Closed. 08:59, 21 February 2009 (UTC)
This page in a nutshell: A Request for Comment to review and, if needed, amend the arbitration enforcement process. |
Please direct general discussion and responses to the talk page. |
The Arbitration Committee stated in the Eastern European disputes case:
“ | Following the conclusion of this case, the Committee will open a general request for comments regarding the arbitration enforcement process, particularly where general sanctions are concerned. Having received such comments, the Committee will consider instituting suitable reforms to the enforcement process. | ” |
Note. Due to size, some of the topics may be split out into their own sub-RfCs and a summary transcluded into here. An up-to-date list of sub-RfCs can be found here.
Views detailing what you specifically feel works well and/or is to the benefit of the commununity under the current status quo.
Discretionary sanctions have been a godsend in numerous areas that are constantly problematic (Eastern Europe/Troubles/etcetera). It has done more to resolve these issues then anything bar the cases themselves. I would encourage administrators to be quicker with using discretionary sanctions such as 1RR/0RR, or topic bans in problematic areas
Respectfully expressing reservations about SirFozzie's opinion above. An aggressive AE decision last year of the type he describes caused considerable trouble, even though the decision went in my favor. Not to call out the administrator or the other editors involved, but the basic dimensions were a BLP article with an especially bitter dispute that had already escalated to substantial offsite dimensions. Two people got page banned without warning, and a side effect of that action ruined six months of careful work to earn the trust of both sides. The page banned editors conjectured that I had conspired with the administrator and attempts at retaliation followed. If I had anticipated that result I wouldn't have gone to AE at all. More active intervention is indeed sometimes needed, but not the Dirty Harry solution. Let's not swing this pendulum blindly.
Nothing. Literally nothing about the poorly staffed, poorly managed, poorly thoughtout and badly prioritized AE process works well right now.
Perhaps a brief recital of my track record is worth going over here. WP:ARBMAC enforcement has, as you can see by the log, been largely the result of collaboration between myself and Future Perfect at Sunrise ( talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA). Enforcement of Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Armenia-Azerbaijan 2 is something I have heavily contributed to. In Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/CAMERA lobbying the arbitration committee endorsed the findings of ChrisO ( talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA), FPAS and myself at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents/Statement re Wikilobby campaign based on the authority of Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Palestine-Israel articles. I have done as much as I can in the Eastern European wars ( Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Digwuren as well), although with limited impact. I could go on, but it would perhaps become tedious.
This is background to ensure that people understand that I have done vast amounts of arbitration enforcement work (usually related to nationalism). I have, therefore, seen both failures of the process and successes, something that many here have not.
Discretionary sanctions can work. ARBMAC has largely been a success. Ditto for AA2, which has reduced edit-warring and talkpage flaming. They are particularly good at dealing with accounts engaging in particularly poor conduct. They are less good at dealing with VestedContributors who engage in more subtle POV-pushing, as such VestedContributors are likely to have admin friends to overturn any sanctions placed on them, or to lobby for overturning. It is worth nothing that in the Balkans and Armenia-Azeri there are no partisan admins to disrupt the work of the neutral ones. Given good admin judgment and conduct, and the absence of influential partisans, nationalist flaming can be contained very well.
However, the problem is the lack of good judgment (others have noted the lack of admins: I won't go into this: the ultimate basis is the retardation of RFA culture, but that's a side-issue). Lack of good judgment stems from a) adopting the wrong paradigm to begin with and b) lack of experience. The latter is especially damaging when someone dips their toes in the water, gets scalded due to not quite knowing what they are doing, and never comes back to help. One admin more down.
This, however, should be easy to fix if we equip admins entering these forests with greater knowledge in advance. I am currently writing a dossier summarising everything I have learnt during my career dealing with these issues. This, once finished, I intend to circulate privately (no, not publicly. I have no intention of dozens of banned users working out how to avoid being caught from it) to a broad but select circle in the hope that it becomes something of an standard tome for future generations of admins facing similar problems.
"Adopting the wrong paradigm" is, however, more insidious, more damaging, and harder to fix. What I mean by the "wrong paradigm" can be summarised as the following:
The result is admins who fail to do their research, who cannot understand the background to the dispute, who fail to distinguish trolling from a content dispute, who can make no informed statements on the dispute they are supposed to be helping to solve, and who fail to understand which type of content dispute they are dealing with (see Number 46). This last, I suggest, is where most of the discontent surrounding arbitration enforcement stems from. Suggestions to fix it, anybody?
Article and topic bans have proven a useful tool. GRBerry 17:31, 22 January 2009 (UTC)
I have more thoughts in depth in progress elsewhere, but I wanted to get the main points underway, so here goes.
Discretionary sanctions, topic bans, and the like give admins varied tools and a strong implied threat to try to manage problems. When there are only a few good admins working hard, this is Very Good, gives them procedural cover where in normal disputes, you would expect other admins to step up to the plate. Bottom line: discretionary sanctions are (in the right hands) very helpful.
Related to the above, but broken into a separate section to allow others to endorse specific parts if they wish.
WP:AE has been somewhat effective at containing disputes. It has not been good at solving them, so its important to remember: the primary work of Arbitration Enforcement isn't Dispute Resolution, but dispute management. Within that context, certain things work extremely well: Discretionary sanctions and a dedicated admin corps can contain disputes, usually moving the drama generation away from SPI, AN, ANI, WQA and the articles themselves. Problematic editors are constrained by topic bans from the articles where they are the most disruptive, and behavior is often kept checked - but seldom if ever improves. Essentially, AE keeps warriors from disrupting many articles and tying up extra adminstration hours - at the cost of a few articles becoming battlegrounds and the sanity of the small handful of AE admins.
Related to the above, but broken into a separate section to allow others to endorse specific parts if they wish.
Discussions on WP:AE have occasionally developed new creative enforcement techniques. This includes a universal 1RR on troubles articles and a planned special sanction on Naked Short Selling. It should be noted that these remedies are usually born out of admin frustration and are actually outside of AE's mandate. Procedurally, there isn't actually a lot that allows these sanctions to happen except the consensus of those who show up. AE's few admin readers (in contrast to ANI) and the failure of enforcement to contain or solve a situation sometimes leads to brilliant insights. Its a very dysfunctional upside, but its sort of an upside.
I edit Israeli related topics and we get a lot of complaints or disputes. I take the view that an article on "Israel" should show empathy to Israel while maintaining adherence to neutrality reliability and truth. An article on Palestine should show empathy to Palestine etc. some articles are no-mans land but in my expereince they are usually fringe issues. This might be described as a post-modern view of the conflict.
Telaviv1 ( talk) 16:39, 4 February 2009 (UTC)
AE is the process by which the decisions reached after an ArbCom Request, and following involvement by all interested parties - involved or not, are enforced when they are violated, and can therefore be regarded as the enactment of the communities will. AE should then be the instrument of ultimate (to borrow Tznkai's phrase) dispute management, and remarkably often is. LessHeard vanU ( talk) 22:59, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
Views detailing what you specifically feel fails, works poorly, and/or is to the detriment of the community under the current status quo.
We need more administrators who don't mind getting knee deep in the muck, so to speak, to patrol AE and to assist the admins who bring a number of the cases at AE.
Discretionary sanctions are seldom effective at large disputes. Call it clubbing: people with similar views stand up for each other. And whether or not they mean well the thread soon gets so tangled that it drives away newcomers. Few venture there except those already active. Wikipedia should be a collaborative environment, not gang warfare.
One problem with Arbcom enforcement is that it often isn't enforced. Take Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Martinphi-ScienceApologist. Martinphi was put under an editing restriction, "Should they make any edits which are judged by an administrator to be disruptive, they may be banned from any affected page or set of pages."
He was banned from exactly one page in the entire year. Every other time he got an undocumented second chance, even when he admitted that he was editing a policy page in an attempt to make it easier to get ScienceApologist blocked under his civility restriction. [2]. Later, he began reworking NPOV, and I pointed out that someone under a restriction for POV-pushing really shouldn't be the one doing that. His response? He went over to WP:ANI, launched a scathing attack, claimed that "soapboxing" in the Arbcom's finding of fact did not mean the same thing as POV-pushing, and outed me (now oversighted but there's enough left in that I'm not going to link. I'll provide some diffs about the situation to the Arbcom on request. (I could, of course, be wrong about the outing - it's oversighted after all - but I do remember seeing my real name there, and he was banned for repeated outing on his talk page, including me, after an incident where he repeatedly restored outing of Scienceapologist to a wiki-link from his User page.)) He was warned, but nothing further happened. No matter what he did, noone, save that single time by Vassyana, was willing to do anything about it, deciding that, since he hadn't been restricted before, that it was a one-off event. This probably directly led to him becoming bolder and bolder at pushing boundaries, until there was no choice but the recent ban.
The lack of enforcement made the remedy against him essentially meaningless. Arbitration enforcement lacks archive searches, so anything put there is essentially lost, so if a second chance is given, then the problem user's deeds get dropped in the memory hole. One almost wonders if there shouldn't be an expidited Arbcom process for applying enforcement, instead of admins, because at least then everything would be documented, and the Arbcom would know of it.
Arbitration enforcement is a bit like the sheriff of an old west town coming into the bar and throwing some loaded handguns on the table. Sometimes a wise person gets the gun first and enforces justice. Other times a cowboy gets the guns and causes more trouble than initially existed. The problem for Arbcom is that it never knows which of the 1,600+ admins will decide to help out in a particular sanctions area. Also, because the sanctions areas are widespread through the wiki, it is difficult for the community to identify problematic enforcement of the sanctions, as is possible with the centralized RFAR pages. Some better method of enforcement of sanctions, outside of the rarely used (compared to all the sanctions being enforced) WP:AE page needs to be found.
If an admin is viewed by reasonable parties to be more than slightly involved or biased, they should not be implementing sanctions, regardless of their own personal views of their level of involvement or bias.
Not all "discretionary" topics are created equal, and admins at WP:AE sometimes fail to recognize this. For instance, in a nationalistic dispute like WP:ARBMAC, it is reasonable to think that Wikipedia should be genuinely "neutral" and not favor the claims of any particular Balkan group. On the other hand, in areas of fringe/pseudoscience, WP:WEIGHT explicitly dictates that positions supported by experts in the field deserve greater representation than those of minoritarian or fringe groups. One size does not fit all, and problems occur when techniques useful in ethnic/nationalistic disputes are imported into areas with different ground rules and content mandates. MastCell Talk 20:13, 21 January 2009 (UTC)
I'm largely quoting, with an omissions, and then elaborating a statement that Tznkai made on my talk page last month.
"An arbitration enforcer is a thankless incredibly difficult job to begin with - ... Its a hard job to do right, and you do it wrong, and you get blasted for it, you do it right, you get blasted for it - sometimes even worse. That kind of pressure selects very stubborn admins - which leads to its own problems. You need to have the magical triumvirate of stubbornness, adaptability, and measured responsiveness to criticism. What admin has that all the time, let alone at all? Most people (rightfully) wimp out of the difficult problems, and the ones left often become problems in their own right. --Tznkai (talk) 23:26, 17 December 2008 (UTC)"
To do the job well, the admin has to be able to, and reliably actually do the work to, look beyond the surface complaints presented, review the history across multiple editors activity on multiple pages, and reach a reasonable opinion about how to address what is often a complex and long standing pattern of behavior. Sockpuppetry is often an issue, so they need to be able to spot it and deal with it, even in cases where the editors have previously been caught in sockpuppetry so have learned rudimentary skills for evading detection. Meatpuppetry is also occasionally an issue. They should be or develop familiarity with the topic area, which sources for it are reliable, and which are partisan or otherwise unreliable. And they often need to be able to boil all this down to one paragraph sound bites for review by a peanut gallery in which partisans will likely be the loudest commentators, while also having a reasonable discussion with other admins who have a different take on the problem(s) and/or a different proposed solution. In all of these skills the level of competence that is called for is above that possesed by the average admin. In addition to the skills, an admin has to be uninvolved in the topic of dispute. Those who are uninvolved often do get blasted as involved simply because they are doing arbitration enforcement in the area.
Ultimately, the skills needed are rarely all possessed by a single individual to the desired level, so every volunteer compromises. For example, my sockpuppetry identification skills would have been best described as nearly non-existent; I'd only catch the most blatant and obvious cases. In short, the community as a whole has made the job too demanding for the average admin to perform it at all, and too unrewarding to keep most of the admins able to perform it competently interested in performing it for long. GRBerry 06:30, 22 January 2009 (UTC)
Discretionary sanctions have not yet yielded results from tested creative (i.e. non-standard) sanctions other than topic bans, article bans, and 1RR limits that are worth replicating on a wider scale. Nor have many even been tried. GRBerry 17:33, 22 January 2009 (UTC)
Arbitration enforcement is difficult and the editors who post there are, by definition, the most difficult editors to work with. Arbitrators should not undermine [3] [4] admins who volunteer for this difficult task unless they have found specific errors in judgement. Thatcher 19:22, 22 January 2009 (UTC)
Discretionary sanctions have the effect of shifting the burden of managing Wikipedia's most difficult editors off the shoulders of the 15 (or 18) people who were actually elected to do the job and onto the backs of self-appointed volunteer enforcers, sometimes as few as one at any given time. The admins who patrol WP:AE are generally not power-trippers and make good faith attempts to process complaints fairly and knowledgeably, but there is no assurance things will stay that way. I think there are two main problems with discretionary sanctions as presently handled.
1. Used as a cop-out when blocks and bans would be more appropriate. Perhaps "cop-out" is too strong a word. But I get the feeling that discretionary sanctions are sometimes used when a case is large, complex, or has so many parties that Arbcom finds it too challenging to evaluate the behavior of individual editors. Discretionary sanctions are useful to help patrol troubled articles that attract edit warriors. But some of these edit warriors are unredeemable and should probably be topic or site banned by Arbcom rather than leaving the mess for admins to figure out.
2. Admins are too lenient. I have been guilty of this as well, handing out 1RR per week or page bans of only a few days duration. These editors are at WP:AE because Arbcom has already ruled that their behavior is so far outside the expected norms that strong measures are necessary. I have seen WP:AE reports that are longer than the articles the parties are fighting over. The reports need to be long enough so that admins can understand and evaluate the evidence, evaluate mitigating circumstances such as claims of baiting, etc.; then close it down and do something decisive. Thatcher 11:51, 23 January 2009 (UTC)
One of the problems with arbitration enforcement is frivolous complaints and attacks against the enforcing administrators. Some sanctioned editors become very efficient in forming tag teams or factions to challenge any administrative action, to try and intimidate away unfriendly administrators. So anything an admin does in the "team's" topic area, may be immediately challenged with repeated admin board threads and ArbCom motions, where multiple members of the faction come in to the related threads to complain about the administrator's bias/POV/instability/incompetence etc. It can be exhausting to an administrator to know that for every simple block or ban they implement, even for something as clearcut as a 3RR block in the topic area, they may then have to deal with several days (or weeks) of attacks and discussion board threads, even if the admin's actions are ultimately upheld. Having some oversight of administrative actions is of course necessary, but something also needs to be done to rein in the time-wasting "insta-challenges" to everything an admin does. -- El on ka 17:41, 24 January 2009 (UTC)
Arbitration enforcement generally resolves around entrenched disputes. These are disputes that have gone to ArbCom, generally after multiple admin intervention failures, RfCs, mediation, and other processes. In short, entrenched disputes cannot be solved by normal means. If they could, they would've been already. The tools given to AE admins are essentially beefier versions of normal means - thus leading (predictably) to failure in most cases. Sockpuppetry, tendentiousness, and mistrust are common - all of which makes AE disputes depressingly similar to real world entrenched conflicts such Taiwan/China, The Troubles, the Balkans, the Science Wars, and the Arab-Israeli question - just with lower stakes and no one dying.
I've already been quoted by GRBerry concerning admin selection pressures, so I'll just expand on admin burnout. A fundamental part of the wiki process, and probably the human brain, is feedback. Feedback can be positive (barnstars) negative (you suck!) and constructive (this works, this doesn't. In AE you usually only get negative feedback, sometimes you get positive feedback from people you don't want to (as one side of editor warriors rejoices when you sanction their opponents) and you get virtually no constructive feedback. In addition to that, there is inherently very little pay off. When an admin manages a dispute on a typical article, helps correct behavior and forge consensus, that admin can feel proud. They have helped improve the article. Something got done - two sides at loggerheads are working together, and content will spring forth as a result. That sort of success brings elation. This does not happen at AE - or if it does, it does so very rarely, and the victories are short lived. Answering AE problems has very little pay off, and as a result is incredibly exhausting. Oh - and you're usually going it alone.
No person can withstand that for long - at least not without some serious damage to judgment. Our best admins get used up - and the admin's stubbornness that allows success in the first place is also dangerous in its own right: admins who are trying hard in good faith often end up creating drama and problems as they desperately try to solve unsolvable situations essentially (psychologically) cut off from any useful feedback mechanism.
The primary participants of the Arbitration Enforcement board are warriors, edit or POV, or uncivil jackasses, take your pick, the people doing the complaints are usually part of the problem. Often, the complaints become part of the problem. Problematic editors try to arbitration enforcement - which lessens the ability of the responding admin to get a clear picture of the dispute, drives away uninvolved editors and other admins from adding in, turns AE into a battleground, and finally and most importantly eliminates the deterance value of Arbitration remedies. Instead problematic editors simply sling accusations back and forth until they all get sanctioned. Who loses? Admins, editors, and the reader (cause the articles go to hell or stagnate as a result).
To start with, I'd like to call attention to this gem from GRBerry on the failures of AE which will help put my comments here into context: arbitration enforcement is a critically flawed paradigm that does not work. Arbitration enforcement passes the buck on difficult disputes to an increasingly shrinking pool of admins who usually come out damaged or useless. AE consumes our best admins, and makes some of our admins into serious problems in their own right. Even if AE was flooded with a large number of high quality admins to mitigate burnout and low participation problems, AE would still be the equivalent of treading water. Nothing is being solved because you can't solve entrenched disputes by detterence and simple solutions - if you could we would've done it already. Disputes end up at AE because of how difficult they are to solve. We need to think more creatively.
One of the biggest problems of AE and other bureacracies surrounding arbitration is that they generally ignore core principles of WP:ENC because there is no system in place to distinguish between good content contributors and those who are either too ignorant, too ideological, or too obsessive to write good content, distinguish between good and bad sources, actively contribute to a collaborative editing environment, or make the mundane editorial decisions necessary when writing an encyclopedia article. Essentially, AE is a giant political game of trying to parse what behaviors of editors are in specific violation of particular incunabula created by the arbcom committee. The "diff" culture at Wikipedia means that a carefully crafted and annotated series of diff-evidence will get positive attention by administrators even if the evidence is cooked or the context is lost. Furthermore, the net effect of a user's presence is completely ignored since the entire endeavor is so ridiculously piddling. Did he swear in the edit summary? Is it okay to block her even though she refactored? Is he forum shopping? Does her activity constitue edit warring if she only reverts once a day? These discussions are stupid: they don't resolve anything because they don't take into account the basic fact that everyone is skirting around: content. Every single dispute at Wikipedia ultimately boils down to content -- and if it doesn't the disputants should be told to take their dispute elsewhere. But arbcom steadfastly refuses to rule on content (except when it igores all rules and does so anyway -- generally with disastrous results). However, just because arbcom doesn't rule on content doesn't mean that administrators must be so tied. Administrators who support decent content on Wikipedia are cowed by a culture of toleration for all users. It's a culture that is, frankly, in stark defiance to WP:ENC. Administrators are forced to treat all users as equals even in the face of evidence that some user is actively harming content.
There is no reason to tolerate users who are the most destructive to Wikipedia content, and the continual insistence that describing someone's actions as being detrimental to Wikipedia content are somehow uncivil or needlessly personal, let alone actively ban or block such users, has stymied progress in many different areas. Administrators who have shown the capability of distinguishing between good content contributors and those who shouldn't be editing a mainstream encyclopedia have told me in private that they feel disenfranchised to act. Editors who are destroying or preventing the creation of good content on Wikipedia are given a free pass as long as their other "behaviors" superficially seem okay (Civil POV-pushing) because there is no acknowledgement that such activity is harmful to the encyclopedia.
Although I agree with Science Apologist that on one level all concerns on Wikipedia arise out of content disputes, I think that may be an over arching definition of content that serves to define "encyclopedia". In fact Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, but is also collaborative as SA notes. This means that content has also a more explicit definition in reference to specific articles, and that the decision on what constitutes appropriate information on each article is based on the decision making processes that arise out of a group. Wikipedia was established this way. This can create problems as SA also notes. Making decision as to who are the experts, who are the editors who are harming the articles, who should and should not be allowed to edit are all highly subjective decisions and are impossible to judge in an objective manner. One side in a dispute is no more able to make such decisions objective than is the other. For this to change, a drastic restructuring in the encyclopedia would have to be occur, in that, a neutral, decision making body would have to be established to make neutral decisions. I can't see that happening. In the meantime, although I understand there are concerns with civility being used as excuses for all kinds of misuse, I also see that civility and good editing don't have to be mutually exclusive. I don't see great articles being achieved when stress is introduced into the environment for any reason. Stressful situations aren't side specific, but destroy productive environments for everyone. Fundamentally, incivility is a stress creating mechanism and as such damages whole discussions even if its directed at one user.( olive ( talk) 20:49, 22 February 2009 (UTC))
One problem with arbitration enforcement, is that sometimes administrators become entrenched and start enforcing their own bias. The admin decides for themselves how the articles should be written, and supports those editors that they see as having the "right" view, and rapidly blocks (sometimes indefinitely) those who they see as having the "wrong" view. Bans and blocks may be issued with little or no warning to perceived "bad" editors, even to new editors, with a rationale of, "If they start off bad, they'll always be bad, let's just rid of them quickly." An exacerbating problem with this situation, is that even good and genuinely neutral administrators are frequently attacked with frivolous complaints of bias. So it becomes very difficult to sort out the valid complaints about a biased admin, from the routine noise that always surrounds even the non-biased admins in arbitration enforcement. I'm not sure what the solution is here (ban people who make frivolous complaints, from making further cry wolf complaints?), but I did want to point out the problem. -- El on ka 17:47, 29 January 2009 (UTC)
Arbitration Enforcement at the Israel/Palestine topic has been disastrous (to anyone seeking to write good articles, anyway). The imposition of an "0RR" at some articles has led to dreadful bloggish sources being inserted, and the selective chasing off of editors still attempting to write to policy. At other articles, the problem is the rejection of good sources, and selective enforcement against people trying to include them. Meanwhile, there are newly arrived and seriously deficient editors being encouraged. Details available of all of this and more if interested. (Later - see this discussion for the chaos caused by 0RR, from which the article in question has never recovered). PR talk 15:30, 4 February 2009 (UTC)
One problem in arbitration enforcement is an echo of a problem in other (non-enforcement) areas of Wikipedia, where our community is still wrestling with the question of how to deal with an editor who may be a valuable academic but also have such poor social skills that they end up antagonizing other editors. Painting with a broad brush, some members of our community seem to classify all editors into two main camps: "smart" (being people who have advanced degrees, or are recognized experts in a subject area, or claim to be), and "dumb" (the hobbyists who pick up their knowledge in a more amateur and casual style). The philosophy being that the "smart" editors should be empowered, and if their social skills are poor, they should be tolerated because of the quality of the articles that they create. The philosophy further says that if there's a dispute between a "dumb" and a "smart" editor, the dumb editor should be rapidly ejected from the dispute, article, and/or Wikipedia entirely. Often an article in dispute seems to boil down to two camps of editors, with the "smart" side saying, "We're academics, we know what we're talking about, stop trying to insert pop culture nonsense," and the "dumb" side saying, "You say you're academics, but you're using limited sources, or garbage sources," which results in counter-charges of, "No, your sources are garbage," and this goes back and forth. In the case of arbitration enforcement, some editors of this "smart v. dumb" philosophy seem to feel that sanctions should be used only to kick out the "dumb" editors, so as to empower the "smart" editors. So when an admin attempts to sort things out, if the admin takes action against someone perceived as an "academic", even if the academic was being disruptive, edit-warring without discussion, issuing personal attacks, etc., then the admin may be attacked for "empowering POV-pushers". Even if the admin is administering warnings equally to both "sides" in the dispute, there is still sometimes a perception that academics should receive fewer (or no) warnings, simply because they're academics. -- El on ka 20:00, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
In the ArbEnforcement-relevant areas wikipedia is a giant game. People in these areas follow the natural human urge to form groups for mutual benefit. The fact that truth on wikipedia is social rather than intellectual, along with number-favoring policies such as WP:Edit war and WP:3RR, and the general preference of discipline over content policies not only forces, but positively recommends that people collaborate off-line. This is as natural as any real world scenario where one person chats about another behind their back, and many theorists believe that the human brain grew its present size mainly for this purpose. Those that resist this because of values derived from elsewhere get more often that not the "Sucker's payoff". These facts, while not particularly nice, are real. Wikipedia's policies on handling such areas don't in any real way take account of this, of what were recently labelled "tag-teams" (formerly called "cabals") who co-ordinate moves by IMs, IRC and email. How could a system possibly work if, through moral blindness, it continued to ignore, as it currently does, one of the forces that shape it most? It obviously couldn't! Deacon of Pndapetzim ( Talk) 07:05, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
Arbitration committee decisions are often unenforceable on powerful users. On the relevant AE or AN/I thread anyone with enough friends can have the most sensible decision overturned based on a use of WP:CONSENSUS. In this manner Wikipedia often resembles an early medieval court, where you are tried or convicted based on the number and status of the armed friends who turn up at the hearing. Hence, if all you have to worry about is lone admins, and you know you enough friends to prevent any ruling ever being applied, what is the incentive to obey arbcom rulings? Likewise, if you are the lone admin and know user x has enough friends to avoid it being enforced, why waste your time taking the shit for it? That is obviously a serious flaw! Deacon of Pndapetzim ( Talk) 07:21, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
Just like any other wikipedia bureaucratic gadget, enforcement of broad topic bans may actually be used as a tool against opponents by ingenuous corner cutting, selective shut-eye, overreacting, etc.
Scenarios involving an opinionated admin teamed with rank-and-file POV-pushers abound, myself being hit swift and hard in one when I occasionally stepped into Prem Rawat zone without any real interest in the topic. Adding insult to injury, user:Jossi was commended by arbcom for alleged "self-imposed restriction" while he continued to orchestrate ousting the opponents of his favorite guru. Mukadderat ( talk) 18:58, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
Arbitration enforcement is a silly idea in the first place. Administrators should be doing things because they think they're the right thing to do in the circumstances, not because some committee told them to -- Gurch ( talk) 17:53, 7 February 2009 (UTC)
AE works in uncontroversial, simple cases. Anything complex (violating rulings on incivility, creating a battleground, wikistalking, bad faith, etc.) risks one of the following problems:
In addition, I'd like to briefly point out two more issues the arbcom should address, which while slightly less related to AE, are quite crucial (as became clear to me in the EE arbcom aftermath):
See also my summary to EE arbcom, and my mini-essay here.
Solution: #Proposal by Piotrus
-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 00:13, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
One problem with arbitration enforcement, is that it seems to work backwards from other parts of Wikipedia. For example, bans v. blocks. In some AE areas, if an administrator posts a temporary editing restriction on an editor, this is seen as more controversial than if the administrator had entirely blocked the editor's account access. When an editor is blocked, they are restricted to their talkpage. When an editor is banned from one article, they will often immediately go to ANI to challenge the ban, which results in the usual drama-fest. Another contradiction in the way that arb enforcement works, is that bans are only authorized in very limited areas of the project, such as Eastern Europe, Armenia/Azerbiajan, September 11th, Pseudoscience, Israel/Palestine, etc. If a problem occurs in some other non-AE areas of the project (for example, an article about a religious cult), administrators have fewer tools available to them. To deal with a disruptive editor, an admin's only real option is to warn and block, since the admin is not authorized to place a more limited restriction such as a ban or a revert limitation. As the saying goes, "When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." So the block "hammer" may be used on editors, when a lighter remedy such as a ban from one article might have been all that was needed. This also causes the problem that when an editor is being mildly disruptive, but not so disruptive that a block is warranted, the administrator's hands are tied, since their only options are (1) warn (and see the warning ignored); or (2) Block (and risk the block being overturned as too strict). So the dispute at an article or topic area may just continue to escalate until it lands on ArbCom's doorstep, at which point, ironically, milder bans may finally be authorized. I'd like to see things flipped around, so that uninvolved administrators are authorized to place limited bans in non-AE areas, before a dispute escalates to the level of requiring arbitration. Giving administrators more "tools in the toolbox" when managing complex disputes, will be more likely to nip problems in the bud, and make disputes less likely to rise to the level of RfAr in the first place. -- El on ka 21:32, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
I agree with User:Cla68 that the case of Martinphi-ScienceApologist (properly linked-in by Shoemaker's Holiday) is worrisome. I disagree thoroughly with the outcome--Ruling 5, that arbitration was not "to settle good-faith content disputes" was irrelevant, given Martin's unrefuted and seemingly well-supported claim that Raul654 abused his authority by protecting a page to keep his own disputed edits in place, rather than engage in discussion of them. I have no doubt that if administrators still had the authority to block editors unilaterally (several talk page discussions I read some time back indicated quite clearly that this had been the case; they included the complaint that once blocked you can't defend your actions because you're blocked [emphasis theirs]; that is what is being suggested here, is it not? If I am wrong, my apologies for misinterpreting the point here) I would have been blocked several times, just for pointing out behavior detrimental to the encyclopedia. Such is clearly Wikipedia business but each time was labelled a " No personal attacks" violation by one or another admin (also each time, the involved admin[s] eventually dropped the matter without comment, presumably recognizing but refusing to admit the legitimacy of the distinction). The regs do in fact acknowledge reporting bad faith behavior as an option, but in what I can interpret only as another instance of this attitude making itself known, all that is said there is a warning against making a false report of such, no description whatsoever as to where and/or how such reports should be made. It is bad enough that such an indefensible resistance to dealing with such behavior is widespread among administration, but for individual admins to possess the authority to act upon it with no checks and balances would probably result in the knowledge, sources, and abilities of many good editors being lost to the project. -- Ted Watson ( talk) 22:58, 15 February 2009 (UTC)
Read through this thread. Count the number of bytes contributed by uninvolved admins. Compare that to the volume of noise contributed by various familiar partisans. MastCell Talk 04:14, 19 February 2009 (UTC)
The arbitration enforcement process is ineffective in dealing with cases where private, sensitive information is involved that cannot be presented onwiki (e.g. personally identifying information of users, some BLP cases, and cases where harassment — including off-wiki or by e-mail — is involved). Such cases are complicated and difficult, and not something that an ordinary admin might want or be able to handle. Yet, the arbitration committee rarely is involved in arbitration enforcement, and prefers letting ordinary admins deal with arbitration enforcement. -- Aude ( talk) 01:48, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
In many of the AE threads the discussion the issues become opaque because there is no ready way to distinguish between the involved and the uninvolved. For instance, a user posts an AE issue for administrator attention about user x. User x's allies turn up with their perspectives, clouding consensus, or user x' enemy user y and his buddies turn up clouding consensus. When this happens, as it does as often as not, it is often obvious to the admins seasoned in the area; but isn't to everyone else. As well as making it more difficult to arrive at the right decision, it may discourage the wider administrator attention that is needed. In some areas it is a problem that the same administrators supervise the same disputes over and over again; in one area at least I think this has led to bias because the administrators in question have bonded with some of the parties over time by email and elsewhere, and have created their own subculture that some are able to benefit from more than other; the prejudices created consolidate themselves over time by confirmation bias; and when that is the case, it hurts fairness. Deacon of Pndapetzim ( Talk) 01:57, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
Specific proposals for the improvement of arbitration sanctions and enforcement.
In order to encourage discussion on ArbCom enforcement, and to make sure the same "clique" of admins do not exert too much influence on the AE process:
Any Administrator who blocks or places a discretionary sanction on a user per a discussion on WP:AE should post a short summary of the action taken on the administrator's noticeboard, with a link to the discussion in question.
Administrators can form volunteer task forces to address specific long term problem areas. This would involve a commitment to a specific area, watchlisting pages, and stepping forward foremost with negotiation skills. Talk to people in a friendly way; let them know that policies mean something and that somebody's paying attention. Step forward with short page protections when an edit war starts to break out, occasionally apply short blocks. The full weight of discretionary sanctions would be a last resort. The key is to get a critical mass of neutral admins together. Suggest setting up a volunteer group and selecting one long term trouble spot as a pilot project. Say, 15 administrators sharing a commitment to The Troubles. If the pilot project works, refine the approach and repeat it elsewhere.
Administrators generally self-select for roles in arbitration enforcement, which has caused difficulty in a number of settings in the past. Not all administrators are cut out for the detailed and difficult work of enforcement arbitration remedies in complex disputes. The best administrators at work in enforcement have no more discretion than the worst, and often get burnt out and leave enforcement altogether. The following proposals are more food for thought than anything I think could gain a serious consensus; they are an attempt to brainstorm methods to spread the burden of enforcement into small teams and to enable skilled administrators to participate while preventing the haphazard participation of administrators whose skills lie elsewhere.
Option one:
Option two:
I notice that the scope of this request for comment explicitly includes WP:BLPSE - special enforcement of biographies of living persons. I noticed a few weeks ago that Barberio asked the committee to consider mitigating or revoking this clause. The most recent section on the policy's talk page is here: Barberio and current committee members were discussing what to do.
There's a lot of discussion on that talk page. I won't read all of it. If I stumble across points that have been made endlessly, please forgive me.
"Special enforcement" should only be necessary if "ordinary enforcement" is not sufficient. If ordinary enforcement of the BLP policy is working, there should be no need to invoke the authority of the committee in undertaking ordinary administrator actions. Let's hypothetically replace BLP with any other policy, for example, that hoax articles should be deleted. Would we consider the absurdity of a "Special enforcement" that an admin may invoke the authority of ArbCom to delete a hoax? I would say the admin is just doing his or her job. It's the same with BLP: it's a policy like any other policy, and people who enforce that policy are just doing their jobs.
It's important that administrators delete defamatory biographical articles and block users who repeatedly insert defamation into articles, but it shouldn't be from a decree on high. If I were an admin, and I felt that the only way to justify an action was by invoking "special enforcement", I would think again and say "maybe the action is not wise." Crystal whacker ( talk) 03:03, 21 January 2009 (UTC)
WP:BLPSE begins, "Administrators are authorized to use any and all means at their disposal..."
I cannot believe that Arbcom seriously meant that. Are we to believe that Arbcom advocates, say, banning at the drop of a hat, deletion, edit warring, mafia hits - all the harmful things that could be done and which could create massive drama? No, clearly what they actually meant was Well, pretty much, Wikipedia:BLP#Maintaining_biographies_of_living_persons.
The over-the-top statement made in the first sentence is probably a big reason why this policy has seen so little support. It's clear that the arbcom cannot mean what their words say in it, and that any admin who actually did use massive overkill in protecting BLP would soon find himself up before Arbcom for censure.
Bad writing was a particular problem in the 2008 Arbcom. This is another example of the problems it can cause.
If BLPSE is to remain, it needs completely rewritten. However, Wikipedia:BLP#Maintaining_biographies_of_living_persons already includes all or most of the material that could conceivably remain from it. A better plan may be for the Arbcom to simply add any important statements from BLPSE that aren't already there to WP:BLP, and then rescind the rest of that finding.
I have said this numerous times to the 2008 Arbcom: A policy that people aren't aware of isn't policy. Burying, say, a clarifiction of WP:USER in what was already a year-old case when a sitting arbiter asked for it to be reopened particularly to add the WP:USER clarification ( WP:Requests for arbitration/Tobias Conradi), only serves to trap users not aware of the extremely-well-hidden Arbcom comments. If Arbcom wants to modify policy, they are trusted, respected users. They can modify policy, say that the changes are recommended by Arbcom, and, the changes will quite likely stick.
There is no need whatsoever for the 2008 Arbcom's creation of policy by fiat, which never was added to the policy pages themselves.
At the conclusion of any arbitration case in which discretionary/general sanctions are placed, the Committee shall appoint a team of five uninvolved administrators to enforce said sanctions. If an uninvolved administrator should find themselves unable to continue in the role, the arbitration committee shall appoint a replacement. Arbitrators may not be uninvolved administrators. Only the appointed administrators may enforce the specific sanction. Appeals of sanctions will be made first informally to the appointed group of five and then to the Arbitration Committee as a Request for Clarification.
Proposal: Arbitration enforcement's scope is strictly limited to parties of the case.
Rationale: I propose the above for several reasons:
Arbitration enforcement mostly works. Drastic changes are not needed. Absent specific findings that discretionary sanctions have been misused by admins with agendas or poor judgement or too much involvement, additional bureaucracy such as special enforcement panels or committees is not needed. Here are some suggestions for improving WP:AE.
-- Thatcher 15:54, 23 January 2009 (UTC)
I think this could work well in cases where neither side has policy to back them, but in cases where one side is clearly warring against policy, e.g. NPOV, these suggestions could be disasterous. For instance, the Greens think that an article on X should reflect the mainstream scientific view. The purples want to remove all criticism of X, and use the article for advocacy. Is the solution really to come down equally hard on the greens?
Similarly, point 2, on gaming the system, is open for abuse. Let's say in the above situation an admin holds purple views, but has never edited the article. People complain about the way he does enforcement, seeing him as too involved, but under the proposal, are accused of gaming the system, and their somewhat subtle points ignored.
In short: Thatcher makes what's on the whole a good proposal, but it definitely needs some work. Shoemaker's Holiday ( talk) 21:32, 24 January 2009 (UTC)
P.S. To be clear, while my comments on point 5 are things I've seen, the comments about the secret purple admin is not meant to apply to anyone. Shoemaker's Holiday ( talk) 21:11, 25 January 2009 (UTC)
This is just brainstorming, but I thought I'd toss it out there: How about "admin rotation"? If a dispute in a particular topic area is dragging on for more than three months, rotate the admins on that dispute out, and rotate new administrators in, by swapping places. So, for example, take the group of admins that are monitoring the 9/11 articles, and swap them with the group that are monitoring the Armenian/Azerbaijani articles. This will bring in fresh eyes to both disputes, and guarantee "uninvolved" status in both topic areas. -- El on ka 23:56, 23 January 2009 (UTC)
This proposal operates under certain premises
This is not a one size fits all solution, but addresses a certain subset of arbitration targeted articles.
The Arbitration Committee, will appoint a special 5 editor mediation panel that is responsible for creating through discussion and whatever internal processes they wish, binding content standards on a set of articles. Of the five editors, 2 editors are to be selected directly by the committee because they are known to be level headed, intelligent, and strongly committed to genuinely neutral, rigorous, and informative content. 2 editors are to be elected to represent the two opposing "sides" of the conflict - if there are more than two sides, the panel size will need to be adjusted suitably. These 2 editors are often going to be problematic editors, and should come recommended by those (purportedly) sharing their viewpoint as credible representatives. Finally, and this is the tricky bit, the fifth member is the chair of the panel - and the sole member allowed to enforce discipline. By necessity, this user must be an administrator, and should come with recommendations by the opposing 2 editors as an admin respected as neutral, ethical and forthright.
The panel, unlike Mediation or Arbitration, covers both conduct and content. The panel will hear complaints about content disputes, the application policy, and establish internal ground rules for voting, and editor conduct issues, and so on. In short - the panel is in charge of apart of the wiki - a binding WikiProject.
I cannot stress how important it is that the panel be selected carefully and intelligently, with respect for all voices involved. If anyone feels disenfranchised, the entire thing will explode. The three neutral parties have to be among our best and brightest.
This solution is radical - it would create a process that creates binding editorial standards and is very unwiki like - I'm not sure if I support it fully myself, but its time to get some ideas.
A major problem with entrenched disputes is the chilling effect. Neutral editors get squeezed out and exasperated quickly, this proposal is an attempt to address that problem
The primary flaw here is gathering volunteers. Short of raising money wiki-wide through bakesales and custom barnstars, we're going to have to think of something better to encourage participants in a thankless task.
Another brainstorming idea: How about any time an administrator becomes involved with arbitration enforcement, they be required to keep a log in a subpage of their userspace which tracks each restriction, block, or ban they implement? This provides an easy way to track a specific administrator's activity, for both positive and negative reasons. Negative, since it makes it much easier to see if an administrator is showing a tendency to only take action on one "side" of a particular dispute, or if the admin is focusing too much energy in a single topic area. And positive, because it can build trust with editors in a new dispute, to be able to check the background of an "unknown" administrator, and see where they've worked in arbitration enforcement in the past. This may help the editors in the new dispute to trust that the administrator does know what they're doing, since it'll be easy to see the string of (hopefully) successful accomplishments behind them. With editors, we have other ways of seeing someone's positive history: Good and featured class articles, barnstars, etc. But with administrators, it's more difficult to see their resume. If they maintain a list in their userspace, it's easier to examine their activity. -- El on ka 03:28, 26 January 2009 (UTC)
There seems to be issues with AE by admins when an admin's non-involvement or impartiality is called in doubt. I'd like to suggest that, as with mediation, editors retain the privilege to refuse arbitration enforcement if they feel the circumstances justify it. Of course, any one editor's refusal to submoit to a specific AE process can be brought up at a user RfC (or at RfArb) just as is the case for refusing mediation today. It would also help separate those cases where a single or a very few editors refuse AE (which is an indication of a refusal to comply) from those cases where many if not most editors refuse AE (which may be reflective of other issues, maybe having to do with the proposed enforcer). I believe it would also help increase acceptance of AE within the community.-- Ramdrake ( talk) 16:28, 27 January 2009 (UTC)
We could actively look for experience, willingness to participate in dispute resolution, and the like at WP:RFA. Heck, we could even ask candidates to select a long running dispute and address how they might help with it. Asking can't hurt, and might yield some who actually lend a hand. GRBerry 03:44, 29 January 2009 (UTC)
I happened to notice in a recent AE dispute, a user was banned for a month for edit warring over pictures of casualties in a recent conflict. This particular dispute has thus been temporarily resolved, but nothing has been done to address the underlying issue. Thus the potential remains for more edit warring in future over the same issue on that page or other pages.
I would like to see admins taking a more proactive role in preventing disputes by establishing general principles from individual cases, just as is done in a legal system. For example, in the case of this recent dispute about casualty pictures, wouldn't the obvious thing to do to be to establish a general principle that casualty pictures either are or are not acceptable in articles about conflicts? Once that has been done, we no longer have to worry about users edit warring over the issue, or having to resolve such disputes at AE. By establishing general principles from particular cases wherever possible, we should be able to decrease the amount of disputation on the project as a whole, as well as reducing the burden on administrators at AE. Gatoclass ( talk) 03:55, 31 January 2009 (UTC)
Disband ArbComm because it's a waste of time in the first place, a joke in the second place. I know an editor "topic banned" out of the "blue" without any sort of attention paid to the user's edits at the article. Just because he happened along to edit the article at the wrong time, during a lengthy heated BLP/Reliable sources vs. article subject's own published statements tiff, he was topic banned. Shut down ArbComm. RFC is enough and can be enforced by the people that are to enforce rules: ADMINS. - ✰ ALLST☆R✰ echo 07:32, 1 February 2009 (UTC)
I think that the current block and ban sanction-base approach used by arbcom, while certainly useful and helpful, isn't necessarily the most effective approach in an open, volunteer, horizontal hierarchy. Ultimately people need practical tools to help resolve their content disputes and achieve quality encyclopedic content. The dispute resolution process as it exists is fine by me, I just think it needs to be reinforced at a ground level - thus the following proposals-
Similar to concerns already addressed, I feel some of the problems with the current system are the inequalities in application of topic bans, page bans, temporary and permanent, etc. Currently the blocking systems seem to be universally understood and applied. Sadly, I can speak from personal experience that is not true with bans. There are likely a variety of reasons the current banning system is lacking or unevenly understood and applied, but focusing on potential solutions I propose:
The Arbitration Committee stated in the Eastern European disputes case that it will consider instituting suitable reforms to the enforcement process. Why was it necessary? Because for three months the proverbial mud flew in all directions between some twenty (20) experienced users supplying cooked evidence spiked with white lies in commentaries - which is possible only among users who already know how to work the system. And, what do we have now? No admin would touch this case with a ten-foot pole regardless of need. Everybody's exhausted except for the POV warriors who submit frivolous reports to ArbCom enforcement. [9]
The repeat gaming of the system exemplified in EEd Evidence section was barely acknowledged by the ArbCom in Proposed Decission due to its sheer volume with 648 diffs plus 230 Talk page links impossible to follow. In the real world the examination of such evidence would take years and possibly millions of dollars. So, something else needs to be done.
I hope that the Arbitration Committee can prevent the same manipulation from being repeated in the future, first, by narrowing the definition of what constitutes acceptable evidence. 1). No copy-paste jobs from previous cases, already closed and resolved. 2). No emotive eloquence in commentaries to diffs. 3). No repeat accusations of personal attacks and other character assassinations, simply because ArbCom in itself has a potential for becoming an attack venue against opponents. 4). Evidence provided cannot be labeled with fresh summaries because ArbCom has no clue who's real? 5). No insults (especially racial), with a threat of being barred from further proceedings. That's jest what is needed, from a perspective of a layman like me. -- Poeticbent talk 19:36, 2 February 2009 (UTC)
In the spirit of brainstorming, and picking up on Elonka's idea of rotation above: how about something akin to a jury duty system for admins? If there are around 1500 admins, at the first of each month, 250 of them – selected by the month they became an admin – would find an automated message on their talk page saying, "You have AE duty this month."
Potential benefits:
Wikipedia self defines as both collaborative or community driven, and as an encyclopedia - content driven. Although clear delineation is possible and necessary, both of these are also broad categories that can overlap. Neither should be mutually exclusive.
Stress fundamentally is neutral. The effects of stress, though, impact Wikipedia in terms of both editing content and behaviour. Research indicates that stress effects human beings on every level: Based on such research John Medina in his book Brain Rules notes that:
Your body’s defense… is built for immediate response to a serious but passing danger…Chronic stress dangerously deregulates a system built only to deal with short term responses.
and
Under chronic stress, adrenaline creates scars in your blood vessels that can cause a heart attack or stroke and cortisol damages the cells of the hippocampus. Crippling your ability to learn and remember.
and
Emotional stress has huge impacts across society….and on employees’ productivity at work. (Medina, John. Brain Rules. Pear Press, Seattle, Washington, USA, 2008.)
Arbs,. editors and admins. are all affected by incivility. What is uncivil for one and creates stress may not be for another. Civility means creating around you an environment where the other guy can work as well as you can. That includes the arbs. Arbs need to be relieved of stressful situations somewhat, to act in the most effective way possible. No one signed up for anything on Wikipedia to be beaten up.
Remedy: Delegate
1.) Example: On Behaviour
(As a sideline this may do away with the kind of gang mentality present in some situations as noted by Durova above.)
2.) Example: On Content:
3.) This means:
(I apologize if any of this is redundant ... Thought I'd better lay it all out as one thought.)
Users who endorse this suggestion
This is a variation from the recommendations from last year's Working Group on cultural and ethnic edit wars: When a case involving a wideranging dispute is addressed by ArbCom, the remedies should focus not just on the specific editors involved, but also the entire topic area. As was done with the Israel-Palestine case, discretionary sanctions should be authorized for any uninvolved administrators in the entire topic area of dispute. -- El on ka 19:46, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
Another variation from the recommendations from last year's Working Group on cultural and ethnic edit wars: Discretionary sanctions should be authorized in certain cases, even if a dispute has not yet risen to the point of an action ArbCom case. For example:
-- El on ka 19:46, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
These are three prophylactic suggestions that would help keep things cooler in general, allowing Admins to focus on knottiest problems. Where's best place to push them?
Let's alleviate the pressure on admins by taking away the seriousness of their own decision. Because of the distorted process of communal consensus formation on forums like AN/I and AE and the unclear and changing nature of WP:WHEEL, I suggest all admins patrolling AE appoint or get appointed a number of other admins who are allowed to reverse their decisions without any accusation of a WP:WHEEL violation. Such individually particular appeal-admins, if they agreed, cwould automatically be assigned power-to-overturn when one of their admins made a decision. AE Admins should be encouraged and trusted to appoint other admins whom they trust but are not close to. If the "community" were unhappy with the appeal-admin's choice they could take it to ArbCom who could motion for or against it. This would free us up to tighten this policy in other regards. I.e. it would allow us to prevent free-for-alls where any admin with another interest can overturn any decision citing "consensus" (and protect such an admin from the temptation) while not overwhelming the time of the small group of arbitrators. I think such a proposal is worth considering, even if it has to be fine-tuned. I think at the very least, AE admins should be encouraged to appoint such appeal-admins voluntarily, if for no other reason than sometimes we all go to bed. Deacon of Pndapetzim ( Talk) 08:47, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
Editors reverting pages for whatever reason should take responsibility that the page be left in a better condition that they found it. Two possible categories of problem arise.
If a good faith editor corrects typos, adds references, attempts to improve the page and then another good faith editor convinced that the edit is OR or not verifiable despite the references and cites, reverts it rather than editing it productively the net effect, may be negative.
I reverted a piece of vandalism the other day and didn't take the time to check the whole article for more. Another editor contacted me and reminded me that by removing one occurence but leaving another I hadn't caught I was in effect embedding it where other editors might not see it. Rktect ( talk) 21:58, 7 February 2009 (UTC)
It should be clear that editors should from AE should be able to request input by arbcom committee members, when they feel AE thread was improperly reviewed and closed. This should be a relatively easy and painless procedure. But those who cry fire too often should not be allowed to swamp arbcom with their grievances; thus an editor should have a limited number of "tickets" s/he can use to each year for filling RfArb requests (or clarification requests or such). If the request is considered valid, they can keep the ticket, but if not, they should run out of them (in other words, an editor spamming RfArb - or even AE - too often, should find himself unable to do so).-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 00:17, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
Admins who consider themselves neutral should keep a log of their actions and make sure that their actions aren't disproportionately in favor of one side of a conflict. Admin should also make sure to be split down the middle in terms of his actions within a given conflict. The benefit of this proposal is that sanctioned editors will have a harder time complaining that a sanctioning admin is biased.-- brew crewer (yada, yada) 23:15, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
See talk page for further discussion re
User:Elonka's response.--
brew
crewer
(yada, yada) 21:08, 11 February 2009 (UTC)
I think that there has been enough feedback so far to warrant a general proposal that assumes the need for the formation of something to improve, unify, and clarify the arbitration enforcement process i.e.
The formation of a committee, sub-committee, work group or task force of some sort which, via the creation of community-approved guidelines and policies, aims to –
1- Provide clearer instructions and guidelines to all parties on how to proceed following the arbitration decision and the proper use of arbitration enforcement resources.
2- Give general and consistent guidelines in terms of length and nature of arbitration enforcement sanctions to be applied, with good faith, neutrality, and transparency checks and controls for all parties involved.
3- Encourage good communication and cooperation among all case participants at all levels. (i.e. editors named in case, participating editors, arbitrators, arbitration clerks, and arbitration enforcement administrators)
4- Encourage familiarity with content of articles involved and specific content issues of disputes as well as a reasonably solid knowledge of the history of the case and the nature and specifics of the arb decision.
5- When necessary, allow for the creation of pragmatic, specific, practical solutions for resolving the dispute and encouraging quality articles.
Arbitration Enforcement requests would no longer be open to all administrators, they would only be open to those belonging to this specific new group formed for the purpose of arbitration enforcement. -- Scott Free ( talk) 01:28, 11 February 2009 (UTC)
I'm not sure if jumping into all these proposals was the smart thing to do, I think perhaps it would have been better had there been an in depth discussion on the talk page first. However, I guess I had better put this one up before the RFC is closed.
I propose that, for the sake of fairness and to spread the burden of responsibility, we elect a board of three admins to handle AE cases. While anyone can comment on a case and recommend action, sanctions will be left to these three admins. We could have relatively frequent elections to avoid burnout. Gatoclass ( talk) 11:19, 12 February 2009 (UTC)
Sanctions don't work. I think I've heard that somewhere before. My opinion is that arbitration is supposed to be final and binding. There should not be any of these sanctions. Given that arb-com only rules on behaviour, arb-com should be prepared to say that this user's behaviour has been unacceptable, and so the user is blocked from Wikipedia for this period of time. End of story. Admins are free to block users for various reasons at any time, and don't really need the added burden/sheen of arb-com outcomes. When a case comes to arb-com, it is usually because everything else has been tried first and all parties just want arb-com to make a decision one way or the other. Allowing the dispute to continue within a walled garden of "rules of engagement" doesn't end anything; half the time it makes it worse. To me, it's not a difficult idea to swallow. Evidence is presented and reviewed, and then arb-com should decide whose behaviour is unacceptable and block accordingly. That's the be all and end all. There should be no allowances made for outside interpretation. Arbitration should mean the situation has been arbitrated. So I propose:
1. Arbitrators review the evidence brought.
2. Arbitrators review the policies that guide behaviour.
3. Arbitrators decide if any breaches of policies have been made.
4. Arbitrators decide how serious these breaches have been.
5. Arbitrators decide how serious the effects of these breaches have been on Wikipedia.
6. Arbitrators review previous behaviour of users in question.
7. Arbitrators block users accordingly.
8. Arbiotrators close the case as having been dealt with.
9. Blocked users return when their block expires, the situation having been dealt with.
10. People move on.
That's about the sum of it.
Hiding
T 18:45, 16 February 2009 (UTC)
There are a lot of lies we tell ourselves on wikipedia, "there is no voting", "there are no cabals", "wikipedia is not a social network", etc.
Another fiction is that the Arbcom does not rule on content disputes. The reality is that the Arbcom does rule on content disputes indirectly, they just let other administrators divvy out the enforcement.
I suggest that arbitotors get rid of this fiction, and openly state that they decide content disputes, albiet indirectly. This will allow them to use the solutions above more often. Ikip ( talk) 12:04, 19 February 2009 (UTC)
In partial solution to #View_by_Deacon_of_Pndapetzim_3, propose new standard practise of maintaining separate sections for admins and non-admins on AE threads. Preferably, this would be parties and non-parties, but as there would be benefit from ignoring this, this would assuredly be ignored. Admins can discuss action in their section, while the interested non-admins (who'll be far more often than not parties to some extent) can give their advice in their own section. This is similar to the structure of arbcom case workshops. Deacon of Pndapetzim ( Talk) 02:05, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
In partial solution to #View_by_Deacon_of_Pndapetzim 2. New discretionary power, whereby uninvolved AE administrators are empowered to designate "tag teams" in restricted topic areas. I.e., for the purposes of 1RR (or whatever numerical restriction is in place), an uninvolded administrator could classify editor 1 and editor 2 (and editor 3, etc) as one editor, based on consistent historical pattern of reverting in concert. The obvious benefit here is that the use of this power, or the threat of use of it, would discourage off-wiki co-ordination and prevent use of numbers stifling cross-party dialogue, as it currently does. Deacon of Pndapetzim ( Talk) 02:16, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
Closed. 08:59, 21 February 2009 (UTC)
This page in a nutshell: A Request for Comment to review and, if needed, amend the arbitration enforcement process. |
Please direct general discussion and responses to the talk page. |
The Arbitration Committee stated in the Eastern European disputes case:
“ | Following the conclusion of this case, the Committee will open a general request for comments regarding the arbitration enforcement process, particularly where general sanctions are concerned. Having received such comments, the Committee will consider instituting suitable reforms to the enforcement process. | ” |
Note. Due to size, some of the topics may be split out into their own sub-RfCs and a summary transcluded into here. An up-to-date list of sub-RfCs can be found here.
Views detailing what you specifically feel works well and/or is to the benefit of the commununity under the current status quo.
Discretionary sanctions have been a godsend in numerous areas that are constantly problematic (Eastern Europe/Troubles/etcetera). It has done more to resolve these issues then anything bar the cases themselves. I would encourage administrators to be quicker with using discretionary sanctions such as 1RR/0RR, or topic bans in problematic areas
Respectfully expressing reservations about SirFozzie's opinion above. An aggressive AE decision last year of the type he describes caused considerable trouble, even though the decision went in my favor. Not to call out the administrator or the other editors involved, but the basic dimensions were a BLP article with an especially bitter dispute that had already escalated to substantial offsite dimensions. Two people got page banned without warning, and a side effect of that action ruined six months of careful work to earn the trust of both sides. The page banned editors conjectured that I had conspired with the administrator and attempts at retaliation followed. If I had anticipated that result I wouldn't have gone to AE at all. More active intervention is indeed sometimes needed, but not the Dirty Harry solution. Let's not swing this pendulum blindly.
Nothing. Literally nothing about the poorly staffed, poorly managed, poorly thoughtout and badly prioritized AE process works well right now.
Perhaps a brief recital of my track record is worth going over here. WP:ARBMAC enforcement has, as you can see by the log, been largely the result of collaboration between myself and Future Perfect at Sunrise ( talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA). Enforcement of Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Armenia-Azerbaijan 2 is something I have heavily contributed to. In Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/CAMERA lobbying the arbitration committee endorsed the findings of ChrisO ( talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA), FPAS and myself at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents/Statement re Wikilobby campaign based on the authority of Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Palestine-Israel articles. I have done as much as I can in the Eastern European wars ( Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Digwuren as well), although with limited impact. I could go on, but it would perhaps become tedious.
This is background to ensure that people understand that I have done vast amounts of arbitration enforcement work (usually related to nationalism). I have, therefore, seen both failures of the process and successes, something that many here have not.
Discretionary sanctions can work. ARBMAC has largely been a success. Ditto for AA2, which has reduced edit-warring and talkpage flaming. They are particularly good at dealing with accounts engaging in particularly poor conduct. They are less good at dealing with VestedContributors who engage in more subtle POV-pushing, as such VestedContributors are likely to have admin friends to overturn any sanctions placed on them, or to lobby for overturning. It is worth nothing that in the Balkans and Armenia-Azeri there are no partisan admins to disrupt the work of the neutral ones. Given good admin judgment and conduct, and the absence of influential partisans, nationalist flaming can be contained very well.
However, the problem is the lack of good judgment (others have noted the lack of admins: I won't go into this: the ultimate basis is the retardation of RFA culture, but that's a side-issue). Lack of good judgment stems from a) adopting the wrong paradigm to begin with and b) lack of experience. The latter is especially damaging when someone dips their toes in the water, gets scalded due to not quite knowing what they are doing, and never comes back to help. One admin more down.
This, however, should be easy to fix if we equip admins entering these forests with greater knowledge in advance. I am currently writing a dossier summarising everything I have learnt during my career dealing with these issues. This, once finished, I intend to circulate privately (no, not publicly. I have no intention of dozens of banned users working out how to avoid being caught from it) to a broad but select circle in the hope that it becomes something of an standard tome for future generations of admins facing similar problems.
"Adopting the wrong paradigm" is, however, more insidious, more damaging, and harder to fix. What I mean by the "wrong paradigm" can be summarised as the following:
The result is admins who fail to do their research, who cannot understand the background to the dispute, who fail to distinguish trolling from a content dispute, who can make no informed statements on the dispute they are supposed to be helping to solve, and who fail to understand which type of content dispute they are dealing with (see Number 46). This last, I suggest, is where most of the discontent surrounding arbitration enforcement stems from. Suggestions to fix it, anybody?
Article and topic bans have proven a useful tool. GRBerry 17:31, 22 January 2009 (UTC)
I have more thoughts in depth in progress elsewhere, but I wanted to get the main points underway, so here goes.
Discretionary sanctions, topic bans, and the like give admins varied tools and a strong implied threat to try to manage problems. When there are only a few good admins working hard, this is Very Good, gives them procedural cover where in normal disputes, you would expect other admins to step up to the plate. Bottom line: discretionary sanctions are (in the right hands) very helpful.
Related to the above, but broken into a separate section to allow others to endorse specific parts if they wish.
WP:AE has been somewhat effective at containing disputes. It has not been good at solving them, so its important to remember: the primary work of Arbitration Enforcement isn't Dispute Resolution, but dispute management. Within that context, certain things work extremely well: Discretionary sanctions and a dedicated admin corps can contain disputes, usually moving the drama generation away from SPI, AN, ANI, WQA and the articles themselves. Problematic editors are constrained by topic bans from the articles where they are the most disruptive, and behavior is often kept checked - but seldom if ever improves. Essentially, AE keeps warriors from disrupting many articles and tying up extra adminstration hours - at the cost of a few articles becoming battlegrounds and the sanity of the small handful of AE admins.
Related to the above, but broken into a separate section to allow others to endorse specific parts if they wish.
Discussions on WP:AE have occasionally developed new creative enforcement techniques. This includes a universal 1RR on troubles articles and a planned special sanction on Naked Short Selling. It should be noted that these remedies are usually born out of admin frustration and are actually outside of AE's mandate. Procedurally, there isn't actually a lot that allows these sanctions to happen except the consensus of those who show up. AE's few admin readers (in contrast to ANI) and the failure of enforcement to contain or solve a situation sometimes leads to brilliant insights. Its a very dysfunctional upside, but its sort of an upside.
I edit Israeli related topics and we get a lot of complaints or disputes. I take the view that an article on "Israel" should show empathy to Israel while maintaining adherence to neutrality reliability and truth. An article on Palestine should show empathy to Palestine etc. some articles are no-mans land but in my expereince they are usually fringe issues. This might be described as a post-modern view of the conflict.
Telaviv1 ( talk) 16:39, 4 February 2009 (UTC)
AE is the process by which the decisions reached after an ArbCom Request, and following involvement by all interested parties - involved or not, are enforced when they are violated, and can therefore be regarded as the enactment of the communities will. AE should then be the instrument of ultimate (to borrow Tznkai's phrase) dispute management, and remarkably often is. LessHeard vanU ( talk) 22:59, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
Views detailing what you specifically feel fails, works poorly, and/or is to the detriment of the community under the current status quo.
We need more administrators who don't mind getting knee deep in the muck, so to speak, to patrol AE and to assist the admins who bring a number of the cases at AE.
Discretionary sanctions are seldom effective at large disputes. Call it clubbing: people with similar views stand up for each other. And whether or not they mean well the thread soon gets so tangled that it drives away newcomers. Few venture there except those already active. Wikipedia should be a collaborative environment, not gang warfare.
One problem with Arbcom enforcement is that it often isn't enforced. Take Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Martinphi-ScienceApologist. Martinphi was put under an editing restriction, "Should they make any edits which are judged by an administrator to be disruptive, they may be banned from any affected page or set of pages."
He was banned from exactly one page in the entire year. Every other time he got an undocumented second chance, even when he admitted that he was editing a policy page in an attempt to make it easier to get ScienceApologist blocked under his civility restriction. [2]. Later, he began reworking NPOV, and I pointed out that someone under a restriction for POV-pushing really shouldn't be the one doing that. His response? He went over to WP:ANI, launched a scathing attack, claimed that "soapboxing" in the Arbcom's finding of fact did not mean the same thing as POV-pushing, and outed me (now oversighted but there's enough left in that I'm not going to link. I'll provide some diffs about the situation to the Arbcom on request. (I could, of course, be wrong about the outing - it's oversighted after all - but I do remember seeing my real name there, and he was banned for repeated outing on his talk page, including me, after an incident where he repeatedly restored outing of Scienceapologist to a wiki-link from his User page.)) He was warned, but nothing further happened. No matter what he did, noone, save that single time by Vassyana, was willing to do anything about it, deciding that, since he hadn't been restricted before, that it was a one-off event. This probably directly led to him becoming bolder and bolder at pushing boundaries, until there was no choice but the recent ban.
The lack of enforcement made the remedy against him essentially meaningless. Arbitration enforcement lacks archive searches, so anything put there is essentially lost, so if a second chance is given, then the problem user's deeds get dropped in the memory hole. One almost wonders if there shouldn't be an expidited Arbcom process for applying enforcement, instead of admins, because at least then everything would be documented, and the Arbcom would know of it.
Arbitration enforcement is a bit like the sheriff of an old west town coming into the bar and throwing some loaded handguns on the table. Sometimes a wise person gets the gun first and enforces justice. Other times a cowboy gets the guns and causes more trouble than initially existed. The problem for Arbcom is that it never knows which of the 1,600+ admins will decide to help out in a particular sanctions area. Also, because the sanctions areas are widespread through the wiki, it is difficult for the community to identify problematic enforcement of the sanctions, as is possible with the centralized RFAR pages. Some better method of enforcement of sanctions, outside of the rarely used (compared to all the sanctions being enforced) WP:AE page needs to be found.
If an admin is viewed by reasonable parties to be more than slightly involved or biased, they should not be implementing sanctions, regardless of their own personal views of their level of involvement or bias.
Not all "discretionary" topics are created equal, and admins at WP:AE sometimes fail to recognize this. For instance, in a nationalistic dispute like WP:ARBMAC, it is reasonable to think that Wikipedia should be genuinely "neutral" and not favor the claims of any particular Balkan group. On the other hand, in areas of fringe/pseudoscience, WP:WEIGHT explicitly dictates that positions supported by experts in the field deserve greater representation than those of minoritarian or fringe groups. One size does not fit all, and problems occur when techniques useful in ethnic/nationalistic disputes are imported into areas with different ground rules and content mandates. MastCell Talk 20:13, 21 January 2009 (UTC)
I'm largely quoting, with an omissions, and then elaborating a statement that Tznkai made on my talk page last month.
"An arbitration enforcer is a thankless incredibly difficult job to begin with - ... Its a hard job to do right, and you do it wrong, and you get blasted for it, you do it right, you get blasted for it - sometimes even worse. That kind of pressure selects very stubborn admins - which leads to its own problems. You need to have the magical triumvirate of stubbornness, adaptability, and measured responsiveness to criticism. What admin has that all the time, let alone at all? Most people (rightfully) wimp out of the difficult problems, and the ones left often become problems in their own right. --Tznkai (talk) 23:26, 17 December 2008 (UTC)"
To do the job well, the admin has to be able to, and reliably actually do the work to, look beyond the surface complaints presented, review the history across multiple editors activity on multiple pages, and reach a reasonable opinion about how to address what is often a complex and long standing pattern of behavior. Sockpuppetry is often an issue, so they need to be able to spot it and deal with it, even in cases where the editors have previously been caught in sockpuppetry so have learned rudimentary skills for evading detection. Meatpuppetry is also occasionally an issue. They should be or develop familiarity with the topic area, which sources for it are reliable, and which are partisan or otherwise unreliable. And they often need to be able to boil all this down to one paragraph sound bites for review by a peanut gallery in which partisans will likely be the loudest commentators, while also having a reasonable discussion with other admins who have a different take on the problem(s) and/or a different proposed solution. In all of these skills the level of competence that is called for is above that possesed by the average admin. In addition to the skills, an admin has to be uninvolved in the topic of dispute. Those who are uninvolved often do get blasted as involved simply because they are doing arbitration enforcement in the area.
Ultimately, the skills needed are rarely all possessed by a single individual to the desired level, so every volunteer compromises. For example, my sockpuppetry identification skills would have been best described as nearly non-existent; I'd only catch the most blatant and obvious cases. In short, the community as a whole has made the job too demanding for the average admin to perform it at all, and too unrewarding to keep most of the admins able to perform it competently interested in performing it for long. GRBerry 06:30, 22 January 2009 (UTC)
Discretionary sanctions have not yet yielded results from tested creative (i.e. non-standard) sanctions other than topic bans, article bans, and 1RR limits that are worth replicating on a wider scale. Nor have many even been tried. GRBerry 17:33, 22 January 2009 (UTC)
Arbitration enforcement is difficult and the editors who post there are, by definition, the most difficult editors to work with. Arbitrators should not undermine [3] [4] admins who volunteer for this difficult task unless they have found specific errors in judgement. Thatcher 19:22, 22 January 2009 (UTC)
Discretionary sanctions have the effect of shifting the burden of managing Wikipedia's most difficult editors off the shoulders of the 15 (or 18) people who were actually elected to do the job and onto the backs of self-appointed volunteer enforcers, sometimes as few as one at any given time. The admins who patrol WP:AE are generally not power-trippers and make good faith attempts to process complaints fairly and knowledgeably, but there is no assurance things will stay that way. I think there are two main problems with discretionary sanctions as presently handled.
1. Used as a cop-out when blocks and bans would be more appropriate. Perhaps "cop-out" is too strong a word. But I get the feeling that discretionary sanctions are sometimes used when a case is large, complex, or has so many parties that Arbcom finds it too challenging to evaluate the behavior of individual editors. Discretionary sanctions are useful to help patrol troubled articles that attract edit warriors. But some of these edit warriors are unredeemable and should probably be topic or site banned by Arbcom rather than leaving the mess for admins to figure out.
2. Admins are too lenient. I have been guilty of this as well, handing out 1RR per week or page bans of only a few days duration. These editors are at WP:AE because Arbcom has already ruled that their behavior is so far outside the expected norms that strong measures are necessary. I have seen WP:AE reports that are longer than the articles the parties are fighting over. The reports need to be long enough so that admins can understand and evaluate the evidence, evaluate mitigating circumstances such as claims of baiting, etc.; then close it down and do something decisive. Thatcher 11:51, 23 January 2009 (UTC)
One of the problems with arbitration enforcement is frivolous complaints and attacks against the enforcing administrators. Some sanctioned editors become very efficient in forming tag teams or factions to challenge any administrative action, to try and intimidate away unfriendly administrators. So anything an admin does in the "team's" topic area, may be immediately challenged with repeated admin board threads and ArbCom motions, where multiple members of the faction come in to the related threads to complain about the administrator's bias/POV/instability/incompetence etc. It can be exhausting to an administrator to know that for every simple block or ban they implement, even for something as clearcut as a 3RR block in the topic area, they may then have to deal with several days (or weeks) of attacks and discussion board threads, even if the admin's actions are ultimately upheld. Having some oversight of administrative actions is of course necessary, but something also needs to be done to rein in the time-wasting "insta-challenges" to everything an admin does. -- El on ka 17:41, 24 January 2009 (UTC)
Arbitration enforcement generally resolves around entrenched disputes. These are disputes that have gone to ArbCom, generally after multiple admin intervention failures, RfCs, mediation, and other processes. In short, entrenched disputes cannot be solved by normal means. If they could, they would've been already. The tools given to AE admins are essentially beefier versions of normal means - thus leading (predictably) to failure in most cases. Sockpuppetry, tendentiousness, and mistrust are common - all of which makes AE disputes depressingly similar to real world entrenched conflicts such Taiwan/China, The Troubles, the Balkans, the Science Wars, and the Arab-Israeli question - just with lower stakes and no one dying.
I've already been quoted by GRBerry concerning admin selection pressures, so I'll just expand on admin burnout. A fundamental part of the wiki process, and probably the human brain, is feedback. Feedback can be positive (barnstars) negative (you suck!) and constructive (this works, this doesn't. In AE you usually only get negative feedback, sometimes you get positive feedback from people you don't want to (as one side of editor warriors rejoices when you sanction their opponents) and you get virtually no constructive feedback. In addition to that, there is inherently very little pay off. When an admin manages a dispute on a typical article, helps correct behavior and forge consensus, that admin can feel proud. They have helped improve the article. Something got done - two sides at loggerheads are working together, and content will spring forth as a result. That sort of success brings elation. This does not happen at AE - or if it does, it does so very rarely, and the victories are short lived. Answering AE problems has very little pay off, and as a result is incredibly exhausting. Oh - and you're usually going it alone.
No person can withstand that for long - at least not without some serious damage to judgment. Our best admins get used up - and the admin's stubbornness that allows success in the first place is also dangerous in its own right: admins who are trying hard in good faith often end up creating drama and problems as they desperately try to solve unsolvable situations essentially (psychologically) cut off from any useful feedback mechanism.
The primary participants of the Arbitration Enforcement board are warriors, edit or POV, or uncivil jackasses, take your pick, the people doing the complaints are usually part of the problem. Often, the complaints become part of the problem. Problematic editors try to arbitration enforcement - which lessens the ability of the responding admin to get a clear picture of the dispute, drives away uninvolved editors and other admins from adding in, turns AE into a battleground, and finally and most importantly eliminates the deterance value of Arbitration remedies. Instead problematic editors simply sling accusations back and forth until they all get sanctioned. Who loses? Admins, editors, and the reader (cause the articles go to hell or stagnate as a result).
To start with, I'd like to call attention to this gem from GRBerry on the failures of AE which will help put my comments here into context: arbitration enforcement is a critically flawed paradigm that does not work. Arbitration enforcement passes the buck on difficult disputes to an increasingly shrinking pool of admins who usually come out damaged or useless. AE consumes our best admins, and makes some of our admins into serious problems in their own right. Even if AE was flooded with a large number of high quality admins to mitigate burnout and low participation problems, AE would still be the equivalent of treading water. Nothing is being solved because you can't solve entrenched disputes by detterence and simple solutions - if you could we would've done it already. Disputes end up at AE because of how difficult they are to solve. We need to think more creatively.
One of the biggest problems of AE and other bureacracies surrounding arbitration is that they generally ignore core principles of WP:ENC because there is no system in place to distinguish between good content contributors and those who are either too ignorant, too ideological, or too obsessive to write good content, distinguish between good and bad sources, actively contribute to a collaborative editing environment, or make the mundane editorial decisions necessary when writing an encyclopedia article. Essentially, AE is a giant political game of trying to parse what behaviors of editors are in specific violation of particular incunabula created by the arbcom committee. The "diff" culture at Wikipedia means that a carefully crafted and annotated series of diff-evidence will get positive attention by administrators even if the evidence is cooked or the context is lost. Furthermore, the net effect of a user's presence is completely ignored since the entire endeavor is so ridiculously piddling. Did he swear in the edit summary? Is it okay to block her even though she refactored? Is he forum shopping? Does her activity constitue edit warring if she only reverts once a day? These discussions are stupid: they don't resolve anything because they don't take into account the basic fact that everyone is skirting around: content. Every single dispute at Wikipedia ultimately boils down to content -- and if it doesn't the disputants should be told to take their dispute elsewhere. But arbcom steadfastly refuses to rule on content (except when it igores all rules and does so anyway -- generally with disastrous results). However, just because arbcom doesn't rule on content doesn't mean that administrators must be so tied. Administrators who support decent content on Wikipedia are cowed by a culture of toleration for all users. It's a culture that is, frankly, in stark defiance to WP:ENC. Administrators are forced to treat all users as equals even in the face of evidence that some user is actively harming content.
There is no reason to tolerate users who are the most destructive to Wikipedia content, and the continual insistence that describing someone's actions as being detrimental to Wikipedia content are somehow uncivil or needlessly personal, let alone actively ban or block such users, has stymied progress in many different areas. Administrators who have shown the capability of distinguishing between good content contributors and those who shouldn't be editing a mainstream encyclopedia have told me in private that they feel disenfranchised to act. Editors who are destroying or preventing the creation of good content on Wikipedia are given a free pass as long as their other "behaviors" superficially seem okay (Civil POV-pushing) because there is no acknowledgement that such activity is harmful to the encyclopedia.
Although I agree with Science Apologist that on one level all concerns on Wikipedia arise out of content disputes, I think that may be an over arching definition of content that serves to define "encyclopedia". In fact Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, but is also collaborative as SA notes. This means that content has also a more explicit definition in reference to specific articles, and that the decision on what constitutes appropriate information on each article is based on the decision making processes that arise out of a group. Wikipedia was established this way. This can create problems as SA also notes. Making decision as to who are the experts, who are the editors who are harming the articles, who should and should not be allowed to edit are all highly subjective decisions and are impossible to judge in an objective manner. One side in a dispute is no more able to make such decisions objective than is the other. For this to change, a drastic restructuring in the encyclopedia would have to be occur, in that, a neutral, decision making body would have to be established to make neutral decisions. I can't see that happening. In the meantime, although I understand there are concerns with civility being used as excuses for all kinds of misuse, I also see that civility and good editing don't have to be mutually exclusive. I don't see great articles being achieved when stress is introduced into the environment for any reason. Stressful situations aren't side specific, but destroy productive environments for everyone. Fundamentally, incivility is a stress creating mechanism and as such damages whole discussions even if its directed at one user.( olive ( talk) 20:49, 22 February 2009 (UTC))
One problem with arbitration enforcement, is that sometimes administrators become entrenched and start enforcing their own bias. The admin decides for themselves how the articles should be written, and supports those editors that they see as having the "right" view, and rapidly blocks (sometimes indefinitely) those who they see as having the "wrong" view. Bans and blocks may be issued with little or no warning to perceived "bad" editors, even to new editors, with a rationale of, "If they start off bad, they'll always be bad, let's just rid of them quickly." An exacerbating problem with this situation, is that even good and genuinely neutral administrators are frequently attacked with frivolous complaints of bias. So it becomes very difficult to sort out the valid complaints about a biased admin, from the routine noise that always surrounds even the non-biased admins in arbitration enforcement. I'm not sure what the solution is here (ban people who make frivolous complaints, from making further cry wolf complaints?), but I did want to point out the problem. -- El on ka 17:47, 29 January 2009 (UTC)
Arbitration Enforcement at the Israel/Palestine topic has been disastrous (to anyone seeking to write good articles, anyway). The imposition of an "0RR" at some articles has led to dreadful bloggish sources being inserted, and the selective chasing off of editors still attempting to write to policy. At other articles, the problem is the rejection of good sources, and selective enforcement against people trying to include them. Meanwhile, there are newly arrived and seriously deficient editors being encouraged. Details available of all of this and more if interested. (Later - see this discussion for the chaos caused by 0RR, from which the article in question has never recovered). PR talk 15:30, 4 February 2009 (UTC)
One problem in arbitration enforcement is an echo of a problem in other (non-enforcement) areas of Wikipedia, where our community is still wrestling with the question of how to deal with an editor who may be a valuable academic but also have such poor social skills that they end up antagonizing other editors. Painting with a broad brush, some members of our community seem to classify all editors into two main camps: "smart" (being people who have advanced degrees, or are recognized experts in a subject area, or claim to be), and "dumb" (the hobbyists who pick up their knowledge in a more amateur and casual style). The philosophy being that the "smart" editors should be empowered, and if their social skills are poor, they should be tolerated because of the quality of the articles that they create. The philosophy further says that if there's a dispute between a "dumb" and a "smart" editor, the dumb editor should be rapidly ejected from the dispute, article, and/or Wikipedia entirely. Often an article in dispute seems to boil down to two camps of editors, with the "smart" side saying, "We're academics, we know what we're talking about, stop trying to insert pop culture nonsense," and the "dumb" side saying, "You say you're academics, but you're using limited sources, or garbage sources," which results in counter-charges of, "No, your sources are garbage," and this goes back and forth. In the case of arbitration enforcement, some editors of this "smart v. dumb" philosophy seem to feel that sanctions should be used only to kick out the "dumb" editors, so as to empower the "smart" editors. So when an admin attempts to sort things out, if the admin takes action against someone perceived as an "academic", even if the academic was being disruptive, edit-warring without discussion, issuing personal attacks, etc., then the admin may be attacked for "empowering POV-pushers". Even if the admin is administering warnings equally to both "sides" in the dispute, there is still sometimes a perception that academics should receive fewer (or no) warnings, simply because they're academics. -- El on ka 20:00, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
In the ArbEnforcement-relevant areas wikipedia is a giant game. People in these areas follow the natural human urge to form groups for mutual benefit. The fact that truth on wikipedia is social rather than intellectual, along with number-favoring policies such as WP:Edit war and WP:3RR, and the general preference of discipline over content policies not only forces, but positively recommends that people collaborate off-line. This is as natural as any real world scenario where one person chats about another behind their back, and many theorists believe that the human brain grew its present size mainly for this purpose. Those that resist this because of values derived from elsewhere get more often that not the "Sucker's payoff". These facts, while not particularly nice, are real. Wikipedia's policies on handling such areas don't in any real way take account of this, of what were recently labelled "tag-teams" (formerly called "cabals") who co-ordinate moves by IMs, IRC and email. How could a system possibly work if, through moral blindness, it continued to ignore, as it currently does, one of the forces that shape it most? It obviously couldn't! Deacon of Pndapetzim ( Talk) 07:05, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
Arbitration committee decisions are often unenforceable on powerful users. On the relevant AE or AN/I thread anyone with enough friends can have the most sensible decision overturned based on a use of WP:CONSENSUS. In this manner Wikipedia often resembles an early medieval court, where you are tried or convicted based on the number and status of the armed friends who turn up at the hearing. Hence, if all you have to worry about is lone admins, and you know you enough friends to prevent any ruling ever being applied, what is the incentive to obey arbcom rulings? Likewise, if you are the lone admin and know user x has enough friends to avoid it being enforced, why waste your time taking the shit for it? That is obviously a serious flaw! Deacon of Pndapetzim ( Talk) 07:21, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
Just like any other wikipedia bureaucratic gadget, enforcement of broad topic bans may actually be used as a tool against opponents by ingenuous corner cutting, selective shut-eye, overreacting, etc.
Scenarios involving an opinionated admin teamed with rank-and-file POV-pushers abound, myself being hit swift and hard in one when I occasionally stepped into Prem Rawat zone without any real interest in the topic. Adding insult to injury, user:Jossi was commended by arbcom for alleged "self-imposed restriction" while he continued to orchestrate ousting the opponents of his favorite guru. Mukadderat ( talk) 18:58, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
Arbitration enforcement is a silly idea in the first place. Administrators should be doing things because they think they're the right thing to do in the circumstances, not because some committee told them to -- Gurch ( talk) 17:53, 7 February 2009 (UTC)
AE works in uncontroversial, simple cases. Anything complex (violating rulings on incivility, creating a battleground, wikistalking, bad faith, etc.) risks one of the following problems:
In addition, I'd like to briefly point out two more issues the arbcom should address, which while slightly less related to AE, are quite crucial (as became clear to me in the EE arbcom aftermath):
See also my summary to EE arbcom, and my mini-essay here.
Solution: #Proposal by Piotrus
-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 00:13, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
One problem with arbitration enforcement, is that it seems to work backwards from other parts of Wikipedia. For example, bans v. blocks. In some AE areas, if an administrator posts a temporary editing restriction on an editor, this is seen as more controversial than if the administrator had entirely blocked the editor's account access. When an editor is blocked, they are restricted to their talkpage. When an editor is banned from one article, they will often immediately go to ANI to challenge the ban, which results in the usual drama-fest. Another contradiction in the way that arb enforcement works, is that bans are only authorized in very limited areas of the project, such as Eastern Europe, Armenia/Azerbiajan, September 11th, Pseudoscience, Israel/Palestine, etc. If a problem occurs in some other non-AE areas of the project (for example, an article about a religious cult), administrators have fewer tools available to them. To deal with a disruptive editor, an admin's only real option is to warn and block, since the admin is not authorized to place a more limited restriction such as a ban or a revert limitation. As the saying goes, "When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." So the block "hammer" may be used on editors, when a lighter remedy such as a ban from one article might have been all that was needed. This also causes the problem that when an editor is being mildly disruptive, but not so disruptive that a block is warranted, the administrator's hands are tied, since their only options are (1) warn (and see the warning ignored); or (2) Block (and risk the block being overturned as too strict). So the dispute at an article or topic area may just continue to escalate until it lands on ArbCom's doorstep, at which point, ironically, milder bans may finally be authorized. I'd like to see things flipped around, so that uninvolved administrators are authorized to place limited bans in non-AE areas, before a dispute escalates to the level of requiring arbitration. Giving administrators more "tools in the toolbox" when managing complex disputes, will be more likely to nip problems in the bud, and make disputes less likely to rise to the level of RfAr in the first place. -- El on ka 21:32, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
I agree with User:Cla68 that the case of Martinphi-ScienceApologist (properly linked-in by Shoemaker's Holiday) is worrisome. I disagree thoroughly with the outcome--Ruling 5, that arbitration was not "to settle good-faith content disputes" was irrelevant, given Martin's unrefuted and seemingly well-supported claim that Raul654 abused his authority by protecting a page to keep his own disputed edits in place, rather than engage in discussion of them. I have no doubt that if administrators still had the authority to block editors unilaterally (several talk page discussions I read some time back indicated quite clearly that this had been the case; they included the complaint that once blocked you can't defend your actions because you're blocked [emphasis theirs]; that is what is being suggested here, is it not? If I am wrong, my apologies for misinterpreting the point here) I would have been blocked several times, just for pointing out behavior detrimental to the encyclopedia. Such is clearly Wikipedia business but each time was labelled a " No personal attacks" violation by one or another admin (also each time, the involved admin[s] eventually dropped the matter without comment, presumably recognizing but refusing to admit the legitimacy of the distinction). The regs do in fact acknowledge reporting bad faith behavior as an option, but in what I can interpret only as another instance of this attitude making itself known, all that is said there is a warning against making a false report of such, no description whatsoever as to where and/or how such reports should be made. It is bad enough that such an indefensible resistance to dealing with such behavior is widespread among administration, but for individual admins to possess the authority to act upon it with no checks and balances would probably result in the knowledge, sources, and abilities of many good editors being lost to the project. -- Ted Watson ( talk) 22:58, 15 February 2009 (UTC)
Read through this thread. Count the number of bytes contributed by uninvolved admins. Compare that to the volume of noise contributed by various familiar partisans. MastCell Talk 04:14, 19 February 2009 (UTC)
The arbitration enforcement process is ineffective in dealing with cases where private, sensitive information is involved that cannot be presented onwiki (e.g. personally identifying information of users, some BLP cases, and cases where harassment — including off-wiki or by e-mail — is involved). Such cases are complicated and difficult, and not something that an ordinary admin might want or be able to handle. Yet, the arbitration committee rarely is involved in arbitration enforcement, and prefers letting ordinary admins deal with arbitration enforcement. -- Aude ( talk) 01:48, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
In many of the AE threads the discussion the issues become opaque because there is no ready way to distinguish between the involved and the uninvolved. For instance, a user posts an AE issue for administrator attention about user x. User x's allies turn up with their perspectives, clouding consensus, or user x' enemy user y and his buddies turn up clouding consensus. When this happens, as it does as often as not, it is often obvious to the admins seasoned in the area; but isn't to everyone else. As well as making it more difficult to arrive at the right decision, it may discourage the wider administrator attention that is needed. In some areas it is a problem that the same administrators supervise the same disputes over and over again; in one area at least I think this has led to bias because the administrators in question have bonded with some of the parties over time by email and elsewhere, and have created their own subculture that some are able to benefit from more than other; the prejudices created consolidate themselves over time by confirmation bias; and when that is the case, it hurts fairness. Deacon of Pndapetzim ( Talk) 01:57, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
Specific proposals for the improvement of arbitration sanctions and enforcement.
In order to encourage discussion on ArbCom enforcement, and to make sure the same "clique" of admins do not exert too much influence on the AE process:
Any Administrator who blocks or places a discretionary sanction on a user per a discussion on WP:AE should post a short summary of the action taken on the administrator's noticeboard, with a link to the discussion in question.
Administrators can form volunteer task forces to address specific long term problem areas. This would involve a commitment to a specific area, watchlisting pages, and stepping forward foremost with negotiation skills. Talk to people in a friendly way; let them know that policies mean something and that somebody's paying attention. Step forward with short page protections when an edit war starts to break out, occasionally apply short blocks. The full weight of discretionary sanctions would be a last resort. The key is to get a critical mass of neutral admins together. Suggest setting up a volunteer group and selecting one long term trouble spot as a pilot project. Say, 15 administrators sharing a commitment to The Troubles. If the pilot project works, refine the approach and repeat it elsewhere.
Administrators generally self-select for roles in arbitration enforcement, which has caused difficulty in a number of settings in the past. Not all administrators are cut out for the detailed and difficult work of enforcement arbitration remedies in complex disputes. The best administrators at work in enforcement have no more discretion than the worst, and often get burnt out and leave enforcement altogether. The following proposals are more food for thought than anything I think could gain a serious consensus; they are an attempt to brainstorm methods to spread the burden of enforcement into small teams and to enable skilled administrators to participate while preventing the haphazard participation of administrators whose skills lie elsewhere.
Option one:
Option two:
I notice that the scope of this request for comment explicitly includes WP:BLPSE - special enforcement of biographies of living persons. I noticed a few weeks ago that Barberio asked the committee to consider mitigating or revoking this clause. The most recent section on the policy's talk page is here: Barberio and current committee members were discussing what to do.
There's a lot of discussion on that talk page. I won't read all of it. If I stumble across points that have been made endlessly, please forgive me.
"Special enforcement" should only be necessary if "ordinary enforcement" is not sufficient. If ordinary enforcement of the BLP policy is working, there should be no need to invoke the authority of the committee in undertaking ordinary administrator actions. Let's hypothetically replace BLP with any other policy, for example, that hoax articles should be deleted. Would we consider the absurdity of a "Special enforcement" that an admin may invoke the authority of ArbCom to delete a hoax? I would say the admin is just doing his or her job. It's the same with BLP: it's a policy like any other policy, and people who enforce that policy are just doing their jobs.
It's important that administrators delete defamatory biographical articles and block users who repeatedly insert defamation into articles, but it shouldn't be from a decree on high. If I were an admin, and I felt that the only way to justify an action was by invoking "special enforcement", I would think again and say "maybe the action is not wise." Crystal whacker ( talk) 03:03, 21 January 2009 (UTC)
WP:BLPSE begins, "Administrators are authorized to use any and all means at their disposal..."
I cannot believe that Arbcom seriously meant that. Are we to believe that Arbcom advocates, say, banning at the drop of a hat, deletion, edit warring, mafia hits - all the harmful things that could be done and which could create massive drama? No, clearly what they actually meant was Well, pretty much, Wikipedia:BLP#Maintaining_biographies_of_living_persons.
The over-the-top statement made in the first sentence is probably a big reason why this policy has seen so little support. It's clear that the arbcom cannot mean what their words say in it, and that any admin who actually did use massive overkill in protecting BLP would soon find himself up before Arbcom for censure.
Bad writing was a particular problem in the 2008 Arbcom. This is another example of the problems it can cause.
If BLPSE is to remain, it needs completely rewritten. However, Wikipedia:BLP#Maintaining_biographies_of_living_persons already includes all or most of the material that could conceivably remain from it. A better plan may be for the Arbcom to simply add any important statements from BLPSE that aren't already there to WP:BLP, and then rescind the rest of that finding.
I have said this numerous times to the 2008 Arbcom: A policy that people aren't aware of isn't policy. Burying, say, a clarifiction of WP:USER in what was already a year-old case when a sitting arbiter asked for it to be reopened particularly to add the WP:USER clarification ( WP:Requests for arbitration/Tobias Conradi), only serves to trap users not aware of the extremely-well-hidden Arbcom comments. If Arbcom wants to modify policy, they are trusted, respected users. They can modify policy, say that the changes are recommended by Arbcom, and, the changes will quite likely stick.
There is no need whatsoever for the 2008 Arbcom's creation of policy by fiat, which never was added to the policy pages themselves.
At the conclusion of any arbitration case in which discretionary/general sanctions are placed, the Committee shall appoint a team of five uninvolved administrators to enforce said sanctions. If an uninvolved administrator should find themselves unable to continue in the role, the arbitration committee shall appoint a replacement. Arbitrators may not be uninvolved administrators. Only the appointed administrators may enforce the specific sanction. Appeals of sanctions will be made first informally to the appointed group of five and then to the Arbitration Committee as a Request for Clarification.
Proposal: Arbitration enforcement's scope is strictly limited to parties of the case.
Rationale: I propose the above for several reasons:
Arbitration enforcement mostly works. Drastic changes are not needed. Absent specific findings that discretionary sanctions have been misused by admins with agendas or poor judgement or too much involvement, additional bureaucracy such as special enforcement panels or committees is not needed. Here are some suggestions for improving WP:AE.
-- Thatcher 15:54, 23 January 2009 (UTC)
I think this could work well in cases where neither side has policy to back them, but in cases where one side is clearly warring against policy, e.g. NPOV, these suggestions could be disasterous. For instance, the Greens think that an article on X should reflect the mainstream scientific view. The purples want to remove all criticism of X, and use the article for advocacy. Is the solution really to come down equally hard on the greens?
Similarly, point 2, on gaming the system, is open for abuse. Let's say in the above situation an admin holds purple views, but has never edited the article. People complain about the way he does enforcement, seeing him as too involved, but under the proposal, are accused of gaming the system, and their somewhat subtle points ignored.
In short: Thatcher makes what's on the whole a good proposal, but it definitely needs some work. Shoemaker's Holiday ( talk) 21:32, 24 January 2009 (UTC)
P.S. To be clear, while my comments on point 5 are things I've seen, the comments about the secret purple admin is not meant to apply to anyone. Shoemaker's Holiday ( talk) 21:11, 25 January 2009 (UTC)
This is just brainstorming, but I thought I'd toss it out there: How about "admin rotation"? If a dispute in a particular topic area is dragging on for more than three months, rotate the admins on that dispute out, and rotate new administrators in, by swapping places. So, for example, take the group of admins that are monitoring the 9/11 articles, and swap them with the group that are monitoring the Armenian/Azerbaijani articles. This will bring in fresh eyes to both disputes, and guarantee "uninvolved" status in both topic areas. -- El on ka 23:56, 23 January 2009 (UTC)
This proposal operates under certain premises
This is not a one size fits all solution, but addresses a certain subset of arbitration targeted articles.
The Arbitration Committee, will appoint a special 5 editor mediation panel that is responsible for creating through discussion and whatever internal processes they wish, binding content standards on a set of articles. Of the five editors, 2 editors are to be selected directly by the committee because they are known to be level headed, intelligent, and strongly committed to genuinely neutral, rigorous, and informative content. 2 editors are to be elected to represent the two opposing "sides" of the conflict - if there are more than two sides, the panel size will need to be adjusted suitably. These 2 editors are often going to be problematic editors, and should come recommended by those (purportedly) sharing their viewpoint as credible representatives. Finally, and this is the tricky bit, the fifth member is the chair of the panel - and the sole member allowed to enforce discipline. By necessity, this user must be an administrator, and should come with recommendations by the opposing 2 editors as an admin respected as neutral, ethical and forthright.
The panel, unlike Mediation or Arbitration, covers both conduct and content. The panel will hear complaints about content disputes, the application policy, and establish internal ground rules for voting, and editor conduct issues, and so on. In short - the panel is in charge of apart of the wiki - a binding WikiProject.
I cannot stress how important it is that the panel be selected carefully and intelligently, with respect for all voices involved. If anyone feels disenfranchised, the entire thing will explode. The three neutral parties have to be among our best and brightest.
This solution is radical - it would create a process that creates binding editorial standards and is very unwiki like - I'm not sure if I support it fully myself, but its time to get some ideas.
A major problem with entrenched disputes is the chilling effect. Neutral editors get squeezed out and exasperated quickly, this proposal is an attempt to address that problem
The primary flaw here is gathering volunteers. Short of raising money wiki-wide through bakesales and custom barnstars, we're going to have to think of something better to encourage participants in a thankless task.
Another brainstorming idea: How about any time an administrator becomes involved with arbitration enforcement, they be required to keep a log in a subpage of their userspace which tracks each restriction, block, or ban they implement? This provides an easy way to track a specific administrator's activity, for both positive and negative reasons. Negative, since it makes it much easier to see if an administrator is showing a tendency to only take action on one "side" of a particular dispute, or if the admin is focusing too much energy in a single topic area. And positive, because it can build trust with editors in a new dispute, to be able to check the background of an "unknown" administrator, and see where they've worked in arbitration enforcement in the past. This may help the editors in the new dispute to trust that the administrator does know what they're doing, since it'll be easy to see the string of (hopefully) successful accomplishments behind them. With editors, we have other ways of seeing someone's positive history: Good and featured class articles, barnstars, etc. But with administrators, it's more difficult to see their resume. If they maintain a list in their userspace, it's easier to examine their activity. -- El on ka 03:28, 26 January 2009 (UTC)
There seems to be issues with AE by admins when an admin's non-involvement or impartiality is called in doubt. I'd like to suggest that, as with mediation, editors retain the privilege to refuse arbitration enforcement if they feel the circumstances justify it. Of course, any one editor's refusal to submoit to a specific AE process can be brought up at a user RfC (or at RfArb) just as is the case for refusing mediation today. It would also help separate those cases where a single or a very few editors refuse AE (which is an indication of a refusal to comply) from those cases where many if not most editors refuse AE (which may be reflective of other issues, maybe having to do with the proposed enforcer). I believe it would also help increase acceptance of AE within the community.-- Ramdrake ( talk) 16:28, 27 January 2009 (UTC)
We could actively look for experience, willingness to participate in dispute resolution, and the like at WP:RFA. Heck, we could even ask candidates to select a long running dispute and address how they might help with it. Asking can't hurt, and might yield some who actually lend a hand. GRBerry 03:44, 29 January 2009 (UTC)
I happened to notice in a recent AE dispute, a user was banned for a month for edit warring over pictures of casualties in a recent conflict. This particular dispute has thus been temporarily resolved, but nothing has been done to address the underlying issue. Thus the potential remains for more edit warring in future over the same issue on that page or other pages.
I would like to see admins taking a more proactive role in preventing disputes by establishing general principles from individual cases, just as is done in a legal system. For example, in the case of this recent dispute about casualty pictures, wouldn't the obvious thing to do to be to establish a general principle that casualty pictures either are or are not acceptable in articles about conflicts? Once that has been done, we no longer have to worry about users edit warring over the issue, or having to resolve such disputes at AE. By establishing general principles from particular cases wherever possible, we should be able to decrease the amount of disputation on the project as a whole, as well as reducing the burden on administrators at AE. Gatoclass ( talk) 03:55, 31 January 2009 (UTC)
Disband ArbComm because it's a waste of time in the first place, a joke in the second place. I know an editor "topic banned" out of the "blue" without any sort of attention paid to the user's edits at the article. Just because he happened along to edit the article at the wrong time, during a lengthy heated BLP/Reliable sources vs. article subject's own published statements tiff, he was topic banned. Shut down ArbComm. RFC is enough and can be enforced by the people that are to enforce rules: ADMINS. - ✰ ALLST☆R✰ echo 07:32, 1 February 2009 (UTC)
I think that the current block and ban sanction-base approach used by arbcom, while certainly useful and helpful, isn't necessarily the most effective approach in an open, volunteer, horizontal hierarchy. Ultimately people need practical tools to help resolve their content disputes and achieve quality encyclopedic content. The dispute resolution process as it exists is fine by me, I just think it needs to be reinforced at a ground level - thus the following proposals-
Similar to concerns already addressed, I feel some of the problems with the current system are the inequalities in application of topic bans, page bans, temporary and permanent, etc. Currently the blocking systems seem to be universally understood and applied. Sadly, I can speak from personal experience that is not true with bans. There are likely a variety of reasons the current banning system is lacking or unevenly understood and applied, but focusing on potential solutions I propose:
The Arbitration Committee stated in the Eastern European disputes case that it will consider instituting suitable reforms to the enforcement process. Why was it necessary? Because for three months the proverbial mud flew in all directions between some twenty (20) experienced users supplying cooked evidence spiked with white lies in commentaries - which is possible only among users who already know how to work the system. And, what do we have now? No admin would touch this case with a ten-foot pole regardless of need. Everybody's exhausted except for the POV warriors who submit frivolous reports to ArbCom enforcement. [9]
The repeat gaming of the system exemplified in EEd Evidence section was barely acknowledged by the ArbCom in Proposed Decission due to its sheer volume with 648 diffs plus 230 Talk page links impossible to follow. In the real world the examination of such evidence would take years and possibly millions of dollars. So, something else needs to be done.
I hope that the Arbitration Committee can prevent the same manipulation from being repeated in the future, first, by narrowing the definition of what constitutes acceptable evidence. 1). No copy-paste jobs from previous cases, already closed and resolved. 2). No emotive eloquence in commentaries to diffs. 3). No repeat accusations of personal attacks and other character assassinations, simply because ArbCom in itself has a potential for becoming an attack venue against opponents. 4). Evidence provided cannot be labeled with fresh summaries because ArbCom has no clue who's real? 5). No insults (especially racial), with a threat of being barred from further proceedings. That's jest what is needed, from a perspective of a layman like me. -- Poeticbent talk 19:36, 2 February 2009 (UTC)
In the spirit of brainstorming, and picking up on Elonka's idea of rotation above: how about something akin to a jury duty system for admins? If there are around 1500 admins, at the first of each month, 250 of them – selected by the month they became an admin – would find an automated message on their talk page saying, "You have AE duty this month."
Potential benefits:
Wikipedia self defines as both collaborative or community driven, and as an encyclopedia - content driven. Although clear delineation is possible and necessary, both of these are also broad categories that can overlap. Neither should be mutually exclusive.
Stress fundamentally is neutral. The effects of stress, though, impact Wikipedia in terms of both editing content and behaviour. Research indicates that stress effects human beings on every level: Based on such research John Medina in his book Brain Rules notes that:
Your body’s defense… is built for immediate response to a serious but passing danger…Chronic stress dangerously deregulates a system built only to deal with short term responses.
and
Under chronic stress, adrenaline creates scars in your blood vessels that can cause a heart attack or stroke and cortisol damages the cells of the hippocampus. Crippling your ability to learn and remember.
and
Emotional stress has huge impacts across society….and on employees’ productivity at work. (Medina, John. Brain Rules. Pear Press, Seattle, Washington, USA, 2008.)
Arbs,. editors and admins. are all affected by incivility. What is uncivil for one and creates stress may not be for another. Civility means creating around you an environment where the other guy can work as well as you can. That includes the arbs. Arbs need to be relieved of stressful situations somewhat, to act in the most effective way possible. No one signed up for anything on Wikipedia to be beaten up.
Remedy: Delegate
1.) Example: On Behaviour
(As a sideline this may do away with the kind of gang mentality present in some situations as noted by Durova above.)
2.) Example: On Content:
3.) This means:
(I apologize if any of this is redundant ... Thought I'd better lay it all out as one thought.)
Users who endorse this suggestion
This is a variation from the recommendations from last year's Working Group on cultural and ethnic edit wars: When a case involving a wideranging dispute is addressed by ArbCom, the remedies should focus not just on the specific editors involved, but also the entire topic area. As was done with the Israel-Palestine case, discretionary sanctions should be authorized for any uninvolved administrators in the entire topic area of dispute. -- El on ka 19:46, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
Another variation from the recommendations from last year's Working Group on cultural and ethnic edit wars: Discretionary sanctions should be authorized in certain cases, even if a dispute has not yet risen to the point of an action ArbCom case. For example:
-- El on ka 19:46, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
These are three prophylactic suggestions that would help keep things cooler in general, allowing Admins to focus on knottiest problems. Where's best place to push them?
Let's alleviate the pressure on admins by taking away the seriousness of their own decision. Because of the distorted process of communal consensus formation on forums like AN/I and AE and the unclear and changing nature of WP:WHEEL, I suggest all admins patrolling AE appoint or get appointed a number of other admins who are allowed to reverse their decisions without any accusation of a WP:WHEEL violation. Such individually particular appeal-admins, if they agreed, cwould automatically be assigned power-to-overturn when one of their admins made a decision. AE Admins should be encouraged and trusted to appoint other admins whom they trust but are not close to. If the "community" were unhappy with the appeal-admin's choice they could take it to ArbCom who could motion for or against it. This would free us up to tighten this policy in other regards. I.e. it would allow us to prevent free-for-alls where any admin with another interest can overturn any decision citing "consensus" (and protect such an admin from the temptation) while not overwhelming the time of the small group of arbitrators. I think such a proposal is worth considering, even if it has to be fine-tuned. I think at the very least, AE admins should be encouraged to appoint such appeal-admins voluntarily, if for no other reason than sometimes we all go to bed. Deacon of Pndapetzim ( Talk) 08:47, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
Editors reverting pages for whatever reason should take responsibility that the page be left in a better condition that they found it. Two possible categories of problem arise.
If a good faith editor corrects typos, adds references, attempts to improve the page and then another good faith editor convinced that the edit is OR or not verifiable despite the references and cites, reverts it rather than editing it productively the net effect, may be negative.
I reverted a piece of vandalism the other day and didn't take the time to check the whole article for more. Another editor contacted me and reminded me that by removing one occurence but leaving another I hadn't caught I was in effect embedding it where other editors might not see it. Rktect ( talk) 21:58, 7 February 2009 (UTC)
It should be clear that editors should from AE should be able to request input by arbcom committee members, when they feel AE thread was improperly reviewed and closed. This should be a relatively easy and painless procedure. But those who cry fire too often should not be allowed to swamp arbcom with their grievances; thus an editor should have a limited number of "tickets" s/he can use to each year for filling RfArb requests (or clarification requests or such). If the request is considered valid, they can keep the ticket, but if not, they should run out of them (in other words, an editor spamming RfArb - or even AE - too often, should find himself unable to do so).-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 00:17, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
Admins who consider themselves neutral should keep a log of their actions and make sure that their actions aren't disproportionately in favor of one side of a conflict. Admin should also make sure to be split down the middle in terms of his actions within a given conflict. The benefit of this proposal is that sanctioned editors will have a harder time complaining that a sanctioning admin is biased.-- brew crewer (yada, yada) 23:15, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
See talk page for further discussion re
User:Elonka's response.--
brew
crewer
(yada, yada) 21:08, 11 February 2009 (UTC)
I think that there has been enough feedback so far to warrant a general proposal that assumes the need for the formation of something to improve, unify, and clarify the arbitration enforcement process i.e.
The formation of a committee, sub-committee, work group or task force of some sort which, via the creation of community-approved guidelines and policies, aims to –
1- Provide clearer instructions and guidelines to all parties on how to proceed following the arbitration decision and the proper use of arbitration enforcement resources.
2- Give general and consistent guidelines in terms of length and nature of arbitration enforcement sanctions to be applied, with good faith, neutrality, and transparency checks and controls for all parties involved.
3- Encourage good communication and cooperation among all case participants at all levels. (i.e. editors named in case, participating editors, arbitrators, arbitration clerks, and arbitration enforcement administrators)
4- Encourage familiarity with content of articles involved and specific content issues of disputes as well as a reasonably solid knowledge of the history of the case and the nature and specifics of the arb decision.
5- When necessary, allow for the creation of pragmatic, specific, practical solutions for resolving the dispute and encouraging quality articles.
Arbitration Enforcement requests would no longer be open to all administrators, they would only be open to those belonging to this specific new group formed for the purpose of arbitration enforcement. -- Scott Free ( talk) 01:28, 11 February 2009 (UTC)
I'm not sure if jumping into all these proposals was the smart thing to do, I think perhaps it would have been better had there been an in depth discussion on the talk page first. However, I guess I had better put this one up before the RFC is closed.
I propose that, for the sake of fairness and to spread the burden of responsibility, we elect a board of three admins to handle AE cases. While anyone can comment on a case and recommend action, sanctions will be left to these three admins. We could have relatively frequent elections to avoid burnout. Gatoclass ( talk) 11:19, 12 February 2009 (UTC)
Sanctions don't work. I think I've heard that somewhere before. My opinion is that arbitration is supposed to be final and binding. There should not be any of these sanctions. Given that arb-com only rules on behaviour, arb-com should be prepared to say that this user's behaviour has been unacceptable, and so the user is blocked from Wikipedia for this period of time. End of story. Admins are free to block users for various reasons at any time, and don't really need the added burden/sheen of arb-com outcomes. When a case comes to arb-com, it is usually because everything else has been tried first and all parties just want arb-com to make a decision one way or the other. Allowing the dispute to continue within a walled garden of "rules of engagement" doesn't end anything; half the time it makes it worse. To me, it's not a difficult idea to swallow. Evidence is presented and reviewed, and then arb-com should decide whose behaviour is unacceptable and block accordingly. That's the be all and end all. There should be no allowances made for outside interpretation. Arbitration should mean the situation has been arbitrated. So I propose:
1. Arbitrators review the evidence brought.
2. Arbitrators review the policies that guide behaviour.
3. Arbitrators decide if any breaches of policies have been made.
4. Arbitrators decide how serious these breaches have been.
5. Arbitrators decide how serious the effects of these breaches have been on Wikipedia.
6. Arbitrators review previous behaviour of users in question.
7. Arbitrators block users accordingly.
8. Arbiotrators close the case as having been dealt with.
9. Blocked users return when their block expires, the situation having been dealt with.
10. People move on.
That's about the sum of it.
Hiding
T 18:45, 16 February 2009 (UTC)
There are a lot of lies we tell ourselves on wikipedia, "there is no voting", "there are no cabals", "wikipedia is not a social network", etc.
Another fiction is that the Arbcom does not rule on content disputes. The reality is that the Arbcom does rule on content disputes indirectly, they just let other administrators divvy out the enforcement.
I suggest that arbitotors get rid of this fiction, and openly state that they decide content disputes, albiet indirectly. This will allow them to use the solutions above more often. Ikip ( talk) 12:04, 19 February 2009 (UTC)
In partial solution to #View_by_Deacon_of_Pndapetzim_3, propose new standard practise of maintaining separate sections for admins and non-admins on AE threads. Preferably, this would be parties and non-parties, but as there would be benefit from ignoring this, this would assuredly be ignored. Admins can discuss action in their section, while the interested non-admins (who'll be far more often than not parties to some extent) can give their advice in their own section. This is similar to the structure of arbcom case workshops. Deacon of Pndapetzim ( Talk) 02:05, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
In partial solution to #View_by_Deacon_of_Pndapetzim 2. New discretionary power, whereby uninvolved AE administrators are empowered to designate "tag teams" in restricted topic areas. I.e., for the purposes of 1RR (or whatever numerical restriction is in place), an uninvolded administrator could classify editor 1 and editor 2 (and editor 3, etc) as one editor, based on consistent historical pattern of reverting in concert. The obvious benefit here is that the use of this power, or the threat of use of it, would discourage off-wiki co-ordination and prevent use of numbers stifling cross-party dialogue, as it currently does. Deacon of Pndapetzim ( Talk) 02:16, 2 March 2009 (UTC)