![]() | Arbitration Committee Election 2015 candidate:
Opabinia regalis
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Thank you for stepping forward! A woman who will pass kittens and cookies!
Thank you for running for the hardest and most thankless job on the project. Many of these questions are sourced from actual cases, discussions, and problems over the past year. Enjoy!
Committed, productive volunteers are critical to the success of the project and the most important factor in considering a site ban is respecting their safety, their time, and their contributions. I mention safety first because there should be no leniency for harassment, abuse, threats, doxing, outing, and other behaviors that compromise the well-being of volunteer contributors.
When it comes to time and effort, it's more of a balancing act. I'd support a site ban for cases of paid or unpaid advocacy or POV-pushing where the editor shows no inclination to edit other topics, causes conflicts with many neutral editors in a topic area, and where a topic ban hasn't been successful - we just can't be wasting volunteer time on cleaning up after people whose content contributions are unusable and embarrassing. A similar argument applies to egregious or repeated behaviors like abusive sockpuppetry, copyvios, BLP violations, and so forth, though many of these issues get handled by the community. On the other hand, for that category of people who are prickly or volatile or otherwise considered difficult to work with, but who are themselves good contributors, I'm very much inclined to find alternatives to a site ban. Opabinia regalis ( talk) 06:45, 15 November 2015 (UTC)
Well, sometimes the civility problems are the problem and sometimes they're a symptom of a different problem. So I don't agree that these are the only tools in the toolbox; in some cases incivility is secondary to another issue - e.g., frustration from dealing with POV-pushing or trolling or harassment - and dealing with the source of the frustration may improve the editing environment without the need for specific civility-related remedies.
Even where there isn't a specific obvious cause, most incivility on the project is reactive, because someone was angry or upset. And then there's the "incivility" that comes in the form of superficially civil baiting and insults, which tends to fly under the radar due to not producing a single spectacular curse-word-laden diff. It's not exactly creative, but my best suggestion is to make sure arbs have enough time to dig deep enough into the evidence to understand the context behind instances of incivility and figure out whether remedies and restrictions can address the underlying problem.
I've also noticed a few proposals recently on using technical rather than social tools to implement behavioral restrictions. IIRC there was one for technical implementation of a topic ban, and there's a current one on filtering talk page abuse. Right now we have very blunt instruments available for stopping problematic behavior that is isolated to a particular article or topic: you can protect a page so no one can edit it, or you can block a user so they can't edit anything. I think we'd benefit from exploring more fine-grained technical measures. They'd have downsides of their own, but at least the endless wikilawyering about "broadly construed" could be controlled. Opabinia regalis ( talk) 06:45, 15 November 2015 (UTC)
I'm closely paraphrasing myself in a recent post, plagiarizing some forgotten second source: the workshop mostly seems to be a place for editors to demonstrate the behaviors that got them dragged to arbcom in the first place. Probably from the same source: it's also a good place for editors to fling mud at each other without getting it all over the rest of the encyclopedia.
I'm joking, sort of :) I think it's useful in principle, because a) it's a chance to solicit input from the parties and interested observers about what they think a workable solution would look like; and b) it alleviates the waiting-for-Godot feeling of anticipating a proposed decision. In practice, it seems awkward at best, like a mini-thunderdome at worst, and soaks up a lot of clerk time. I wonder if dropping the "write a proposed proposed decision" format and just inviting brief statements from each party on what they hope to see in the final decision might make the whole thing less of a mudslinging match. Opabinia regalis ( talk) 04:16, 15 November 2015 (UTC)
OK, top-line response: the fact that Wikipedia is a disproportionately unsafe place for women to participate is one of my top concerns, is a major reason I returned to the project earlier, and is a major reason I put myself on this page in the first place. I am certainly committed to doing what I can to make the project a safer place.
That being said: I'm not convinced the problem is most usefully analyzed using the concept of "bullying". In order to really make progress here, we're going to have to start being more specific about the behaviors and actions we want to change instead of trying to stuff a whole parade of horribles into a black box with a label like "bullying" or "incivility". (Never mind the mixed metaphor... ) I described some thoughts on the matter here in what was probably way too long of a post for a Signpost comment, but I think the distinctions drawn there are important. Harassment and abuse are not the same problem as "microaggressions", or the accumulating irritations of individually ignorable but collectively exhausting minor misjudgments. Conflating the two problems alienates those in the second group who can be persuaded to change their behavior by implying they're no better than the jerks in the first group.
I'm also not sure that making a ranked list of priorities is a useful exercise as a candidate for a committee whose job is primarily reactive. Arbcom can't "take charge" of some community issue or another, no matter how strongly individual arbs may feel about it. Nevertheless, within the limits of what arbcom can do, I consider it critical to make sure that women and members of other underrepresented groups feel as safe as anyone else participating in the community and using its dispute-resolution processes.
Oh, and as long as we're here: that is very much not a platform of disrespecting or devaluing the contributions and commitment of people who happen to be in majority demographics - I too am objectively very privileged and in any case this isn't social justice bingo. It's about making sure we treat the other human beings who have volunteered their time to the project with equal amounts of kindness and respect. Opabinia regalis ( talk) 02:37, 15 November 2015 (UTC)
1) I suggested way up above somewhere that communication between arbs and parties seems to have been a real problem this year, and the e-cigs case is an excellent example of it. I hope that streamlining or reducing off-wiki tasks will enable more time spent on cases and more opportunities for keeping the parties in the loop in case of delays. But I'm not sure that I can make specific proposals at this stage to change how arbs communicate with each other, without knowing the existing patterns of off-wiki communication.
2) I am not by nature intransigent at all, and take a very practical approach to reform proposals; I think I'm personally unlikely to contribute to stalled reforms out of stubbornness. I'd try to nudge anyone who's dug their heels in by showing evidence in favor of whatever reform was being proposed; sometimes things can be argued about in the abstract near-indefinitely but the impasse breaks with convincing data.
3) I may be long-winded, verbose, and prolix, as well as wordy and loquacious, but I still can't stand that stuff. I'd like to see a lot of the procedural fluff trimmed. First on the chopping block: the terms "Level 1/2 desysop". That's not even English, dammit. Opabinia regalis ( talk) 07:49, 15 November 2015 (UTC)
Well, scientists do tend to be a contentious bunch. At the risk of oversimplifying, though, the disputes I get into in real life are usually resolved by someone collecting more data. I have tried to bring that kind of empirical sensibility to some frequently discussed topics on Wikipedia, for example at WT:RFA, where conversation can spin around in circles of ever-expanding hypotheticals unless someone presents graphs and statistics.
I won't make you go look in the Wikipedia:Great Dismal Swamp for examples, but I try to be a moderating influence when I come across an interpersonal conflict, and prefer to nudge people toward a resolution on the substance of the dispute rather than focusing on surface qualities like who cursed more or used a shouty edit summary or whatever. There's a tendency in some parts of the project to react to people who are frustrated and venting by quoting wikipolicy at them, which doesn't generally make people more civil or less frustrated.
You could also take a look at the current operations at TfD, where I'm usually the most active admin at the moment and have been a sort of pseudo-project manager (you know, the person who supposedly has more power but isn't really doing very much of the work? ;) following an RfC about six months ago enabling non-admin delete closures there, which we now have a handful of very experienced and productive people doing. Opabinia regalis ( talk) 04:40, 16 November 2015 (UTC)As for how much incivility alone affects editor retention, and to what extent that effect is gendered, these are empirical questions that I don't know the answers to. I do believe that the general discourse environment on Wikipedia can be off-putting to women, but that's not quite the same question as whether the Wikipedia-idiosyncratic concept of "civility" is a factor. It should come as no surprise to hear that I am in favor of data-driven decision-making, and I would prefer to see data on the effects of specific behaviors on editor retention rather than trying to use the umbrella description of "incivility". For example, automated and bureaucratic-seeming notices are a known issue in retaining new editors, and the proliferation of those notices is arguably an effect of an environment built largely by well-educated men who disproportionately come from the technology industry, but this isn't a matter of "civility" the way we usually think of it.
If I can be a bit of a hypocrite here and mention my personal anecdata-driven opinion: when we lose good long-term contributors for Wikipedia-culture-related reasons rather than real-life reasons, it usually seems to be the effect of someone feeling that their contributions were disrespected. Disrespect and incivility aren't quite the same, and focusing too narrowly on the latter in editor-retention efforts would be a mistake. Opabinia regalis ( talk) 21:32, 15 November 2015 (UTC)
Interesting question, but I'm not sure I agree with the premise. I haven't seen much (any?) angst over professional contributions in my content areas. Maybe you could link to some? In fact, editors in biomedicine have been making a lot of progress in improving engagement with professional organizations. There have been some plans to get articles peer-reviewed by named academics, and on that specific topic I've expressed some mild reservations about using academics' personal reputations as local signifiers of article quality - but that is mostly because I have a low opinion of how academic reputation works, not because I think it's bad for Wikipedia.
Anyway, I think there's at least two groups of editors to which your question might apply. The first is people who are here as volunteers but are contributing in their areas of professional expertise. The second is people who are paid for their work on Wikipedia, spanning the range from part-time Wikipedian-in-Residence positions to chapter staff to WMF employees, who have varying levels of experience as volunteers here. And then there are full-time staff at academic and cultural institutions whose duties involve Wikipedia, who I suppose have a foot on both sides of the fence.
We've had plenty of people in the first group for a long time, and I'm not really sure if there has been a recent increase. The biggest challenge for this group is acculturation. They're often very self-confident about their contributions but also easily frustrated by not knowing how to use the software, and they don't react well to Randy in Boise telling them off about unsourced edits or poor formatting or possible COI. I wrote some thoughts for new expert editors here awhile back, and while the original purpose of that piece didn't pan out, I still think it's good advice. The second category of "professional" I have very little interaction with, other than some excellent WiR contributors in biology and chemistry, whose positions as far as I can see are not controversial at all.I definitely don't think I've seen any difference in standards of conduct following patterns of "professionalization" the way you describe. Opabinia regalis ( talk) 07:21, 18 November 2015 (UTC)
Of course this is a particularly salient problem for female candidates - as GorillaWarfare recently described in detail elsewhere. Harassment is a problem no matter who the victim is, but online harassment of women has a specific, gendered pattern that can be very distressing and disruptive. I didn't arrive on the internet yesterday; I've been harassed online in this way before - fortunately relatively briefly, and with no real-life consequences, though it's interesting to find total strangers who have no idea who you are, but simultaneously think that you're probably ugly and fat and that you need to hurry up and [ahem, this is a family-friendly election]. Of course, that sort of nonsense does put the occasional frustrated "fuck you" in perspective. As a matter of temperament I'm pretty low-key, and I'm not usually susceptible to accidental troll-feeding. When I see venting and insults and whatnot in response to an on-wiki event, I generally try to focus on whether there's a real problem buried under the rhetoric instead of reacting to the way it was expressed.
One thing I did think carefully about before deciding to run is the history of outing/doxxing of sitting arbs, since I think I'm one of the few still-pseudonymous candidates, and I'd prefer to keep it that way as a combination of principle and stubbornness. But I'm really very boring and unimportant in real life, there's very little hay to be made from discovering my identity (headline: "employee of educational institution occasionally works on educational project at work!"), and overall it'd be kind of a nuisance but not inherently a problem. Opabinia regalis ( talk) 21:15, 16 November 2015 (UTC)
Hi, and thank you for running for Arbcom. These questions focus on WP:OUTING. For the purposes of these questions please assume the editors' usernames are far more distinct and unique than the ones I have given.
This sounds like a not-so-hypothetical hypothetical related to gamergate, but I'm not closely familiar with the events of that case. There's not really enough context left here to say definitively what should be done; in particular, it matters if the Bar account on reddit is itself linked to any real-world personal information. Notable missteps over the last year notwithstanding, the best first step is generally to email the committee with any information that is material to on-wiki events but may raise privacy concerns if posted publicly.
In a general sense, I think it's important to maintain a robust local culture of protecting anonymity. This is a systemic bias issue; members of socially marginalized groups often prefer to interact anonymously online and are more protective of their privacy. (There was a lot of discussion about this in various tech fora when the Google+ service launched, initially requiring the use of real names, and it's one of many reasons you might be reading this parenthetical and thinking "Google+? Is that even still a thing?") It's also a standards-of-evidence issue, in that it can be very difficult to rule out mistaken identity and intentional impersonation/joe jobs when issues arise outside of Wikipedia. Very obviously, based on the Lightbreather situation, we haven't really found the right balance yet. Opabinia regalis ( talk) 03:11, 18 November 2015 (UTC)
The workload seems to vary quite a bit, both in volume and in the balance between things that can be done in otherwise spare moments and things that require large blocks of time. I'd say I'm offering 10-15 aggregate hours per typical week. It remains to be seen what happens post-BASC, but to the extent that more time is needed on a regular basis for things other than core functions of the committee, I would encourage streamlining internal processes and delegating inessential tasks, which I am willing to put some up-front time and effort into if needed. (*cough* CRM *cough*) Opabinia regalis ( talk) 07:04, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
I don't know, but thanks :) Arbcom may be one of those "running for office makes you unqualified for it" kinds of jobs!
Thanks for the pointer to that essay, which I actually hadn't seen before - looks like a good companion to the one I usually think of at WP:CIVILPOV. The railroad essay is thoughtful and has some good suggestions for how to navigate the personal side of this type of conflict. If I were going to edit it, I'd add to the list of recommendations another suggestion to try to resist being railroaded by keeping the focus of conversation on sources. This can be a slow and tedious way to edit, but the best approach to a POV-related dispute is to be extremely careful about how sources are selected and used. This allows someone to defuse the "focusing on the editor" aspects of the "railroading" dynamic (or, alternatively, makes that dynamic much more obvious to outside observers when the matter goes to a dispute resolution process).
As for responding to evidence of this behavior, I think it can be very difficult to demonstrate some of the things you suggest - e.g. that editors are aligned with or coordinating with each other, or that they have a specific goal of running someone else off the site. If I were evaluating evidence of this in a case, I'd like to see the evidence presented in terms of the effects of the behavior, with a minimum of discussion of motivations unless the motivations themselves are stated and diff-able. People who have been involved in a long-running dispute sometimes get tunnel vision and focus too closely on the individual editors they've come to think of as unpleasant obstructionists, when the central question for an arbcom case of this type should really be about how to improve the overall editing environment in the topic area, not just how to make sure specific people are appropriately sanctioned for their possible past misdeeds. Opabinia regalis ( talk) 07:05, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
Now, almost nobody is going to enjoy their encounter with arbcom or walk away thinking that was a good time and we should see each other again next week. A lot of people will be dissatisfied with the outcome of the case they're involved in, frustrated by restrictions imposed, disappointed that the other side didn't get sanctioned as severely as they'd hoped, and so forth, but I think we can do a better job at not sending people away feeling powerless and disrespected. A lot of that is about communication, rather than dispute resolution itself - making case participation less bureaucratic, communicating more clearly about timelines, etc. would go a long way toward improving the environment once a problem has become a case, and these are relatively straightforward changes that seem (based on observations from the outside) like they'd benefit from reducing the number of non-essential and distracting tasks arbs have to handle outside of case work.
Bearing in mind that problems get to arbcom because there aren't any obvious good solutions, a not-bad solution to an otherwise intractable dispute is ideally forward-looking and pragmatic, and focuses on improving the environment around the source of the dispute rather than making individual people eat their ration of crow. Focusing on individuals at the expense of the broader context seems to be a feature of arbitration cases that is long-standing and difficult to avoid, and I'm not sure I have any brilliant ideas in that respect, but if I get elected and make this mistake you'll all have this diff to point me to, at least :) Opabinia regalis ( talk) 05:29, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
Hi, Opabinia regalis. Thank you for running for the position, i know it takes a lot of personal time and effort.
Well, see my answer to Smallbones' question for a partial response on the matter of bullying (which I still don't think is a great term for the problem, but whatever works). I certainly agree that we need to think more deeply than "bad words" in handling incivility.
I'm going waaaaay back in history here, but I think the project doesn't have a great history with groups of users self-organizing around their personal beliefs about civility and user conduct. A lot of the historical mechanisms for soliciting feedback about user behavior - like Wikiquette alerts and RFC/U - have been deprecated, for good reason but with the effect of leaving relatively few options if the problem is behavioral rather than fundamentally about a content issue. ANI is too unstructured and invites too much distracting drive-by commentary to really be useful in addressing low-level but persistent behavior problems, and it tends to exacerbate volatile situations where someone is angry or upset - so I do see the value in having a more structured and deliberative way to address a behavior problem, especially when the complainant has or believes they have less "power" than the person whose behavior they object to. However, I can't off the top of my head design a new solution where so many previous attempts have failed, and in any event this is a matter for the community to handle. Arbs can certainly take a close look at any evidence that arises in cases about bullying and related behavior, but moderating things at the community level where possible would be a better approach. Opabinia regalis ( talk) 21:38, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
Thank you for stepping forward; your commitment to serving the community is greatly appreciated.
Please accept my apologies for the lateness of these questions.
Many thanks in advance for any answers. - Ryk72 'c.s.n.s.' 15:29, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
1. I think people should choose who to vote for based on whatever criteria they think are most important. Personally, I think the relative lack of diversity on arbcom has demonstrated itself to be a problem in the recent past, much as lack of diversity elsewhere in STEM, in open-source communities, etc. can be. If you ask why there aren't more women on, say, a panel of speakers at a scientific conference, you often hear that no women's names came to mind as invitees, that not enough women were qualified, that those who were invited declined, and so on. So if you do think that diversity is an important criterion, that's less of a limitation here; three women have volunteered and you can judge us by whatever is important to you.
2. The relevant part of my CV is here :) Opabinia regalis ( talk) 22:00, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
Thank you for your answers. I'm not a proponent of positive discrimination, the question was perhaps trickier than it seemed, but well answered. Diversity is definitely needed for any team to function well. You have my vote. As for scientific merit: mine is limited too, i'm still struggling to finish my PhD. But if you ever come across an arbitration case (or article) on neuroscience or medicine in general, which is in dire need of expertise, feel free to leave me a note. PizzaMan ( ♨♨) 07:15, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
There's a pretty broad range of possible issues here. I'll say that in general, I think the community is not very good at this.
First of all: Wikipedians, individually and collectively, are not competent to diagnose anyone's mental illness, verify anyone's claim to have one (or not), or provide therapy or supportive care. If someone seems to be in real danger, their needs exceed what amateurs can help with over the internet; that's what emergency@wikimedia.org is for.
For more routine matters, the best approach really depends on what the original problem behavior was. It's important to bring some empathy and sensitivity to this kind of situation, and to know when to step back and let things settle down even if it means tolerating some contained "disruption" in the meantime. There are some common community antipatterns here - for example, if someone's behavior has been conspicuously problematic, instead of thinking "this person seems frustrated/upset/vulnerable" a common response seems to be to arrive on their talk page and tell them they need to be more WP:CIVIL, wikilink and all. Or, three or four different people will turn up with stern words about Stopping The Disruption. This is often perfectly well-meaning, and difficult to interrupt, but it's also generally counterproductive and condescending, as if someone's short-term capacity for emotional self-regulation will change based on whether they've read a policy page. (If that worked, they would've tried it already, right? I mean, if it worked I might even read the MOS ;)
In my view these situations are usually best approached by a responsible admin or a small group, preferably people the editor is familiar with, in private if the situation warrants. Ideally the editor can identify specific behaviors that were problems and have a plan to avoid them - sometimes these conversations put a lot of emphasis on apologies and remorse and I think that's backwards; focus on specifically what should be done in the future, in a way that neither legitimizes further disruption nor stigmatizes the editor. Quasi-forced mentorship is unappealingly patronizing and ineffective, but one approach to supplement a returning editor's efforts might be a less structured agreement with particular trusted users who can recognize the behavior pattern at issue and intervene at the first sign of a problem. No-questions-asked short self-requested blocks might help short-circuit developing problems in some cases. It's hard to suggest particulars out of context, but I think the important common feature is that the returning editor should feel like they're returning to an environment they can trust, not like they're in a fishbowl surrounded by people staring at them and waiting for a violation, and definitely not like their history and/or block log is justification for others to mistreat them.
Now I wrote all that on the assumption that the editor is productive and that their behavior fell within the normal range of Wikipedia problems. Bringing someone back always requires balancing their efforts with the potential harm their behavior might cause to others, and in some cases the problems were so long-standing or extreme that their relationship to the community is just not repairable. That doesn't mean they should be treated unkindly, and being unable to edit the English Wikipedia isn't some kind of moral judgment; it does mean that they should be encouraged to find something else to do.
Oh, one more thing: occasionally we see someone decide to make insulting or disparaging comments about someone else's mental health, seemingly opportunistically when their target is angry or upset. For some reason it doesn't always get much reaction, but that should be just as unacceptable as disparaging commentary based on any other personal characteristic. Opabinia regalis ( talk) 08:39, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
Well, I'm not sure what use my unconscious opinions are when I'm happy to tell you my conscious ones ;)
As a general point, I think it's healthy for arbs to have stated opinions on this kind of topic - it's evidence of having experience working with issues that arise in mainspace editing - but I'm not sure the specific opinions are all that relevant. Disputes that reach arbitration all have their own particular histories and are best approached in context. General thoughts on the nature of notability or whatever are of limited utility. Opabinia regalis ( talk) 11:36, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
![]() | Arbitration Committee Election 2015 candidate:
Opabinia regalis
|
Add your questions below the line using the following markup:
#{{ACE Question
|Q=Your question
|A=}}
Thank you for stepping forward! A woman who will pass kittens and cookies!
Thank you for running for the hardest and most thankless job on the project. Many of these questions are sourced from actual cases, discussions, and problems over the past year. Enjoy!
Committed, productive volunteers are critical to the success of the project and the most important factor in considering a site ban is respecting their safety, their time, and their contributions. I mention safety first because there should be no leniency for harassment, abuse, threats, doxing, outing, and other behaviors that compromise the well-being of volunteer contributors.
When it comes to time and effort, it's more of a balancing act. I'd support a site ban for cases of paid or unpaid advocacy or POV-pushing where the editor shows no inclination to edit other topics, causes conflicts with many neutral editors in a topic area, and where a topic ban hasn't been successful - we just can't be wasting volunteer time on cleaning up after people whose content contributions are unusable and embarrassing. A similar argument applies to egregious or repeated behaviors like abusive sockpuppetry, copyvios, BLP violations, and so forth, though many of these issues get handled by the community. On the other hand, for that category of people who are prickly or volatile or otherwise considered difficult to work with, but who are themselves good contributors, I'm very much inclined to find alternatives to a site ban. Opabinia regalis ( talk) 06:45, 15 November 2015 (UTC)
Well, sometimes the civility problems are the problem and sometimes they're a symptom of a different problem. So I don't agree that these are the only tools in the toolbox; in some cases incivility is secondary to another issue - e.g., frustration from dealing with POV-pushing or trolling or harassment - and dealing with the source of the frustration may improve the editing environment without the need for specific civility-related remedies.
Even where there isn't a specific obvious cause, most incivility on the project is reactive, because someone was angry or upset. And then there's the "incivility" that comes in the form of superficially civil baiting and insults, which tends to fly under the radar due to not producing a single spectacular curse-word-laden diff. It's not exactly creative, but my best suggestion is to make sure arbs have enough time to dig deep enough into the evidence to understand the context behind instances of incivility and figure out whether remedies and restrictions can address the underlying problem.
I've also noticed a few proposals recently on using technical rather than social tools to implement behavioral restrictions. IIRC there was one for technical implementation of a topic ban, and there's a current one on filtering talk page abuse. Right now we have very blunt instruments available for stopping problematic behavior that is isolated to a particular article or topic: you can protect a page so no one can edit it, or you can block a user so they can't edit anything. I think we'd benefit from exploring more fine-grained technical measures. They'd have downsides of their own, but at least the endless wikilawyering about "broadly construed" could be controlled. Opabinia regalis ( talk) 06:45, 15 November 2015 (UTC)
I'm closely paraphrasing myself in a recent post, plagiarizing some forgotten second source: the workshop mostly seems to be a place for editors to demonstrate the behaviors that got them dragged to arbcom in the first place. Probably from the same source: it's also a good place for editors to fling mud at each other without getting it all over the rest of the encyclopedia.
I'm joking, sort of :) I think it's useful in principle, because a) it's a chance to solicit input from the parties and interested observers about what they think a workable solution would look like; and b) it alleviates the waiting-for-Godot feeling of anticipating a proposed decision. In practice, it seems awkward at best, like a mini-thunderdome at worst, and soaks up a lot of clerk time. I wonder if dropping the "write a proposed proposed decision" format and just inviting brief statements from each party on what they hope to see in the final decision might make the whole thing less of a mudslinging match. Opabinia regalis ( talk) 04:16, 15 November 2015 (UTC)
OK, top-line response: the fact that Wikipedia is a disproportionately unsafe place for women to participate is one of my top concerns, is a major reason I returned to the project earlier, and is a major reason I put myself on this page in the first place. I am certainly committed to doing what I can to make the project a safer place.
That being said: I'm not convinced the problem is most usefully analyzed using the concept of "bullying". In order to really make progress here, we're going to have to start being more specific about the behaviors and actions we want to change instead of trying to stuff a whole parade of horribles into a black box with a label like "bullying" or "incivility". (Never mind the mixed metaphor... ) I described some thoughts on the matter here in what was probably way too long of a post for a Signpost comment, but I think the distinctions drawn there are important. Harassment and abuse are not the same problem as "microaggressions", or the accumulating irritations of individually ignorable but collectively exhausting minor misjudgments. Conflating the two problems alienates those in the second group who can be persuaded to change their behavior by implying they're no better than the jerks in the first group.
I'm also not sure that making a ranked list of priorities is a useful exercise as a candidate for a committee whose job is primarily reactive. Arbcom can't "take charge" of some community issue or another, no matter how strongly individual arbs may feel about it. Nevertheless, within the limits of what arbcom can do, I consider it critical to make sure that women and members of other underrepresented groups feel as safe as anyone else participating in the community and using its dispute-resolution processes.
Oh, and as long as we're here: that is very much not a platform of disrespecting or devaluing the contributions and commitment of people who happen to be in majority demographics - I too am objectively very privileged and in any case this isn't social justice bingo. It's about making sure we treat the other human beings who have volunteered their time to the project with equal amounts of kindness and respect. Opabinia regalis ( talk) 02:37, 15 November 2015 (UTC)
1) I suggested way up above somewhere that communication between arbs and parties seems to have been a real problem this year, and the e-cigs case is an excellent example of it. I hope that streamlining or reducing off-wiki tasks will enable more time spent on cases and more opportunities for keeping the parties in the loop in case of delays. But I'm not sure that I can make specific proposals at this stage to change how arbs communicate with each other, without knowing the existing patterns of off-wiki communication.
2) I am not by nature intransigent at all, and take a very practical approach to reform proposals; I think I'm personally unlikely to contribute to stalled reforms out of stubbornness. I'd try to nudge anyone who's dug their heels in by showing evidence in favor of whatever reform was being proposed; sometimes things can be argued about in the abstract near-indefinitely but the impasse breaks with convincing data.
3) I may be long-winded, verbose, and prolix, as well as wordy and loquacious, but I still can't stand that stuff. I'd like to see a lot of the procedural fluff trimmed. First on the chopping block: the terms "Level 1/2 desysop". That's not even English, dammit. Opabinia regalis ( talk) 07:49, 15 November 2015 (UTC)
Well, scientists do tend to be a contentious bunch. At the risk of oversimplifying, though, the disputes I get into in real life are usually resolved by someone collecting more data. I have tried to bring that kind of empirical sensibility to some frequently discussed topics on Wikipedia, for example at WT:RFA, where conversation can spin around in circles of ever-expanding hypotheticals unless someone presents graphs and statistics.
I won't make you go look in the Wikipedia:Great Dismal Swamp for examples, but I try to be a moderating influence when I come across an interpersonal conflict, and prefer to nudge people toward a resolution on the substance of the dispute rather than focusing on surface qualities like who cursed more or used a shouty edit summary or whatever. There's a tendency in some parts of the project to react to people who are frustrated and venting by quoting wikipolicy at them, which doesn't generally make people more civil or less frustrated.
You could also take a look at the current operations at TfD, where I'm usually the most active admin at the moment and have been a sort of pseudo-project manager (you know, the person who supposedly has more power but isn't really doing very much of the work? ;) following an RfC about six months ago enabling non-admin delete closures there, which we now have a handful of very experienced and productive people doing. Opabinia regalis ( talk) 04:40, 16 November 2015 (UTC)As for how much incivility alone affects editor retention, and to what extent that effect is gendered, these are empirical questions that I don't know the answers to. I do believe that the general discourse environment on Wikipedia can be off-putting to women, but that's not quite the same question as whether the Wikipedia-idiosyncratic concept of "civility" is a factor. It should come as no surprise to hear that I am in favor of data-driven decision-making, and I would prefer to see data on the effects of specific behaviors on editor retention rather than trying to use the umbrella description of "incivility". For example, automated and bureaucratic-seeming notices are a known issue in retaining new editors, and the proliferation of those notices is arguably an effect of an environment built largely by well-educated men who disproportionately come from the technology industry, but this isn't a matter of "civility" the way we usually think of it.
If I can be a bit of a hypocrite here and mention my personal anecdata-driven opinion: when we lose good long-term contributors for Wikipedia-culture-related reasons rather than real-life reasons, it usually seems to be the effect of someone feeling that their contributions were disrespected. Disrespect and incivility aren't quite the same, and focusing too narrowly on the latter in editor-retention efforts would be a mistake. Opabinia regalis ( talk) 21:32, 15 November 2015 (UTC)
Interesting question, but I'm not sure I agree with the premise. I haven't seen much (any?) angst over professional contributions in my content areas. Maybe you could link to some? In fact, editors in biomedicine have been making a lot of progress in improving engagement with professional organizations. There have been some plans to get articles peer-reviewed by named academics, and on that specific topic I've expressed some mild reservations about using academics' personal reputations as local signifiers of article quality - but that is mostly because I have a low opinion of how academic reputation works, not because I think it's bad for Wikipedia.
Anyway, I think there's at least two groups of editors to which your question might apply. The first is people who are here as volunteers but are contributing in their areas of professional expertise. The second is people who are paid for their work on Wikipedia, spanning the range from part-time Wikipedian-in-Residence positions to chapter staff to WMF employees, who have varying levels of experience as volunteers here. And then there are full-time staff at academic and cultural institutions whose duties involve Wikipedia, who I suppose have a foot on both sides of the fence.
We've had plenty of people in the first group for a long time, and I'm not really sure if there has been a recent increase. The biggest challenge for this group is acculturation. They're often very self-confident about their contributions but also easily frustrated by not knowing how to use the software, and they don't react well to Randy in Boise telling them off about unsourced edits or poor formatting or possible COI. I wrote some thoughts for new expert editors here awhile back, and while the original purpose of that piece didn't pan out, I still think it's good advice. The second category of "professional" I have very little interaction with, other than some excellent WiR contributors in biology and chemistry, whose positions as far as I can see are not controversial at all.I definitely don't think I've seen any difference in standards of conduct following patterns of "professionalization" the way you describe. Opabinia regalis ( talk) 07:21, 18 November 2015 (UTC)
Of course this is a particularly salient problem for female candidates - as GorillaWarfare recently described in detail elsewhere. Harassment is a problem no matter who the victim is, but online harassment of women has a specific, gendered pattern that can be very distressing and disruptive. I didn't arrive on the internet yesterday; I've been harassed online in this way before - fortunately relatively briefly, and with no real-life consequences, though it's interesting to find total strangers who have no idea who you are, but simultaneously think that you're probably ugly and fat and that you need to hurry up and [ahem, this is a family-friendly election]. Of course, that sort of nonsense does put the occasional frustrated "fuck you" in perspective. As a matter of temperament I'm pretty low-key, and I'm not usually susceptible to accidental troll-feeding. When I see venting and insults and whatnot in response to an on-wiki event, I generally try to focus on whether there's a real problem buried under the rhetoric instead of reacting to the way it was expressed.
One thing I did think carefully about before deciding to run is the history of outing/doxxing of sitting arbs, since I think I'm one of the few still-pseudonymous candidates, and I'd prefer to keep it that way as a combination of principle and stubbornness. But I'm really very boring and unimportant in real life, there's very little hay to be made from discovering my identity (headline: "employee of educational institution occasionally works on educational project at work!"), and overall it'd be kind of a nuisance but not inherently a problem. Opabinia regalis ( talk) 21:15, 16 November 2015 (UTC)
Hi, and thank you for running for Arbcom. These questions focus on WP:OUTING. For the purposes of these questions please assume the editors' usernames are far more distinct and unique than the ones I have given.
This sounds like a not-so-hypothetical hypothetical related to gamergate, but I'm not closely familiar with the events of that case. There's not really enough context left here to say definitively what should be done; in particular, it matters if the Bar account on reddit is itself linked to any real-world personal information. Notable missteps over the last year notwithstanding, the best first step is generally to email the committee with any information that is material to on-wiki events but may raise privacy concerns if posted publicly.
In a general sense, I think it's important to maintain a robust local culture of protecting anonymity. This is a systemic bias issue; members of socially marginalized groups often prefer to interact anonymously online and are more protective of their privacy. (There was a lot of discussion about this in various tech fora when the Google+ service launched, initially requiring the use of real names, and it's one of many reasons you might be reading this parenthetical and thinking "Google+? Is that even still a thing?") It's also a standards-of-evidence issue, in that it can be very difficult to rule out mistaken identity and intentional impersonation/joe jobs when issues arise outside of Wikipedia. Very obviously, based on the Lightbreather situation, we haven't really found the right balance yet. Opabinia regalis ( talk) 03:11, 18 November 2015 (UTC)
The workload seems to vary quite a bit, both in volume and in the balance between things that can be done in otherwise spare moments and things that require large blocks of time. I'd say I'm offering 10-15 aggregate hours per typical week. It remains to be seen what happens post-BASC, but to the extent that more time is needed on a regular basis for things other than core functions of the committee, I would encourage streamlining internal processes and delegating inessential tasks, which I am willing to put some up-front time and effort into if needed. (*cough* CRM *cough*) Opabinia regalis ( talk) 07:04, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
I don't know, but thanks :) Arbcom may be one of those "running for office makes you unqualified for it" kinds of jobs!
Thanks for the pointer to that essay, which I actually hadn't seen before - looks like a good companion to the one I usually think of at WP:CIVILPOV. The railroad essay is thoughtful and has some good suggestions for how to navigate the personal side of this type of conflict. If I were going to edit it, I'd add to the list of recommendations another suggestion to try to resist being railroaded by keeping the focus of conversation on sources. This can be a slow and tedious way to edit, but the best approach to a POV-related dispute is to be extremely careful about how sources are selected and used. This allows someone to defuse the "focusing on the editor" aspects of the "railroading" dynamic (or, alternatively, makes that dynamic much more obvious to outside observers when the matter goes to a dispute resolution process).
As for responding to evidence of this behavior, I think it can be very difficult to demonstrate some of the things you suggest - e.g. that editors are aligned with or coordinating with each other, or that they have a specific goal of running someone else off the site. If I were evaluating evidence of this in a case, I'd like to see the evidence presented in terms of the effects of the behavior, with a minimum of discussion of motivations unless the motivations themselves are stated and diff-able. People who have been involved in a long-running dispute sometimes get tunnel vision and focus too closely on the individual editors they've come to think of as unpleasant obstructionists, when the central question for an arbcom case of this type should really be about how to improve the overall editing environment in the topic area, not just how to make sure specific people are appropriately sanctioned for their possible past misdeeds. Opabinia regalis ( talk) 07:05, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
Now, almost nobody is going to enjoy their encounter with arbcom or walk away thinking that was a good time and we should see each other again next week. A lot of people will be dissatisfied with the outcome of the case they're involved in, frustrated by restrictions imposed, disappointed that the other side didn't get sanctioned as severely as they'd hoped, and so forth, but I think we can do a better job at not sending people away feeling powerless and disrespected. A lot of that is about communication, rather than dispute resolution itself - making case participation less bureaucratic, communicating more clearly about timelines, etc. would go a long way toward improving the environment once a problem has become a case, and these are relatively straightforward changes that seem (based on observations from the outside) like they'd benefit from reducing the number of non-essential and distracting tasks arbs have to handle outside of case work.
Bearing in mind that problems get to arbcom because there aren't any obvious good solutions, a not-bad solution to an otherwise intractable dispute is ideally forward-looking and pragmatic, and focuses on improving the environment around the source of the dispute rather than making individual people eat their ration of crow. Focusing on individuals at the expense of the broader context seems to be a feature of arbitration cases that is long-standing and difficult to avoid, and I'm not sure I have any brilliant ideas in that respect, but if I get elected and make this mistake you'll all have this diff to point me to, at least :) Opabinia regalis ( talk) 05:29, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
Hi, Opabinia regalis. Thank you for running for the position, i know it takes a lot of personal time and effort.
Well, see my answer to Smallbones' question for a partial response on the matter of bullying (which I still don't think is a great term for the problem, but whatever works). I certainly agree that we need to think more deeply than "bad words" in handling incivility.
I'm going waaaaay back in history here, but I think the project doesn't have a great history with groups of users self-organizing around their personal beliefs about civility and user conduct. A lot of the historical mechanisms for soliciting feedback about user behavior - like Wikiquette alerts and RFC/U - have been deprecated, for good reason but with the effect of leaving relatively few options if the problem is behavioral rather than fundamentally about a content issue. ANI is too unstructured and invites too much distracting drive-by commentary to really be useful in addressing low-level but persistent behavior problems, and it tends to exacerbate volatile situations where someone is angry or upset - so I do see the value in having a more structured and deliberative way to address a behavior problem, especially when the complainant has or believes they have less "power" than the person whose behavior they object to. However, I can't off the top of my head design a new solution where so many previous attempts have failed, and in any event this is a matter for the community to handle. Arbs can certainly take a close look at any evidence that arises in cases about bullying and related behavior, but moderating things at the community level where possible would be a better approach. Opabinia regalis ( talk) 21:38, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
Thank you for stepping forward; your commitment to serving the community is greatly appreciated.
Please accept my apologies for the lateness of these questions.
Many thanks in advance for any answers. - Ryk72 'c.s.n.s.' 15:29, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
1. I think people should choose who to vote for based on whatever criteria they think are most important. Personally, I think the relative lack of diversity on arbcom has demonstrated itself to be a problem in the recent past, much as lack of diversity elsewhere in STEM, in open-source communities, etc. can be. If you ask why there aren't more women on, say, a panel of speakers at a scientific conference, you often hear that no women's names came to mind as invitees, that not enough women were qualified, that those who were invited declined, and so on. So if you do think that diversity is an important criterion, that's less of a limitation here; three women have volunteered and you can judge us by whatever is important to you.
2. The relevant part of my CV is here :) Opabinia regalis ( talk) 22:00, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
Thank you for your answers. I'm not a proponent of positive discrimination, the question was perhaps trickier than it seemed, but well answered. Diversity is definitely needed for any team to function well. You have my vote. As for scientific merit: mine is limited too, i'm still struggling to finish my PhD. But if you ever come across an arbitration case (or article) on neuroscience or medicine in general, which is in dire need of expertise, feel free to leave me a note. PizzaMan ( ♨♨) 07:15, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
There's a pretty broad range of possible issues here. I'll say that in general, I think the community is not very good at this.
First of all: Wikipedians, individually and collectively, are not competent to diagnose anyone's mental illness, verify anyone's claim to have one (or not), or provide therapy or supportive care. If someone seems to be in real danger, their needs exceed what amateurs can help with over the internet; that's what emergency@wikimedia.org is for.
For more routine matters, the best approach really depends on what the original problem behavior was. It's important to bring some empathy and sensitivity to this kind of situation, and to know when to step back and let things settle down even if it means tolerating some contained "disruption" in the meantime. There are some common community antipatterns here - for example, if someone's behavior has been conspicuously problematic, instead of thinking "this person seems frustrated/upset/vulnerable" a common response seems to be to arrive on their talk page and tell them they need to be more WP:CIVIL, wikilink and all. Or, three or four different people will turn up with stern words about Stopping The Disruption. This is often perfectly well-meaning, and difficult to interrupt, but it's also generally counterproductive and condescending, as if someone's short-term capacity for emotional self-regulation will change based on whether they've read a policy page. (If that worked, they would've tried it already, right? I mean, if it worked I might even read the MOS ;)
In my view these situations are usually best approached by a responsible admin or a small group, preferably people the editor is familiar with, in private if the situation warrants. Ideally the editor can identify specific behaviors that were problems and have a plan to avoid them - sometimes these conversations put a lot of emphasis on apologies and remorse and I think that's backwards; focus on specifically what should be done in the future, in a way that neither legitimizes further disruption nor stigmatizes the editor. Quasi-forced mentorship is unappealingly patronizing and ineffective, but one approach to supplement a returning editor's efforts might be a less structured agreement with particular trusted users who can recognize the behavior pattern at issue and intervene at the first sign of a problem. No-questions-asked short self-requested blocks might help short-circuit developing problems in some cases. It's hard to suggest particulars out of context, but I think the important common feature is that the returning editor should feel like they're returning to an environment they can trust, not like they're in a fishbowl surrounded by people staring at them and waiting for a violation, and definitely not like their history and/or block log is justification for others to mistreat them.
Now I wrote all that on the assumption that the editor is productive and that their behavior fell within the normal range of Wikipedia problems. Bringing someone back always requires balancing their efforts with the potential harm their behavior might cause to others, and in some cases the problems were so long-standing or extreme that their relationship to the community is just not repairable. That doesn't mean they should be treated unkindly, and being unable to edit the English Wikipedia isn't some kind of moral judgment; it does mean that they should be encouraged to find something else to do.
Oh, one more thing: occasionally we see someone decide to make insulting or disparaging comments about someone else's mental health, seemingly opportunistically when their target is angry or upset. For some reason it doesn't always get much reaction, but that should be just as unacceptable as disparaging commentary based on any other personal characteristic. Opabinia regalis ( talk) 08:39, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
Well, I'm not sure what use my unconscious opinions are when I'm happy to tell you my conscious ones ;)
As a general point, I think it's healthy for arbs to have stated opinions on this kind of topic - it's evidence of having experience working with issues that arise in mainspace editing - but I'm not sure the specific opinions are all that relevant. Disputes that reach arbitration all have their own particular histories and are best approached in context. General thoughts on the nature of notability or whatever are of limited utility. Opabinia regalis ( talk) 11:36, 3 December 2015 (UTC)