated, she was writing a lot of, let us say it bluntly, crap articles and edits [0]; and he was, as a good editor, trying to fix those edits repeatedly), because of the implicated power that you can have over the Wikimedia communities by knowing someone on T&S and/or the Board.
[0] She was writing duplicate paragraphs and mistranslating from a language she does not speak in an absurd manner.
Edit: I deleted unfounded speculation I made against LauraHale. Sorry.
Cherry picking lines out of context. A poor counter-argument.
The statement before the one you posted was quite clear. Do not interact with her in any way. At all. Nothing. Don't even contact other admins and ask them to do it.
Then why did they clarify specifically that this was not an interaction ban.What was the purpose of both lines if they thought Fram did harass her and thus wanted to impose a interaction ban?
The problem with the accusation of cherry picking is that I don't have an issue if you would include the full text. In context it is pretty clear that what they wanted was to prevent any further friction between the two editors. If they thought it was harassment and they intended to issue a punitive action then they would have done that. WMF is quite cable to call out harassment without needing to wrapping it up with false statements of "To be clear, we are not placing an interaction ban" and "We remain convinced that it was not intended to intimidate or make her feel uncomfortable".
> who do not know anything about the case calling him a harrasser.
I know what I've been told by WMF, which is that he was a harasser and that en:wiki failed to stop his harassment.
I know also what I've read in the fram-gigantathread, where a bunch of admins describe him as kind of an asshole, and say that it's being going on for years, but then go on to excuse that because he makes a lot of edits.
> I know what I've been told by WMF, which is that he was a harasser and that en:wiki failed to stop his harassment.
There is another thing wrong with your comment: how could the English Wikipedia community attempt to stop Fram's alleged harassment if no harassment is known. Whether you want to sanction someone or just improve that someone's behavior, you have got to give an indication of what is wrong with their behavior.
> I know what I've been told by WMF, which is that he was a harasser and that en:wiki failed to stop his harassment.
> told by WMF
No comment.
> I know also what I've read in the fram-gigantathread, where a bunch of admins describe him as kind of an asshole, and say that it's being going on for years, but then go on to excuse that because he makes a lot of edits.
The truth doesn't matter anymore, they think we won't remember that time they joined in the free-for-all to say whatever terrible thing possible about the guy.
There is a war on between the truth and the sensation of the high horse.
"Fuck ArbCom which doesn't even understand their own messages and again give themselves powers they don't have. First it was deletions, then it was mandatory 2FA, inbetween it is loads of evidence of utter incompetence in many of its members (witness the statement by AGK above, but also some of the comments at e.g. the Rama case request). Just crawl into a corner and shut up until the community asks you to do something within your remit, but don't try to rule enwiki as if you have the right and the competence to do so. Or collectively resign. But don't give us any more of this bullshit. [[User:Fram|Fram]] ([[User talk:Fram|talk]]) 07:39, 4 May 2019 (UTC)"
The biggest difference in this case is that I can go the mailing list and see Linus Torvalds words and the context in which they have been said. There is even articles that list top 10 of Linus rants, all with links to the specific mail.
In the Fram case the closest we got is that he said the word "fuck" in regard to a statement that all admins who refuse two-token authentication would get banned, and that someone felt harassed after several stub articles had been deleted, although that is mostly speculations as WMF has explicitly said they won't give out specifics because of privacy concerns.
> In the Fram case the closest we got is that he said the word "fuck"
No it isn't. WMF said that they had allegations of harassment, that they weren't going to release details of that harassment to protect the accuser[1], and that after having looked at several _years_ of fram's edits they decided to take action.
[1] and looking at this thread and the wikipedia thread they were right to do so.
You are wrong there. The exact diff was given to Fram:
"And then a few hours ago, they posted my one year ban, and helpfully gave the actual reason. Which is one edit, this one[1]. That's it." - Fram
""This decision has come following extensive review of your conduct on that project and is an escalation to the Foundation’s past efforts to encourage course correction, including a conduct warning issued to you on April 2018 and a conduct warning reminder issued to you on March 2019. With those actions in mind, this ban has been triggered following your recent abusive communications on the project, as seen here [1]." - WMF
The _factually matter_ is, the only explicit proof we have as justification of creating this ban is the evidence that WMF gave. The warning on March 2019 was about the alleged harassment, which WMF said "We remain convinced that the activity on Laura’s articles listed above was not intended to intimidate or make her feel uncomfortable".
The speculation is that the provided diff with the word "fuck" is a false herring and the actually reason for the ban is something like them changing their mind of on the March 2019 decision, or something completely else where the they want to protect the accuser. We don't know, the information is not given, its not out there.
I see no reason to suspect that and I do not believe that WMF would not say something if a Wikipedia Administrator wrote a fake email in their name.
> We have to decide if we believe fram or wmf.
That is a false proposition. People can choose to believe different speculations, but there is no evidence that the statement from Fram are not written by Fram and the statement from WMF is not written by WMF. I see no evidence to doubt the authenticity of each parties statements.
There's a difference between Linus and this situation. Linus noted he would work on being better at the same time the project adopted a code of conduct. If I read it right, in this case someone was banned for a year for an unknown reason. To relate it to government, it would be like someone being put in jail for a year without linking it to a violation of a specific law. For some it appears this is the problem.
> Fram (wiki mod in question) is apparently the Linus Torvalds of the old-guard Wikipedia community.
FUD.
The issue with the WMF T&S team's actions is that they are completely unaccountable, not appealable, not backed with any kind of justification or proof. And they bypassed the Arbitration Committee.
> It’s telling that the Wikipedia community’s response is “How do we deal with WMF” and not “How do we deal with this admin”
The response did include heavy scrutinization of Fram's activities to find any possible reason for sanctions against him.
Its depressing to see how many people are happy to ditch the decentralized approach of decision making and conflict resolution in the community in favor of a position of authority that can dictate its will on the community.
To be honest, the first thing I thought when I learned about this case is: "Great, maybe T&S will fix Croatian Wikipedia too!". Then I read the comment quoted in [0]. Looking at the greater context of T&S's actions it really seems that something shady is happening at WMF.
It's a mistake to focus on the particular issue like this. Trading away long-term process to get one short-term result is a bad trade. It doesn't much matter how bad Fram was; the particular issue that started the matter is mostly irrelevant in the face of the breaking of process. Don't get blinded by the short-term issue. Don't make short-termist trades. Fram is an object-level, short-term issue; the WMF is a process-level, long-term one.
Fram isn't a short term issue. There are countless arsehole editors who get away with being insufferable arseholes because they make many edits and because the admins turn a blind eye, and this has been happening for very many years.
The inability of ANI and arbcom to do anything is the long running issue. They had their chance, they fucked it up, it's entirely unsurprising that WMF is enforcing the most basic wikipedia conventions.
By "short-term" vs "long-term" here, I'm not talking about how long something has been going on so far. I'm talking about how far into the future this will affect things. Breaking process so completely like this threatens long-term stability. It's not like "break process completely to ban Fram" and "just do nothing" were the only options. The WMF could have acted in a way other than in such a potentially disastrous way. If the process is producing wrong results (e.g. Fram should be banned but he isn't), you try to figure out why and make a better one, not just ignore it.
Expect the part where Fram explicitly harassed a member of the community. Linus might be an asshole, but he didn't go around following a specific comitter and making their life harder for it.
There's a power-struggle going on where one body is taking an action another body feels they should have control or at least input into.
That this power-struggle occurs and especially that it happens in public is healthy, IMO.
But ArbCom should really be looking itself in the mirror right now. The fact is, under their watch Fram was free to be a huge asshole to contributors for some 15 years. ArbCom suggests that someone should have told them they needed to do something. But that seems like a very weak excuse for the senior conduct body. You are the ones who need to be setting and enforcing the rules that allow for contributions!
IMO no organization should tolerate assholes, so they got the result right but clearly did not do it the right way. I think ArbCom needs to handle these cases, at least a decade quicker than in this case.
My main point is ArbCom should have already handled this, perhaps a decade ago.
So they are broken. If they want a healthy Wikipedia their first priority should be fixing themselves. They should understand why a toxic asshole was running free for many years under their watch and how they can prevent it from happening again. Maybe they are doing this behind the scenes, but it's not clear to me they even understand they have a problem.
(BTW, no one seems to be disputing that Fram is an asshole. Maybe I missed it, but if true, then there's no question that in a community-driven site, something needs to be done about it. Some people seem to want to believe that it could be simultaneously true that Fram could be a big asshole AND be a good editor. In the context of a community-driven site, those people are wrong. Driving off potentially valuable contributors is cardinal sin.)
I am not that well acquainted with Fram, and the term asshole is not precise enough; but you really do need some well intentioned assholes if you want to run wiki-style projects. The problem is that wikis are free to participate to, but not everybody is well intentioned or capable of constructive and positive participation. Those people are more harmful than "assholes", and Fram used to take care of such people from what I gather.
Edit: I did not down-vote you, nor would I do it if I could.
It's also wrong to suggest that fram was only abusive to people who shouldn't have been on wikipedia. Read the thread and buzzfeed articles linked here: even people on his side describe him as toxic.
> It's also wrong to suggest that fram was only abusive to people who shouldn't have been on wikipedia.
Quite a claim, maybe give some evidence for that? I saw no example of such behavior.
> even people on his side describe him as toxic.
I am tempted to call you "toxic". Terms like "brusque", "rude", "asshole", "harasser", "toxic" are not equivalent, but you repeatedly try to assign some of those labels to Fram based on others.
"Brusque, bordering on rude sometimes" is not even a bad thing for a Wikipedia user. And "like Inspector Javert at times" is not really as strong as "toxic".
LOL, I posted that link in a top-level comment in this thread.
Can you give an actual example where Fram was abusive, harassing, whatever? This link contains (as far as contra-Fram material goes) only unsubstantiated accusations (concerning a medium where public examples should be relatively easy to find).
Fram's edit you linked is on point criticism of the Arbitration Committee and I think it may have been good for the community. It would have been better, more efficient in transmitting its intended message, more influential if it were written in a better style (the kind exhibited on HN).
I concur that there is danger of Fram's edits promoting bad style in other Wikipedia editors; but there is a tradeoff here that must be made, because good style takes effort and time (both for practice and execution), more so when one lacks relevant education; and some things need to be said (often saying something sooner is more effective than saying it later, too).
I guess some people place most blame on the use of the word "fuck", but using it was warranted. Think about what such profanity can accomplish, it has the power to give a certain tone to one's message. Those who wield language with great command and effectiveness might think of ways to accomplish the same or better tone without using profanities, but for the rest of us profanities are a sometimes necessary shortcut through all the time and exertion needed for better style.
Anyways, let us suppose you want to make Wikimedia projects more "civil", how long of a ban/block do you think profanities should warrant? Two days? A week? Certainly not a year, at least not the first time such a sanction is used.
All the scrutiny Fram has been given during this scandal really ought to have found some more serious violations by Fram to warrant a year long ban.
But let us not forget that nobody outside the WMF employ even knows why Fram was actually banned, nor what should they do not to be banned themselves. The T&S is a complete unknown. They refuse to fix some huge issues (like with the Croatian Wikipedia), but hand out apparently unwarranted unexplained unappealable bans across some Wikipedias (like what happened to Fram). The fact is that Foundation employees mysteriously attacked the community that produces value for the Foundation, of course it is going to raise big questions, which the Foundation is not even bothering to answer!??
The thing is, the community volunteers to produce valuable content for the Foundation, thus trust in the good intentions of the Foundation employees and governance is needed. Ironically the Trust and Safety team made that trust implode and a shroud of fear rise by issuing unexplained bans that well may be malicious or misguided or corrupted, but the community just can not judge the T&S team's actions, because they are unexplained, not supported by any evidence. Even as rulemakers the T&S team does not work, because their actions are totally unexplained, they give no guidance as to how one should act in the aim of not being banned.
It might turn out in the end that Fram was rightfully banned (maybe the issue is something like child pornography), but that will not matter, because the issue is not Fram, the issue is that Foundation employee (or contractor, which is what most of T&S are [0]) actions are not accountable to the community.
Fram was right to be angry. That it showed in his post is, as I said in the grandparent comment, only bad for him and the message he was trying to convey. And notice that you are calling him arrogant while saying "If it hasn’t penetrated by now I don’t think it will" to me.
To be honest the fact that profanities themselves are not the thing that bothers you is even more unsettling to me than if it were the case. Suppose your standards (what they are is not at all clear to me) were imposed on Wikimedia projects. Who would be capable of judging by them and making heads roll? And what would be implications for free speech?
One thing that has not been noted up to now in the discussion, is that even if T&S has, say, decided to impose standards like your's on Wikipedias (which does not appear to be the case, although as I have said already, everything regarding their action is murky), how would it be fair to arbitrarily, without notice or warning start imposing them on Fram specifically.
Again, while you are attacking Fram you are spinning the discussion away from greater issue of a charity corporation being nontransparent to the extreme in making heads roll in the community its value is based on. How are the Wikimedia project communities (some call it a movement, actually) supposed to keep their spirit necessary for volunteering with such arbitrarily capricious and totally unexplained bans happening?
While, you were responding to nsajko, your example is useful for others (such as myself) who don’t know anything about the issue — other than this discussion. That example strikes me as being overly emotive. Its intent is to strongly disagree with the Arbitration Committee but the language and tone have the result of distracting from the substance of the disagreement – a classic case of “more heat than light”.
He did the same thing as Linus, he didn't mince words when he showed the door to people who persistently wrote crap articles. It's the intersection of academic entitlement (students really believe that just showing up and making an effort should be rewarded with good grades, no matter how good the outcome is) and American discourse (no rude words, hurt feelings are more important than substance).
I don't think that your definition of American discourse is totally accurate- it's definitely true that happens, but not everywhere in the US.
One of the things that has made me better has been people who were willing to tell me "please stop", "you seriously screwed up", and "good job"- but if you listen to the wrong people, you won't get anywhere.
Fram seems like one of those people that's actually worth listening to, and that his criticism and praise have some merit.
The whole point of "professional" discourse is to keep emotions and feelings out of it so the substance can be the focus. If you start insulting people then it is going to trigger an emotional response. That's how most humans work. If you choose not to be careful about how you word your criticism, then you are also choosing to inject emotion into the conversation, thus distracting from the substance.
You can be blunt and direct without being an asshole. It's not that hard.
That's the theory, but what do you do if a volunteer's efforts are simply not up to snuff or when his goals are at odds with the project's goals? They need to spend their time elsewhere, unfortunately some just won't take any hint whatsoever.
Storytime!
I'm teaching introductory science at a regional college somewhere in the Southern US. Admission standards are low, especially for the nursing school. Somehow there's a large number of students from a disadvantaged background who have been directed into nursing by family or their guidance counselor or whoever. This describes half of the kids in my class.
Preparedness in math is a great problem, especially for kids from rural or urban ghettoes. Many students have no clue about basic algebra, some can't even do fractions. There is a prerequisite math course that kids must take before the science course, but it fails to fix these deficiencies.
I demand that my students solve multiple-step word problems, simply because it's a needed skill that will come up in later courses and in their careers. Math and reading isn't my concern, teaching science is. Besides, medication errors are the third-leading cause of hospital deaths. Someone who can't read or calculate dosage has no business being anywhere near a patient. Without hyperbole, it's a public health issue!
That's what I told my students, but they don't care. In their minds I am the obstacle between them and a lucrative career. I force them to continue in poverty. If someone has advice I'm glad to hear. It's an institutional problem that the institution comprehensively fails to address. Administration's main interest is tuition income and student satisfaction.
Have you tried starting from a clinical safety perspective, and showing the students the real world consequences of miscalculated dosages? Maybe bring in a guest speaker who was harmed by a preventable medical error?
I did mention real-world cases, but that didn't get me buy-in to fail them. Besides, the real-world consequences for nurses who kill patients through negligence are slim, just ask Google for Radonda Vaught.
EDIT: For the downvoters, my question is because I'm tired of being manipulated by parties on both sides of any issue only disclosing what interests them.
>Fram is also known within the community as an asshole. “He’s like Inspector Javert,” one Wikipedian wrote of Fram recently, comparing him to the ruthless and inflexible antagonist of Les Misérables. “Brusque, bordering on rude sometimes,” another longtime admin, Floquenbeam, told BuzzFeed News. “He has a reputation for almost always being right on the underlying merits in a dispute, but going about it in a fairly obnoxious way.” Over the years, Fram has clashed with other admins, with editors, with ArbCom, and with the foundation itself.
Fram explained that he had received two previous “conduct warnings” from the foundation’s Trust and Safety Council for his incivil style toward other Wikipedians.
The man is not going around stripping people of their rights because he's upset about how people talk to him. I don't think escalation of "I don't like his style" to "he should be banned from participating for a year" is appropriate, no matter how much that style upsets the sweet-sounding passive aggressive types.
I, for one, would prefer a world of people who act in good faith, even if they address issues in a coarse and gruff manner at times; to a world of petty, passive-aggressive crybullies who ultimately contribute nothing of value, nothing but a veneer of shallow procedural "niceness".
> I, for one, would prefer a world of people who act in good faith, even if they address issues in a coarse and gruff manner at times; to a world of petty, passive-aggressive crybullies who ultimately contribute nothing of value, nothing but a veneer of shallow procedural "niceness".
From the article, there seemed to be multiple instances where users reported that they were harassed by Fram across the site after having a dispute with him.
That goes well beyond merely being blunt or rude.
>BU Rob13, a former member of ArbCom who recently retired from administration, said that Fram’s behavior toward him, including “taking shots” at him in an edit summary and following him to unrelated cases, felt like harassment.
The statement the powers that be released would seem to bear this out.
>In a statement to BuzzFeed News, the organization said it had leveled the ban to maintain "respect and civility" on the platform. "Uncivil behavior, including harassment, threats, stalking, spamming, or vandalism, is against our Terms of Use, which are applicable to anyone who edits on our projects," it said.
According to the buzzfeed article [1] some users felt harassed by him. Allegedly he followed them and kept fixing their spelling errors, deleting their unfinished stub articles etc.
Presumably those who felt stalked by him are wary of making the accusations public, since at this point that may invite additional harassment from others.
He was a good editor. But my understanding was he was mean. The community did not have systems to handle the situation so the WMF stepped in. And ruled over the community.
> The community did not have systems to handle the situation so the WMF stepped in.
The community does have systems to handle such situations though (e.g. the arbitration committee which has produced this letter).
Of course, these systems may or may not be adequate - I am not qualified to say, but it seems to me that the chief complaint here is that the WMF did not involve any community systems without having previously expressed concerns about them.
This suggests that either the WMF does not consider the systems adequate, in which case the arbitration committee is quite right to request that the WMF communicate this to them, or the WMF has some genuinely top-secret reason to ban someone that even the arbitration committee cannot be trusted with (which for a matter as light as a 1-year ban due to community reports doesn't seem likely).
There are also (now-deleted) hints elsewhere that the matter which even the arbitration committee cannot be trusted with might have something to do with Gibraltapedia, which is... not a good look, given that was a particularly famous example of a Wikimedia trustee's personal financial interests and those of Wikipedia conflicting, and of this being handled badly by the Foundation.
I don’t know how much you are downvoted, but it seems the issue is pretty public, accusations and responses are in the open, the whole threads are even linked in the article.
If you care to any extent about the issue, going down the rabbit hole and looking for yourself would be the best course of action.
If it seems tedious, pointless and gossipy, asking for other people’s super biased TLDR wouldn’t help anyway, so perhaps ignoring this event could be a course of action (that’s what I did after reading 2 pages of finger pointing BTW)
Wikimeida foundation thinks it's cute that their unpaid content worker bees have a governance system. But we just saw what always happens when an autonomous decision maker with delegated authority makes the wrong decision.
Bye bye Wikipedia, it was nice while it lasted, looks like you got taken over by the totalitarians.
[The Wikimedia Foundation’s (WMF) Trust and Safety team] have reiterated that they are not willing to reconsider the ban, nor will they turn the full evidence over to the community or ArbCom for review.
I guess I'm not surprised. Articles on contentious topics have always had people trying to control the narrative. As Wikipedia got more and more widely trusted/respected, you'd imagine that people would pay money to do it.
I assume there have already been attempts at decentralized, more democratic versions of it?
Wikipedia certainly has its issues in regards to bias on many topics, and I can see the allure of decentralization, but I wonder if it's really the solution. It seems to me like it would just make things worse Instead of each side policing each other and helping keep bias to a minimum, it would likely result in multiple extremely biased "versions" of the truth, with each version treated as gospel by its respective fans while dismissing all others.
Imagine two people arguing about the validity of climate change, with one of them citing ExxonPedia.org and another citing GreenPeacePedia.org. It would be a nightmare.
> Imagine two people arguing about the validity of climate change, with one of them citing ExxonPedia.org and another citing GreenPeacePedia.org. It would be a nightmare.
True, but one of them will be loved by Google, so their side will be widely visible, while the other will not. I don't see any incentive for the side in control of Wikipedia to not want this.
The wiki ecosystem is relatively easy to decentralize - just start more wikis! The Wikipedia naming scheme is well known, so it's trivial to match articles about the same subject; and their content is released under an open license. There's also a well-known "InterWiki" standard, making links inbetween different wikis easier.
I am not sure what do you mean by "decentralized, more democratic versions of it", but one problem with that plan is that Google is going to put x.wikipedia.org in the first place in search results (where x is your country code).
You are confusing (the English) Wikipedia with the Wikimedia Foundation, the corporation that owns all the Wikipedias and other Wikimedia projects, like Wiktionary, Wikidata, Wikiversity, etc.
What takeover? The WMF seems to be the same as always, and Jimmy Wales is still the boss. Wikipedia seems to work despite (or because?) of that style of leadership.
That happended years ago, when the inclusionists lost to the deletionists; this just a natural slow progression of leeching out anything good or useful.
Could you expand on your comment, I am interested in Wikimedia communities? To be honest, I am probably not the only one who thinks that you just want every manga character ever to have its own Wikipedia page after reading "when the inclusionists lost to the deletionists".
I was thinking of giving Pokemon as a sepecific case, but yes, manga characters would also work.
> I am interested in Wikimedia communities
Sorry to disappoint, I wasn't very involved even before they started gutting the non-politics stuff. I just saw the good articles start disappearing and picked up enough discussion to know what the people at fault were called.
The math and science articles seem to be holding out, at least, although I notice they axed Binary_lambda_calculus a couple years ago, so I'm not optimistic.
Here's one of the accusations[1] that is posted publicly on Wikipedia:
> A troll on an offsite forum posted a graphic written depiction of myself engaged in sexual activity with another editor. Fram repeatedly posted a link to this depiction on Wikipedia, even after it was revision deleted.
If Fram did this then there should be a log viewable by a Wikipedia admin.
There are apparently over 1,000 admins. At least one of them should be able to scroll back through Fram's activity, find the case cited, and report publicly that they can corroborate this anonymous accusation.
One of the hard lessons I've learned over the course of my career is that no matter how "valuable" or "irreplaceable" an employee is, if they are toxic, you should fire them immediately. The damage done to a company by keeping toxic people always outweighs the damage done by firing them.
Everybody knows who the toxic people are in an organization. That's pretty much the definition of toxic. Conversely as the old saying goes, if you think everybody in the organization is an asshole, it's likely the real asshole is you.
It's basically the arbitration committee scorning the trust and safety committee of the wikimedia foundation for overstepping into what should of been a case handled by them and the community.
I am reminded of when the “weboob” package was removed from Debian (itself a reasonable action)… by Debian’s Anti-Harassment Team, not by the Debian FTP masters or anyone who usually removes packages.
EDIT: I was misinformed, as geofft correctly point out in a comment below.
Any member of the Debian community (even just a user) can file an RM bug against ftp.debian.org, if they provide justification. That is the standard procedure. The FTP masters perform the removal, but in the majority of cases someone else (the package's own maintainer, a member of the release team, a member of the "QA team" which is also everybody) files it, and says "request of maintainer"/"QA"/etc.
It is clear from the linked bug that antiharassment requested the removal and ftpmaster performed it. That's normal procedure. And the text was clearer than usual that ftpmaster should make their own independent judgment about whether it was justified (even though they always can).
I stand corrected; I only knew what I had read about it.
Also, I now see that Wikipedia’s T&S committee had a plausible reason for not referring the matter of Fram back to ArbCom: It could be argued that ArbCom might be biased against Fram, considering Fram’s comments on record about ArbCom.
I'm not actually comparing his alleged acts to those of those people. It's an unfair comparison, and I didn't intend to imply there was equivalency there.
Just the difficulty of enforcing rules on people who are extremely popular. Couldn't think of any better examples.
People read, get riled, takes sides and form poles.
Lots of wasted energy.
Fram. Banning Fram. Local vs central cabal governance. WWF can play the bad cop and take the hit. There are more Frams, more ArbComs and more WWFs to take their place.
Some day bots will rule, grafting in disparate knowledge graphs.
Is the internet gonna stop using Wikipedia?
If the humans are smart, best stick together and (start) build consensus and trust networks.
They completely bypass the community procedures in place, deal out arbitrary sanctions without any explanation or justification and simultaneously refuse to deal with real issues that the community(ies) really can not deal with.
Quoting a Wikimedia steward (Rschen): "I know for Croatian [Wikipedia] we stewards point-blank asked T&S if they would do anything about it and they said no."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_response_t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_response_t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_response_t...