The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

On 21 October, the web news source Atlantic carried the following story. [1]. This was a story about issues in the Gender Gap in Wikipedia, involving certain previous (and now banned) editors. It was written based on interviews with certain Wikipedia editors, and was designed to show that (a) a certain female editor was unfairly banned (which they may well have been, and it is certain that she was sexually harrassed, but this is irrelevant here), and (b) that editor User: Eric Corbett (EC) was misogynist and/or anti-female. Much of the "evidence" of the article revolved round a single diff by EC which in fact did not show any such thing. Previous attempts by various parties to have EC blocked had been unsuccesful, yet this time, when EC protested his innocence, he was blocked by User:Kirill Lokshin for violation of a previous sanction. Kirill Lokshin had never been involved in the situation before, and indeed had not blocked any user since 2014. Black Kite (talk) 19:45, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

• @ Kirill Lokshin: "The allegation that I was somehow induced to block Eric is mere aspersion, easily made and impossible to disprove". You're absolutely right. So it shouldn't be too difficult to explain exactly why you suddenly appeared in a venue, and with a block, that you hadn't been involved in before. Black Kite (talk) 20:16, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

• I see. So you didn't feel it necessary to get involved as an admin in any of the hundreds of issues on Jimbo's talkpage previously? Just this one. Black Kite (talk) 20:24, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

• I find that unconvincing. And anyone who works in legal circles will know that "you can't prove that" rather than "I didn't do that" is an immediate giveaway. But thanks for your input. Black Kite (talk) 20:32, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

@Many people commenting; Too many of you are missing the point. Did EC break his topic ban? Yes, technically. Was it a situation in which common sense needed to be applied? Yes. Kirill blocked EC without discussion because he believes he's some sort of "white knight" admin defending the Wiki - exactly the same attitude as others have assigned to Yngvadottir (the irony of a female admin being desysopped for defending the admin that many are trying to paint as a sexist is immensely ironic). Common sense is NOT the same as IAR. Black Kite (talk) 08:37, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply

• @ GorillaWarfare:: how else would you characterise "...when someone has so frightened the admin corps that nobody else will step up to the plate."? Black Kite (talk) 09:11, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply
• @ GorillaWarfare:: Also, if you can confirm that the article is not based on an interview with you, I am quite happy to redact every sentence where I have said that. Black Kite (talk) 09:11, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply

The above is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

This is back on the Arbitration Committee's plate, two months after the last case relating to this issue was closed. It's been about eleven months since Eric Corbett was restricted in the Interactions at GGTF case. Since then he's been blocked seven times. These restrictions are clearly not working, and every time they're enforced, we have to suffer through dramatic arguments over the validity of the block, the fairness of the original sanctions, and whether the administrator who placed it is following some hidden agenda. I strongly urge you to take the case—the disruption has gone on far too long.

Please also clarify the scope of the case. Black Kite has not made it incredibly clear what they want this case to address, and the title of the case is confusing... What is "use of external websites" referring to? GorillaWarfare (talk) 02:17, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply

Wow, it's telling that Black Kite is referring to Kirill Lokshin's block as " white knighting". But then again, they seem to be a fan of these kinds of overdramatic and vaguely conspiracy-theorist accusations lately: they have decided that someone is pulling Kirill's marionette strings, anyone who disagrees with them must recuse, and on Wikipediocracy, that I "effectively wrote" the entire Atlanic article. GorillaWarfare (talk) 09:08, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply

@ Black Kite: how else would you characterise "...when someone has so frightened the admin corps that nobody else will step up to the plate."? As a fairly accurate statement of fact... And certainly not as an implication that Kirill stepped in because of ulterior motives with respect to women. Regarding my involvement with the article, my response here is the same as the one I gave on Wikipediocracy: "I'm mentioned in two small paragraphs within the article, and looking back through the interview I gave, I don't see much in there that was used in the rest of the article." GorillaWarfare (talk) 09:19, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply

@ Giano: Some of the more militant female editors decided to brief a journalist to promote the gender gap. Huh, guess I chose this username well eight years ago.

When talking to the journalist, they focused too much on one individual, Eric Corbett, and not enough on generalities This is a bit of a bold statement, unless you're somehow privy to the actual interviews that we gave. GorillaWarfare (talk) 20:35, 25 October 2015 (UTC) reply

@ Giano: Is there anything actually suggesting to you that my statements to this reporter were focused on Eric Corbett or, as you imply in your latest attack, lies? Or are you just grasping at straws? GorillaWarfare (talk) 21:03, 25 October 2015 (UTC) reply

@ Giano: I'm not sure how that's what you gleaned from my comment. I did not mention Eric Corbett at all in the interview I gave. I still don't see how this makes me a liar. GorillaWarfare (talk) 23:34, 25 October 2015 (UTC) reply

I wish you would actually back up your accusation that I'm a liar instead of making it and then asking me to stop questioning why I am being labeled as such. Still, since you've asked me to stop pinging you, I will respect your request and this will be my last comment to you unless you wish me to respond further. Perhaps a clerk or arbitrator will remove (or ask you to remove) your baseless attacks since you've failed to back them up, but either way I doubt they will be taken into consideration here, so no harm no foul. GorillaWarfare (talk) 07:31, 26 October 2015 (UTC) reply

The above is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

On 22 October, I blocked Eric Corbett for a period of 1 month in accordance with Remedy #3 of the Interactions at GGTF case. The block was prompted by Eric's comments here and here, which I deemed to breach points (ii) ["the gender disparity among Wikipedians"] and (iii) ["any process or discussion relating to these topics, broadly construed"] of the amended topic ban. The duration of the block was based on the guidance provided in the standard enforcement provision in the case, and the fact that shorter prior blocks for violation of this remedy had proven ineffective in eliciting compliance.

With regard to Eric having some hypothetical "right to reply" to the Atlantic article, which is being advocated by certain commenters here, such a right would necessarily have to be limited to replying to the claims the article makes regarding Eric himself. Prior to the pair of edits which resulted in his block, Eric made several additional comments which did directly address these claims ( [2], [3], [4]). I note that he was not blocked for these comments. Rather, a block was imposed only when the subject of his comments became the existence of the gender gap itself.

The allegation that I was somehow induced to block Eric is mere aspersion, easily made and impossible to disprove. For the record, I had no communication with anyone regarding this block prior to having placed it. The suggestion that my lack of prior involvement makes my action suspect would seem to fly in the face of the Committee's own requirements, which stipulate that only administrators without such involvement may apply sanctions in the first place.

I ask the Committee to (a) reinstate the block on Eric Corbett for the original un-served duration (or an alternate duration that the Committee considers appropriate), and to (b) appropriately sanction Yngvadottir for deliberately violating the procedure for appeals of arbitration sanctions by unblocking Eric. Kirill Lokshin ( talk) 20:12, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

@ Black Kite: I have Jimmy's talk page on my watchlist, saw a discussion about the Atlantic article (which I had read earlier that day), and saw Eric's comments when I was reading the discussion. Kirill Lokshin ( talk) 20:21, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

@ Black Kite: I don't do much admin work in general (as I'm sure you know). That doesn't mean I won't intervene when I see a need—for example, when someone has so frightened the admin corps that nobody else will step up to the plate. Kirill Lokshin ( talk) 20:29, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

@ Wehwalt: My conclusion is based primarily on the individual testimony of numerous administrators, who have personally told me on various occasions (the earliest being sometime in 2010, as I can recall) that they deliberately avoid intervening in incidents involving Eric for fear of harassment. While these accounts are necessarily anecdotal in nature, they are consistent with the patterns of behavior I’ve personally observed at times when such matters were brought to arbitration, both during my time on the Committee ( [5], [6]) and afterwards ( [7], [8]). Kirill Lokshin ( talk) 11:30, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply

The above is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

Given that I've barely been around (due to much, much more important commitments in my life), I haven't been particularly following this bit of drama, nor was I involved. I was interviewed for the Atlantic in August and only talked about my work writing content with WikiProject Women Scientists, which I will be returning to post-haste, since I try not to let wiki-drama stop me from actually writing articles. Keilana ( talk) 20:06, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

The above is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking ... I owe you all a statement. The nutshell version I posted at Kirill Lokshin's talk page; the committee received a somewhat longer version by e-mail.

Two things are being conflated by some: harassment and dissent. The former is obviously bad; seeking to stamp out the latter is corrosive to the community and at odds with our mission to write an encyclopedia. WP:NOTBATTLE, WP:NOTBURO. Forbidding an editor to discuss an aspect of the community because he disagrees with the popular interpretation of statistical research concerning the community, whether as a means of preserving control or as a proxy for banning him for harassment, damages the project in itself, without considering the effect of preventing his contributions. Our diversity is part of our strength. Isn't that the justification for all the work to combat entrenched bias? That was a decision that reached for the Solomonic and fell flat. And its wrongness was demonstrated by this situation, when the editor in question made measured and respectful responses after being pilloried on- and off-wiki. Blocking him for those responses was following the letter of the law to the detriment of the encyclopedia, and I was made an admin on the understanding I would protect it using my best judgement. In my judgement the committee has stopped thinking about that first principle cited at the head of every judgement, about the purpose of Wikipedia.

I entirely understood that I would be desysopped in consequence, and will not petition Arbcom to restore my bit. I said at my RfA that I would be open to recall, and this circumstance meets my definition of a recall motion.

I would also like to take issue with some of the interpretations of WP:CIVIL that have been raised. The essence of civility on the project is not avoiding a list of bad words, it is respect. In this instance it is Eric who has been treated uncivilly.

I do not know whether I want the committee to take this case. I share the concerns expressed by a couple of others that the committee will mess things up even worse. At the same time, I don't want to mess up the strategizing of the lawyers here. I would have participated in some recent Arbcom cases, including the one that led to this very bad decision. But—probably a defect in my education—I find this moot court environment almost impenetrable. And I wanted to respect my colleagues with whom I disagree over the desirability of the GGTF. But Eric's actions did not merit punishment that is appropriate to harassment. Liz paid me a humbling compliment back in March, saying that I was able to see in shades of grey, and that made me a good admin. Yngvadottir ( talk) 11:59, 26 October 2015 (UTC) reply

The above is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

Contrary to my normal practice, and previously stated intention, I would like to make a short statement, not in my own defence but that of Yngvadottir.

She made a decision that she felt was right, even though I'd already said that I didn't want anyone to unblock me, as I know what shitstorms tend to emanate from that. I would quite happily have sat out a one-month block, but nevertheless it wasn't morally right, and Yngvadottir ought not to be punished for correcting that. Eric Corbett 20:59, 27 October 2015 (UTC) reply

The above is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

• Jimbo's page is generally a safe haven, where even site banned users can drop in and speak.
• The thread in question was substantially about Eric, so it would seem WP:BANEX might apply, or at least a warning in advance of action. A month long also may be somewhat excessive for this infraction
• On the other hand Eric has certainly intentionally flaunted his restrictions before, and the remedy calls for escalating blocks
• However once the block was applied it was an WP:AE block, so Yngvadottir's unilateral unblock seems to be out of bounds. (Certainly though, points #1 and #2 could be used in a community/an/other discussion to reduce/revert the block)
• Eric and related controversy (both those who support him, and those who would like to get rid of him) are likely to remain controversial, and a hot potato nobody but arbcom can deal with. Arbcom has declined to block in the past, certainly they may do so again, but the community cannot handle this. The committee should accept (though perhaps resolve via motion) Gaijin42 ( talk) 19:48, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

@ Black Kite The block is a matter for the community/AE/AN as part of a standard WP:AE appeal (which I believe the rules currently dictate must be done by Eric, not by a 3rd party). The unblock is a pretty unambiguous circumvention of those same rules as a unilateral action overriding an AE. Perhaps the restriction is inappropriate. Perhaps the block was unjust. I don't think the first is going to be re-litigated here, and the second has other venues to be resolved in. The third is deep in the jurisdiction of the committee. Gaijin42 ( talk) 20:26, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

The above is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

I'm guessing User:Yngvadottir might need to be added as a party, as the person who lifted the block.

I guess I can see how there might, in this particular case, be extraordinary circumstances, such as false and misleading information about an editor being published by outside sources and that information being repeated here, about a person who, apparently, is editing under their real-life name here. Perhaps the committee might think it not unreasonable to request that policies and guidelines be adjusted to perhaps allow editors who are being lied about or to, possibly in violation of WP:LIBEL, to do something in a expeditious manner to have such misstatements removed, and/or allow for them to do something to in a sense clear their name, whether that might be somehow a violation of other existing sanctions or not. Alternately, it might be possible to impose DS on topics like this, involving misrepresentation of facts about editors.

Under the circumstances, maybe the foundation's lawyers might be reasonably consulted here.

Having said all that, I would really love to see this whole thing just completely and utterly disappear. This is a dramah overdose of the worst kind, and if nothing else just bringing an end to it as soon as possible might be the best thing to do. John Carter ( talk) 19:50, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

More or less as per Hell in a Bucket and Montanabw below, I think it might make sense to at the very least amend the existing sanction to the effect that sanctions only be made through request at WP:AE. John Carter ( talk) 22:03, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

I'm counting no less than 44 individuals who have posted separate statements at the time of this writing.And this has been here, I think, less than a day, and the weekend when lots of people edit is just started. If this case is accepted, any idea how you all will determine who counts and does not count as a party? John Carter ( talk) 15:14, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply

For the record, I think it is at best irrational to think that any journalist seeking to make a sensationalist story is primarily concerned with getting the facts right. I know I wasn't when I was writing for the high school newspaper, and some of my reporting was perhaps charitably described as "creative". The high school quarterback's comments, for instance, required serious "revision." But, then, my high school experience might have given me more personal experience both with academia and journalism than some others here. John Carter ( talk) 21:14, 25 October 2015 (UTC) reply

If nothing else, indicating that WP:BLP applies to comments made about editors whose real life identity has been publicly disclosed, or are editing under their real name, would probably be beneficial. John Carter ( talk) 22:41, 28 October 2015 (UTC) reply

The above is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

This would present several interesting issues:

1. Is Mr. Wales' an exempt zone - stated by him as such so that fully open discourse may take place? If so, then there is no "case" here.
2. Therefore if that user talk page is not open for free discussion, is the use of it to make claims about an editor who is barred from defending himself fully as improper as the editor defending his own position? I trust the committee would never make any claim that an editor should not be given an opportunity to deal with claims made about him or her personally.
3. If, rather, it is reasonable for any editor not under official "sanctions" (including "anonymous IPs who are quietly likely to be under a false flag of some sort, or who may be experienced editors who find it better to hide their true identity in order to wreak havoc and let loose the dogs of war) to make allegations about an editor who is under stricture not to respond, is a response then a violation of a reasonably interpreted sanction? Collect ( talk) 20:07, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

Jehochman makes some interesting suggestions - which might lead to a proposal that "first mover advantage" should only accrue after some discussion unless there is a dire urgency for immediate action. If immediate action is not required, then only acts taken after a reasonable amount of discussion should be given "first mover advantage", and any precipitous actions not taken after discussion should still be subject to discussion without having the quite strange requirement that the person affected must be the one making an "appeal" and that therefore no other person can question the act. Collect ( talk) 17:33, 26 October 2015 (UTC) reply

The above is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

It is no improvement to the project to use admin tools to promote more anarchy, as Yngvadottir has done. Binding is more than easy to understand and apply. Alanscottwalker ( talk) 20:22, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

If you do take this case, perhaps you can adopt some principle and remedy for, for lack of a better term, " swan song admin actions". Such actions cannot possibly improve the trust we all need to have in the admin corp as a group. Many (most?) Users from time to time become dissatisfied with Wikipedia and its processes, as apparently User: Yngvadottir did this year( User Talk:Yngvadottir#Goodbye statement) [9], but admins have the power to make these grand (noble or ignoble, depending on your POV, of the circumstances at the time) gestures using community tools, as they go off. Yngvadottir was also frustrated at not getting a post up quickly enough at the Atlantic website, but that is no policy reason to take admin action on Wikipedia. [10] Such swan song admin action is simply abuse of the community's tools. Resign, if one must, in protest, as User:Floquenbeam did recently, but do not use the community's tools. Alanscottwalker ( talk) 16:18, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply

I am agnostic on whether this committee takes this case but as to some of the issues:

1) Jimbo's talk page is by policy not exempt from WP:TBAN nor BMB, and this ctte cannot make policy. So, those are no reason to take this case, to pretend to make, or just reaffirm policy;

2) Most the rest of the issues were just covered by this ctte in August, so it is waste of time to take this case for those issues (eg, initial discretion and appeal process is already clear);

3) The only novel and large issues appear to be whether there are safeguards that this ctte can place, w/r/t admins who disregard the process, and whether certain Users regularly exacerbate issues in regard to this particular set of Users by their unsubstantiated charges against others (in which case the ctte can advise, warn, t-ban or other sanction). Alanscottwalker ( talk) 14:34, 26 October 2015 (UTC) reply

The above is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

I'm not directly involved in the case, as far as I can tell, and have made no other comment on it. I will note that User:Yngvadottir should probably be desysopped. In unblocking Eric Corbett, she offered the rationale (in the log): " Time served is sufficient for such a minor infraction of unjust Arbitration ruling."

• Yngvadottir did not participate any in discussion regarding the unblock, with the original blocking admin or anyone else. (She notified the blocking admin, Kirill Lokshin, only a minute before unblocking.) While the block was contentious, there was no discussion underway anywhere on the project which showed a consensus to unblock.
• Yngvadottir did not start or participate in an unblock discussion at any one of the three appropriate and customary venues for such appeals: User talk:Kirill Lokshin, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement, or Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Clarification and Amendment.
• Yngvadottir decided to lift the block partly on the basis that she believes the Arbitration ruling under which Eric Corbett was blocked was "unjust". It is not within Yngvadottir's authority to personally decide ArbCom rulings are unfair and can therefore be overturned.
• Yngvadottir has offered no compelling explanation (or explanation of any kind) why she could not request and argue for an unblock through the usual channels, or why the unblock was so urgent that she needed to carry it out without any discussion and as her very first (and only) actions of the day on Wikipedia.
• Yngvadottir is well aware that her actions should lead to her desysopping: [11].

I expect to have no further comment or need to participate in this case/motion/whatever; clerks need not notify me of future happenings. TenOfAllTrades( talk) 20:47, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

The above is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

Eric knew exactly what he was doing, as just a few days ago he made the right choice and declined to comment, stating: "Given the subject of that article I'm unable to comment". That's your mens rea. The guilty act is of course once again using his account to deny the existence of a gender gap. EC apparently cannot control his impulses, so (like anybody else) he should be blocked until he learns to do so. His presence undermines all authority on Wikipedia, and his continuous boundary pushing is disruptive in the extreme. The block should be reinstated, and ArbCom should desyssop the unblocking admin, who has demonstrated clearly that they are here to protect EC from ArbCom. RO ^(talk) 20:50, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

Addendum: At some point ArbCom will need to address the issue of Eric's supporters who have so thoroughly frightened everyone, including most admins, into submission they are in themselves a more disruptive force than EC. They intimidate and tag-team anyone and everyone who stands up to the clique, and as time goes on it's going to get more and more difficult to address EC when he feels the need to defy ArbCom and the community. They are arguing that the disruption that follows blocks of EC makes blocking him not worth the trouble, but they are the ones causing the disruptive backlash! Translation: "If you block him we'll raise so much hell you'll eventually stop blocking him." I strongly suggest a EC topic ban for these people, who I need not name, but I have no delusion that will ever happen. Nobody else would or should get away with 1/10th of the crap EC does, and it's about time we treated him like everybody else who allegedly writes good content. RO ^(talk) 21:12, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

And what I'm hearing from Newyorkbrad and Dennis Brown is basically, "Yeah, Eric is topic-banned, but if his comments aren't totally obnoxious and disruptive the topic ban should be summarily ignored." This completely undermines ArbCom's authority and exacerbates the problem. Please accept this case with the intent to put this exhausting matter to rest once and for all, as this ongoing drama is disrupting editing and sullying Wikipedia's long-term reputation on a global scale. No one editor, not even Eric Corbett, is more important than Wikipedia. RO ^(talk) 16:41, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply

ArbCom should accept this case to address not only the EC topic ban but also the consistently biased and aggressive behavior of admin Black Kite, who should be desysopped post haste for making unsupported accusations and personal attacks: ( [12]). They do not have the best interests of the community in mind, and would rather protect Eric Corbett from his detractors. RO ^(talk) 19:08, 25 October 2015 (UTC) reply

Please consider implementing a one-way interaction ban between Eric Corbett and Jimbo Wales, as Corbett's incessant complaining about Jimbo is disruptive to the project. RO ^(talk) 22:21, 27 October 2015 (UTC) reply

Newyorkbrad, per this comment: In that light, he may have temporarily lost sight of the fact that he was topic-banned from posting his response see this diff. Two days ago EC knew he was banned from commenting on that article. RO ^(talk) 21:42, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

The above is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

Yngvadottir unblocked with the express intention of rendering the governing Arbitration Committee ruling ineffective. That is wholly unacceptable, and justifies -- and almost certainly requires -- their summary desysopping. There's no need for me to repeat Ten of All Trade's cogent analysis in my more prolix fashion. The Big Bad Wolfowitz (aka Hullaballoo) ( talk) 20:57, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

The above is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

Trouts around. The enforcement provisions of GGTF clearly state, "An uninvolved admin may remove any comments that breach this remedy, and impose blocks as necessary " (emphasis mine). KL showed poor judgement in creating this fracas by imposing an unnecessary block when he could have simply removed the comments and reminded Eric of the sanction. We have a pillar about using good judgement rather than mechanically following the rules; any notion that it was preventative is absurd; the unique circumstances of his being incorrectly described in a major publication are unlikely to occur anytime soon. NE Ent 21:05, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

@ Salvio giuliano: Ya'll are overthinking it - cap the sanction, cap the drama. NE Ent 13:33, 26 October 2015 (UTC) reply

Update: The blowup here from two fairly innocuous edits calls for a serious dose of WP:Wikidryl. The essential problem is the t-ban is good, the enforcement provisions -- especially the escalating block lengths -- are like unstable nitroglycerin -- all it took was a clumsy (lacking good sense) admin to start the current conflagration. Obviously arbcom can't anticipate every possible blue moon circumstance (e.g. the Atlantic article), and no, you don't want to micromanage enforcement, as others have suggested, rather change enforcement to:

• "An uninvolved admin may remove any comments that breach this remedy. If disruption continues, blocks of up to 31 hours may be imposed."

That way, obvious breaches will be dealt with. While questionable blocks will still cause the usual, per Carrite, "soap opera," a short block will lead to a much smaller, much more easily ignored soap opera.

Note Eric's comments at this stage of the proceedings need to be taken with a grain of salt. [13]. (No, that's not an accusation of lying, that's an observation of likely to change his mind based on similar statements made during past soap operas.) Past sanctions have been respected and curbed disruption (e.g. the ban on threaded conversations at Rfa). Arbcom can delegate its power but it can't delegate it's common sense, and putting an upper lid on the enforcement provision will put a limit on future soap operas. This t-ban can be efficacious if given a chance by limiting enforcement discretion. NE Ent 15:19, 25 October 2015 (UTC) reply

The above is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

Why is GW listed as a party in this case? Protonk ( talk) 20:56, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

Black Kite, the statement "that cannot be disproven" is fundamentally distinct from "you can't prove that". If you accuse someone of being alerted in the manner that you did, there is no amount of evidence that they can marshall to disprove the accusation. They could open up their email, phone records, whatever and there still could be some vector by which they could have been influenced. They cannot mount a negative proof. To turn around and suggest that that plain statement of fact implies guilt is embarrassing. I'm embarrassed for you and you should be too. Let's not forget you made that accusation (and suggested it was a violation of policy) without any evidence. Protonk ( talk) 21:45, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

Was there a justification for adding "use of external websites" to the case name? What "use" are we referring to? What websites are we referring to? Protonk ( talk) 22:45, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

The above is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

(Word count, not counting this parenthetical: 774, streamlined from the first draft’s 1400. I request a dispensation from the word limit to this extent.)

Eric Corbett was topic-banned from commenting about Wikipedia’s gender disparity, in light of his several unhelpful posts on the Gender Gap Task Force page and use of inflammatory language. I was one of the arbitrators in that case, and while I disliked having to bar a long-term editor from discussing an important project issue, I believed restricting Eric from this subject was better than banning him from Wikipedia altogether, which had also been proposed. (I personally thought it might be enough to ban him from the GGTF pages themselves, but others disagreed.)

Yesterday, Eric Corbett made two posts on User talk:Jimbo Wales. In one of these, he stated that he does not find a gender disparity among editors he works with; in the other, he said he does not see misogeny on Wikipedia. I disagree with the thrust of these comments. While Eric may encounter roughly equal numbers of female and male editors, overall, the fact that many more men edit than women is well-established; the existence of this unfortunate disparity cannot reasonably be disputed, although the reasons for it can. Regarding the presence of misogyny on Wikipedia, the comments yesterday on Jimbo’s talkpage by GorillaWarfare and Iridescent speak for themselves.

I believe that what Eric meant to say is that in his day-to-day content editing, he finds that editors treat each other respectfully and equally regardless of sex. I agree that most editors do not engage in sexism, discrimination, harassment, or vulgar and obscene abuse of their colleagues: only a small fraction of on- and off-Wikipedia interactions or discussions are sullied by these blights. But even a small percentage of misbehavior still adds up to a significant problem in the context of a project as large as ours. To those female editors who have repeatedly been targeted, the fact that other women have not been harassed, or that women are not always harassed, or that the harassment may come from a relatively small handful of people, is surely of little comfort. I hope that going forward, Eric Corbett, and some others, will be more sensitive to the fact that a serious problem can exist even if they do not personally encounter it.

By the rules of arbitration enforcement, the block of Eric Corbett was defensible. Eric did violate his topic-ban, and he has been blocked several times before under the same or similar remedies, of which he was on notice. It also bears mention that Eric would not have lost the right to comment as freely as any other Wikipedian in this or any discussion if he had not previously made a host of problematic comments. The blocking administrator, Kirill Lokshin, is a former arbitrator colleague, whose judgment and views I value, and who does not deserve the snarky comments aimed at him on Eric’s talkpage.

At the same time, there are several factors that, if I had reviewed the two disputed edits, would have led me not to block.

First, although I have disagreed with the substance of Eric's comments, they were expressed in measured language. They did not contain the sort of inflammatory invective or personal attacks that led to the topic-ban and several prior blocks.

Second, though perhaps least important, these comments were made on User talk:Jimbo Wales. While that page is by no means excluded from project-wide policies or from ArbCom editing restrictions, it is well-known that the page is sometimes a free-for-all (compare, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Banning Policy).

Finally, and most importantly, the context of the thread on Jimbo's talkpage was the discussion of a mainstream non-wiki media article that specifically criticized Eric Corbett by name. He was also repeatedly mentioned by name in the on-wiki thread and indeed was pinged to the discussion. In that light, he may have temporarily lost sight of the fact that he was topic-banned from posting his response, and in any event, it is certainly understandable that he wanted to say something.

It would be contrary to the best interests of the project for the Arbitration Committee and the community to be subject to “Eric Corbett Block/Unblock Drama, Part Ninety-five”; I hope this matter can be resolved quickly. But to the extent this request becomes, in effect, a block/AE review, I find myself in respectful disagreement with the original block and more especially with its one-month duration.

As for the unblock by Yngvadottir, it was certainly “out of process”; but when I was an arbitrator I opposed the adoption of any policy by which a particular consequence would ‘’automatically’’ ensue for a given type of action, in favor of exercising tailored discretion in each case, and I hope that is what occurs here. Newyorkbrad ( talk) 21:25, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

• @ Amortias: and the arbs: Thanks for the extension. I actually meant to ask only for the 774 I was using. :) Newyorkbrad ( talk) 22:49, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply
• My statement above was obviously written before the desysopping motion passed, or at least before I learned of it. As a procedural matter, this motion states that Yngvadottir may regain adminship (if she wants to, not a foregone conclusion) only via a new RfA. Procedurally, though, a "level 2 desysopping" is ordinarily subject to further consideration and revisitation by the Committee if the admin so requests. Was the motion deliberately worded to exclude that in this case, or was the wording just taken from a different context? (Note that any reconsideration would not, I hope, need to involve a whole, long arbitration case.) Newyorkbrad ( talk) 02:14, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply

Addition to statement

These added comments may not be very noticeable here in the middle of an existing statement, but I feel compelled to add something.

The Committee seems to be on the verge of accepting and spending several weeks supervising and deciding a case that virtually nobody wants. There must be a better way.

Kirill blocked Eric for an infraction that Eric denies warrants a sanction. In the ordinary course Eric would have appealed to AE or AN and, based on the majority input, the block would probably have been shortened after a couple of days to some version of "time served." (The input would likely have been too split to reach a consensus to overturn the block altogether, though that might well have been my view.) The entire ensuing sturm-and-drang of an out-of-process unblock, an arguably necessary or arguably precipitous desysopping, and 50-plus statements at the preliminary stage of this case, all arise because Eric feels the appeal process is beneath him, and no one seems able to persuade him otherwise. There's some sort of process lesson there, though I'm not sure what it is.

A lot of people have said in this thread that Eric Corbett's long-term behavior is a problem that the community or the Committee have to resolve. I agreed as an arbitrator and I agree today that Eric's previous comments have cumulatively been a problem, in that they have foreseeably, if not intentionally, been intemperate, insulting, or disruptive. But what I think bothers so many people, including myself, about the most recent block is that it was imposed for relatively mild, albeit wikilegally infringing, participation in a thread that was in part about him in the first place. This has got to be the first time that Eric was blocked for comments that were not inherently intemperate, insulting, or disruptive, other than by the fact of their existence.

Even for those who think that Eric Corbett needs to keep his sharp tongue in check, and that if he seriously offends the remedy is to enforce his ArbCom restrictions via increasing (but calibrated and proportional) blocks, I still feel this was the wrong time and place to draw a "one-month-block" sized line. There has to be a way to reach that conclusion, if it enjoys broader support, without, in any way, saying that any editor is unblockable or indispensable, or setting any precedent beyond concluding that this this particular block was on the harsh side for these particular, unusual facts. And there definitely has to be a way to get there without spending two or three months on this case. Newyorkbrad ( talk) 02:43, 26 October 2015 (UTC) reply

The above is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

I wouldn't mind arbcom looking at an admin who thinks they are Wikipedia's white knight, defending it "...when someone has so frightened the admin corps that nobody else will step up to the plate." [14] -- NeilN ^{talk to me} 21:23, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

@ Gamaliel: I hardly call implying the entire admin corps is a bunch of cowards a civil or mature response. About on par with telling administrators, functionaries, or arbitrators who question your views to resign. -- NeilN ^{talk to me} 17:13, 25 October 2015 (UTC) reply

The above is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

I repeat my opinion (see [15] and [16]) that traditional escalating blocks will not work for this case, and will result in this being brought to your doorstep over and over again. If the "punishment" doesn't "fit the crime" there will be blowback, especially given the community's obsession with Eric Corbett. If User:Kirill Lokshin had made a 72 hour block there would have been no riot; but the perceived injustice of a 1 month block for a minor offense has led to yet another desysop. It may be too late for User:INeverCry and User:Yngvadottir but if you (Arbcom) wanted, you could take this opportunity to prevent the next desysop with an amendment putting a reasonable cap on the block lengths. ~ Awilley ( talk) 21:43, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

I realize Jimbo's talk page is sometimes a free for all, but I oppose anything that codifies that. ~ Awilley ( talk) 16:52, 26 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

I think the block was regrettable. It's also regrettable that the vocal supporters of EC are helping escalate this issue. I urge modification of the sanctions to arbs only, it will save a great deal of community time in these situations. Hell in a Bucket ( talk) 21:47, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

User:L235 who are these nameless arbs running protection of fellow admin and arbs. If those two were the source of this article they are parties to this. Hell in a Bucket ( talk) 01:59, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply

The above is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

• I concur that if Jimbo's page is a free-fire zone, then Corbett appearing there is exempt from his restriction. Thus, no case.

• This is not the first time that a random admin has blocked Corbett.

• I also concur with those who suggest that to avoid problems like this in the future, it may be wise to revise Corbett's restrictions to state something like "only members of ArbCom may block Eric Corbett for violations of his GGTF restrictions, broadly construed. Other issues may be handled per standard procedures." Montanabw ^(talk) 21:58, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

• Per Wehwalt I think that trout all around is an effective remedy. I also must point out that I am not among those who think Corbett should never be held accountable, nor, frankly, are most of his "friends" on wiki. I, and I suspect others, think that he is simply subjected to repeated harassment by individuals who want him banned forever while those who support him believe he is a net positive to the project in spite of his curmudgeonly habits and tendency to feel he has to poke at hornets' nests at times. When he is slapped, he taks his medicine and moves forward. I also think that desysopping Yngvadottir was overkill. Montanabw ^(talk) 19:33, 28 October 2015 (UTC) reply

The above is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

Firstly, let me call for some common sense: an editor gets smeared in widely read media article which is horrendously inaccurate, even on basic details such as Eric being an admin, and there is a thread talking about him, and he is not allowed to comment?

Ok, common sense is very uncommon, so let's try the law. If you are going to stick with the letter of the law, do it consistently. I would note that there was no request at WP:AE to block. On Kirill Lokshin's talk page, they state that since this was a clear violation of topic ban, so WP:AE is not required. Several other people have commented that WP:BANEX may apply, and the fact that Jimbo's page is a free-fire zone. Thus it was certainly not a slam-dunk decision. Keeping in mind these, and the unusual circumstances of off-wiki mention, surely there is a case for deliberative, instead of hasty action here. What was the need for hasty blocking anyway?

Lastly, I will note that for all topic ban violations, admins at WP:AE are allowed discretion on action. In a hypothetical thread at WP:AE, admins may have agreed on a topic ban violation, but may have disagreed on the length, or even the imposition of a block. Kirill's comments state pretty explicitly that they acted because they believe that other admins are afraid of acting on cases involving Eric Corbett (with justification). That does not seem a good thing to me.

I see Yngvadottir has been desysopped. Technically, this was merited. But, I can't help but chalk this up as another instance of the saying: "No good deed goes unpunished." Kingsindian  ♝ ♚ 22:25, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

I just had a thought, reading Gamaliel's remarks - which are ok as far as they go, but miss the point, in my opinion. Why does Jimbo's talk page exist? It is pretty clear that it is a WP:FORUM almost exclusively. Just the existence of the offending thread there, which had nothing to do with any wikipedia article, is proof. If it exists to provide a forum, it can hardly be wrong to post there. Perhaps the time has come for ArbCom to deem that the page either be abolished or recognized for what it is. Kingsindian  ♝ ♚ 08:17, 25 October 2015 (UTC) reply

The above is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

Naming and attacking GorillaWarfare here was a cynical ploy, one very much of a piece with the situations Paling described in her article.

Is User Talk:Jimbo indeed a safe haven where even topic-banned editors may post? If so, I presume my January block for posting there will be expunged, and that I shall receive a proper apology? I, too, was responding to international media coverage that mentioned me by name, and I was responding to what I reasonably perceived as a personal attack there by an arbitrator.

Wikipedia no longer has rules for that or any other page. It has one set of strictures for the privileged and well-connected, and another for the little people. It has one law for women, LGBT people, and others who might be vulnerable to sexual harassment off-wiki, and another for those in a position to shrug off such harassment. It continues to show no care or concern for Wikipedia's victims, but great concern for privileged pals. And now we have proposals here to place Eric Corbett above administrative sanction.

This is the world Arbcom has made; be glad and rejoice in it!

I call your attention to a significant consequence: this state of affairs places administrators in a hopeless bind. An outspoken faction of self-appointed enforcers now threatens their opponents with impunity, knowing that their supporters will exact a heavy toll on any admin who intervenes. An admin who acquiesces surrenders the tools to the self-appointed faction; an admin who does not will endure calumny, annoyance, and troubles dire. Either way, it's clear that the community places persons above rules, policy, considered judgments, process, and indeed the pillars. MarkBernstein ( talk)

Addition

The premise of the complaint, and of several statements (most notably Giano), holds that The Atlantic either published a story at the behest of Wikipedians or allowed them to review or comment on the finished article. This is spectacularly improbable, as anyone with the slightest knowledge of contemporary journalism will know. It is either an expression of ignorance by persons who know nothing of, and have had no dealings with, the press, or it is a deliberate lie; in any event, no one should rely on this supposition. I attempted to furnish details on this to the clerks yesterday.

@ Giano: It is possible that @ GorillaWarfare: asked the clerks to remove your personal attacks, but it is certain that the request had already been placed by others who wished to enforce the Wikipedia policies which you had violated. The clerks have been strangely absent from this page -- perhaps they have gone fishing? The notion that Wikipedians ought not to grant interviews is hilarious; the notion that interview subjects are in any way responsible for the content of an article beyond their direct quotes is absurd.

The above is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

Well, I had started to write a comment on Kirill's page this morning but got interrupted in real life, and now I see the situation has escalated just a bit, so I suppose I'll comment here instead.

• Eric's comments may not have been a good idea, but reacting to them as black-box "topic ban violations" is patently absurd. Elsewhere on the project we call inaccurate and negative information about a named living person a BLP violation. That he should want to respond to discussion in a high-profile venue about a press article in which he was named is entirely reasonable.
• All of these events are fairly representative of how the community tends to deal with gender-gap-related issues: people just react to proximal situations without thinking strategically. If you wanted to hand the men's rights activist types a doozy of a talking point, you could do worse than "Wikipedia editor responds to inaccurate reporting calling him a sexist and gets blocked for his trouble." I'd love to hear an explanation of how this block, or the inevitable ensuing drama, would be good for women on Wikipedia.
• Speaking of reacting to whatever hits you in the nose instead of thinking strategically: I see Yngvadottir's been desysopped already. Second rush-to-desysop in the last couple of months. So far, Wikipedians' response to this article about the gender-gap problem has consisted of a) blocking a man named and negatively characterized in the article for the offense of commenting on it, and b) removing a woman from the admin corps. Did anybody think this through, beyond the preservation of Arbcom Authoritah?
• Kirill says someone has so frightened the admin corps that nobody else will step up to the plate. Frightened? If you observe that other people have not taken an action you would like to take, it's awfully self-serving to conclude that they were simply too afraid to do so, instead of considering that, perhaps, they thought it was a bad idea. The implications of this attitude are actually quite a bit more frightening than the possibility of getting complaints on your talk page, and quite a bit more damaging than (the horror!) performing one "out of process" unblock. If you anticipate that a significant fraction of the community will object to an action, that is, apparently, an argument in favor of doing it, because others must be intimidated by the objections. Opabinia regalis ( talk) 23:04, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply
• Oh, and on the "sanctions enforced by arbcom only" idea: there is obviously no consensus in the community that some of these sanctions are enforced fairly, or that they should be enforced at all. Responding by bringing out a bigger hammer would look a lot more like a power play than like a real effort to control a problem. Opabinia regalis ( talk) 23:25, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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I would implore ArbCom to take over arbitration enforcement for Eric Corbett. Eric Corbett is simply too large a figure to be handled by the community. Community enforcement of sanctions against him are simply not working. How many more admins are going to be lost through arbitration enforcement against him? Please re-read Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Arbitration_enforcement/Evidence#The_arbitral_topic_ban_of_Eric_Corbett_is_in_practice_unenforceable_and_should_be_reconsidered , part of Sandsteins's evidence at the AE case. Of all thats happened concerning and about him, this presents the clearest picture. --Jules  (Mrjulesd) 23:16, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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I've removed my previous statement. I think the committee should take this case. I may have more to say, but I don't know if I will.-- Wehwalt ( talk) 06:44, 25 October 2015 (UTC) reply

Well, after three days hard thinking, here's my advice. Banning Eric is a bad idea not only for the loss of content, but it would probably set off a brushfire war that might never end. The problem is, the collateral damage is mounting up, of admins desysoped, people leaving, and former admins less effective than they were before (I am minded of Hawkeye7's statement not only here but elsewhere complaining what a pain it is for him to get minor admin actions done.) We can't have this continued loss because it is affecting the encyclopedia as well as real people. So de-escalate the situation. Take back enforcement of your own rulings in this one exceptional case, and do it off wiki. Any admin who acts against Eric gets reverted, a trout, a 24-hour block, and gets featured on some dedicated page as holder of some joke trophy until the next person falls into the trap. He does not get desysoped, he gets laughed at, as possibly does Eric. If you place this beyond the temptation of any single admin, and eliminate the drama element (I see one person below urging increasing escalating blocks who 3RR'd the thread on Jimbo's page to keep it open and keep the dramah going), I think there's a chance you'll get rid of the problem. That's the general idea. Craft your own, and do it by motion. No one likes to be a laughing stock. Possibly even put the (un?)lucky admin in the Signpost. Think outside the box.-- Wehwalt ( talk) 10:08, 26 October 2015 (UTC) reply

@@ Salvio giuliano:. Obviously I don't know it will work. Nor am I wedded to any specific proposal (obviously I have no voice other than as a kibitzer) But when the conventional fails, go with the unconventional. We agree that a solution has to be lasting, for I concur with you that we cannot go on like this.. I submit that one element should be doing it in a way a single admin can't jump on the bait, even if they want to, because hard experience has proven that they will, even if they know the price is their bits. We can't afford that damage. Nor, in my view, can we afford Eric's forced departure, even though that would satisfy Criterion A above, because that won't be the end of it, and I'm not talking about elections (about which I am sure none of you give a fuck), I'm talking about ongoing factional conflict, and a lot of these people are (for our purposes) always going to be here. Build around those principles. Otherwise, whether Eric is here or not, there will be more battles, each fought on a battlefield not the choosing of the armies assembled, for reasons that are never quite what we want them to be, under circumstances that will always leave doubt. Don't bequeath that.-- Wehwalt ( talk) 12:06, 26 October 2015 (UTC) reply

And no (I missed this), I don't think it would matter if ArbCom had decreed it. You are likely always going to have admins to whom the bits mean less than something else, especially as people move to the down side of the enthusiasm curve, or (as with Steve, apparently) are willing to come back to do one last favor. Stopping people who do not care is a losing proposition.-- Wehwalt ( talk) 12:13, 26 October 2015 (UTC) reply

And I would second Victoriaearle, what is the point of unleashing a full case? You have all the evidence, and what you would get in an evidence phase is everyone's tea leaves about what Eric meant by this and Kirill meant by that and with side issues of why it's a bad idea for sitting arbs and clerks to be discussing a case offsite (I agree with that, btw). Most people have opined as to what they want to see in a proposed judgment, so really, at this point, the community may add more words, but it isn't going to add much more substance. No need to stall, you got the facts, the policies, and the community's weighed in. Whatever you do, a lot of people aren't going to like it.-- Wehwalt ( talk) 00:39, 28 October 2015 (UTC) reply

Montanabw I do not say that content contributors are immune from consequences either, and there is a (large) extent in which Eric is in a position of his own making. I have for the most part in recent years stood aside from what happens to him, and from almost all arbitration cases, even those involving content contributors. But at some point ... We have few metrics for content, but not being able to measure contributions does not mean there are not contributions and Eric is one of the few with the interest and ability to write meaningfully on a wide range of topics. That being said, I know enough about how stories are placed in publications in this day and age to know that the journalist almost certainly did not chance upon this story, and if we are going to have an election system for ArbCom, we cannot have a system where things can be thrown into chaos (and, basically, sitting arbs led to the electoral guillotine) a couple of weeks before the election process starts, by external action of others. As for clarification of Jimbo's talk page, I would not look for it to come from him, nor take it for much if he did, because of what for any other editor participant on Wikipedia would be deemed involvement. I do not know that making a major public speech in which you clearly advocate the departure of Eric Corbett is considered in our rules as involvement, but Jimbo at this point seems to be following the well-worn, and perfectly acceptable, Wikipedia technique of letting others twist in the wind and hoping the AC or community will rid him of this turbulent contributor. Quite possibly at his hobnobbing with the great, the good, and the Blairs :) , he turns aside to hit refresh on his smartphone to check the latest (of course he is far from alone there, when I got off a 12 hour flight today, it was the fourth thing I checked on the internet).-- Wehwalt ( talk) 22:25, 28 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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Newyorkbrad sums it best, and NE Ent makes interesting points, so I won't rehash. We've had a couple of admins reversing AE/Arb blocks, risking their bits for what seems to be a consensus conclusion. I understand this can be a problem for Arbs, but at some point you have to ask if the system itself is the problem. We talked about a "first to block advantage" last time, yet it still exists, particularly when you bypass AE altogether, and particularly in a case like this where input from other admin should have been sought, given the totality as presented by NYB. Good judgement was not exercised. I would hope we don't have any real sanction for the unblock, even if it was out of order, as it was clearly within consensus, once again, demonstrated by Brad's perspective. Fix the whole "first to block advantage" and you will quit seeing these cases. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 23:58, 23 October 2015 (UTC) reply

• As it has been pointed out, the fact that we just desysopped a woman sysop who unblock Eric, is dripping with irony. This is not how you build a gender neutral encyclopedia. Quite the opposite, actually. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 01:32, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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Not the project's finest hour eh? An excellent woman administrator deyssopped on flimsy grounds in less than two hours, while attempting to nobly defend a male editor (irony of ironies!) who was attempting to defend himself against completely false charges of sexism made by a lousy journalist. Something is rotten in the state of Wikipedia. I am fairly sure that the groundswell of community feeling would restore the bit to this appallingly treated admin in a new RfA by a considerable margin. Many have been quietly following this trainwreck of an arbcom decision today. I strongly suggest that Arbcom reconsider the removal of Y's bit, before a possible successful RfA shreds what credibilty the Arbs have left. KL's judgement has also been problematic. I would urge a complete rethink of this shambles, before further damage is done to the project. Irondome ( talk) 02:04, 24 October 2015 (UTC) (originally posted about 01:15) reply

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I second the concern raised by MarkBernstein ( talk · contribs) about how a user with a WP:FACTION posse can become de facto unblockable. With thousands of admins active, the range of usual suspects rendering decisions at WP:AE is surprisingly small. The admins taking a "damn the torpedoes" attitude to this case are surely not too timid for AE. Rhoark ( talk) 01:01, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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IMHO Eric was just defending himself, I appreciate he's banned from talking about certain subjects & whatnot but if someones making a load of claims against you you then have every right to defend yourself!, I'm not gonna be liked for this but I believe Kirill should be desysopped for creating this whole bloody mess in the first place and IMHO I think Yngvadottir deserves to be given the bit back!. – Davey2010 ^Talk 01:22, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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If ArbCom cannot take control of this situation that arises constantly, then the members who refuse to take the mature, reasonable position should resign or WMF should revoke their privileges. This is beyond an embarrassment, by the same set of actors, for the umpteenth time. I should not have to even state my position, it should be obvious to any mature person with some sort semblance of common sense. Dave Dial ( talk) 01:28, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply

Adding the fact that this is allowed to stay on this page as a 'Statement' speaks volumes about what active Arbs and Clerks believe is acceptable. If Giano were talking about "Jews" or "Blacks", that statement would have been removed as disruptive immediately. Dave Dial ( talk) 17:04, 26 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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Discretion is advised. (Have any arbs been publicly accused of being misogynists? Do any arbs have experience editing under sanctions?) Blind bureaucracy is not a good thing, as KL s/ also take note. IHTS ( talk) 02:39, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply

@ Kevin Gorman: You say "prior to blocking Eric [...] I would expect he [Kirill] reviewed [...] Eric's statement that he DGAF about the sanctions." In fact are you aware that EC's DGAF post occurred more than 26 hours after KL's block?? IHTS ( talk) 20:27, 25 October 2015 (UTC) reply

@ Kevin Gorman: You also say "I seriously doubt he consulted anyone prior to blocking Eric" followed by "I'm sure Kirill also spoke to a large part of the uninvolved admin corps about whether or not they would be willing to possibly action Eric". (Um, that isn't pretty messed up?!) IHTS ( talk) 22:08, 25 October 2015 (UTC) reply

@ Kevin Gorman: You say "if the case is accepted I'd hope the end result would be BK stripped of his tools, and the behavior of all other users launching inappropriate attacks, such as Giano here and elsewhere". Did you think Giano has tools to strip?? If not, then what was it that you were trying to parse in English? 22:30, 25 October 2015 (UTC)

@ Kevin Gorman: And the reason you falsely represented the timeline re when Eric posted his DGAF post is ... what?! This is not the first time you've inaccurately represented EC, and cast aspersions. At a minimum and acc to AGF that is competency issue not English issue. And as far as "behavior", is it possible for you to write even two sentences w/o baselessly attempting to threaten/intimidate someone?! IHTS ( talk) 01:10, 26 October 2015 (UTC) reply

@ Kevin Gorman: Removing your posts to which I've already responded including ping, isn't really kosher. (I'm a reg editor having to point that out to an admin!?) IHTS ( talk) 08:34, 26 October 2015 (UTC) reply

@ Salvio giuliano: Re "all those who edit Wikipedia have to accept that they are bound by the site's policies." What site policies do you imply that EC has broken? (More than one editor has commented they've noticed consistently greater CIV from EC in his communications since the relevant CIV restriction coming out of GGTF arb case. And, how acc. you does this arb case morph into a CIV case when none of EC's posts to Talk:Jimbo leading to the cascade of block & unblock & this case, have anything to do with CIV?) Perhaps actions speak louder than words, especially words one day after being blocked for a month (have *you* ever been blocked for a month!?) and when there is inherent complexity since the GGTF arb restrictions were multiple and also of different breeds. IHTS ( talk) 20:36, 28 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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In September 2012, I had occasion to say, "If Bongwarrior deserves a trout for this block...then Black Kite deserves a fat fucking whale for perpetuating the absurd breakdown of our ability to function normally when Malleus is blocked." How little things change. No real opinion on the block, but Kirill Lokshin's explanation seems to serve as sufficient justification as to why this was a good faith block that could reasonably be construed as enforcing an arbitration decision. Beyond that, any accusations or implications of bad faith being at play, particularly those by Black Kite, are egregious, unsubstantiated personal attacks and I condemn them in the strongest possible terms as conduct unbecoming an administrator. This case request is not an honest appeal regarding a suspicion of bad behavior, but a result of perennial loyalty to Eric by Black Kite stretching back years (see ANI archives) and an attempt to punish and intimidate an administrator for blocking Eric. ArbCom should clearly do something here because this is too much for the community to handle, but that something is absolutely not investigating an administrator that was attempting to enforce its own decision. Swarm ♠ 03:22, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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I have been most impressed by the lengthy, detailed and restrained descriptions that GorillaWarfare has written in recent days about the vile gender harassment she has endured for years. There is something about her calm and dignified self restraint that adds power and gravity to her story. This is a truly serious problem and the Wikipedia community needs to do a much better job dealing with it. Overt harassers must be ousted promptly and kept away.

I am in agreement with Newyorkbrad's observations. He says things more persuasively than I am capable of.

The blocking administrator said that he blocked Eric Corbett because "the subject of his comments became the existence of the gender gap itself." Consider, please, the precise words that led to this block: "In fact, if I were to go just by the editors I've worked with, particularly on FA/GAs I'd be inclined to think that it was about 50/50 between males and females. ", and "That's my experience as well. I'm just not seeing this alleged misogyny." The first quote is not about the gender gap across Wikipedia but rather about the much smaller circle of editors he has collaborated with himself. The second does not deny the existence of the gender gap but is an observation that he has not himself seen misogyny. Let me be clear: I believe that Corbett has a severe blind spot regarding the gender gap, gender based harassment and misogyny. However, as I read his words, he was not "denying the existence of the gender gap itself". Words have meaning.

Too often in such disputes, editors feel the need to respond to the call of the old coal miner's song, Which Side Are You On?, and line up firmly with their friends and against their enemies. It is often better to strive to see both sides of the story. We are dealing with a situation where a problematic personality who is also a person with feelings, was cast as the "villain" in an error-strewn article in The Atlantic, a very prestigious journal published since 1857. He responded in a very open forum, Jimbo's talk page, where overtly socking blocked and banned editors are allowed to vent and spin conspiracy theories. A forum where false allegations against him were being posted and repeated in an ongoing discussion of the Atlantic article. And he responded with relative restraint.

I encourage ArbCom to respond with restraint as well. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 04:20, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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Agree that ArbCom enforcements which apply to a case as inevitably contentious and drama-filled as this case (EC's) always is should only be made by active Arbs. Agree that as the article in question made several inaccurate statements about EC including that he is an admin (and since Jimbo's TP has historically been a free zone, and, as Cullen notes, EC's two brief comments were very restrained and did not deny the existence of the gender gap itself), this was a borderline case and could have been dealt with otherwise, including if necessary removing the comment and issuing a warning, or having an active Arb make the block. Agree wholeheartedly that Yngvadottir should be immediately re-sysopped, and if her actions are to be questioned, they can be questioned here. If Yngvadottir is not immediately re-sysopped, the action of her de-sysopping should be questioned, investigated, and evaluated here. We've already lost two of our very best admins (Malik Shabazz and Floquenbeam) in the last couple of months because of similar odd circumstances; it would be a real shame to lose another excellent admin for the same silly reason. Softlavender ( talk) 05:38, 24 October 2015 (UTC); edited 05:59, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply

We may have lost Drmies as well; he just blanked his user and talk pages in apparent disgust, noting that "I don't really need to be here now". Softlavender ( talk) 06:29, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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I echo Newyorkbrad's statement. Especially the bit where he disagrees with Eric but puts aside his personal opinions before making any decisions. That's something many people in America sadly have seem to have forgotten (to the point of South Park dedicating an entire season to blowing that narcissistic childishness out of the water).

Hopefully some editors here take some notes from Brad's book. In any case - I suggest unblocking the guy, giving warnings to all involved, and let everyone go on their merry way. But I also don't hang at wikipedia too often so I dunno if that would solve anything, haha. Sethyre ( talk) 07:11, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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Two thoughts:

1. I only got really active in Wikipedia editing after the GGTF case has concluded, so I have no clue what Eric Corbett's behavior was like before then. But currently he seems more civil than a large proportion of active editors (including myself), and it looks more like people overreact to everything he does due to some past reputation. In the thread that led to Eric's block there are multiple people who would have ended up blocked if they were under the same civility restriction and scrutiny as him. The reason his sanctions "don't work" is because people are far too keen to block him, due to past notoriety.
2. Unfair blocks and AE enforcements aren't that rare, but in most of those cases you don't see admins going out of their way to get protest desysopped. As MarkBernstein rightly noted, his situation was pretty much exactly the same as Eric's. While some admins protested, there was no wheelwarring, desysop and pursuant Arbcom case that seem to follow every single Eric block. I'm sceptical that the people currently cheering Yngvadottir and throwing barnstars her way for doing the right thing, would have given a damn if it was any other person who'd been unfairly sanctioned.

In conclusion, everyone is terrible. Brustopher ( talk) 09:30, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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"no foul, play on" was said by Floq when Andy was taken to AE for formatting a malformatted infobox. I wish the same had been said about Eric's two comments, of which one translates to me to that he works often with female editors on quality content. I worked with him on Andreas Scholl. Let's keep this short, Opabinia regalis expressed what might have said, had I more time. I spoke elsewhere about talk before you block and breast cancer awareness. Life is too short to deal with arbitration. -- Gerda Arendt ( talk) 09:51, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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I would like the Arbitration Committee to accept this case, not on its merits which are scant, but in order to make findings that will address some of the issues that have been raised. I am particularly interested in the following topics.

1. Responsibility for complying with topic bans. Is it the responsibility of the person who is topic-banned to comply with their topic ban? This might seem like a silly question but it's suggested elsewhere on this page that the responsibility for someone complying with a topic ban in fact lies with, for instance, other Wikipedians who might continue to discuss the topic; or indeed with journalists who might write about the subject in such a way as to inflame the editor with the topic ban so much that they have no option but to continue to post things on the subject on this Wikipedia.
2. Jimbo Wales' talk page. It is asserted on this page that the normal rules of conduct on Wikipedia, including for instance site bans, do not apply on Jimbo's talk page, in one editor's words "it is a free fire zone". Is it indeed the case that there is a community consensus that User Talk:Jimbo Wales is and should be a special place where one can get away with anything? There is no policy or guideline to that effect that I am aware of.
3. Evidence required to support suspicions of malicious conduct by administrators. Black Kite suggests that administrators who use their tools relatively infrequently and who do not contribute to lengthy discussions on particular subjects should not take part in administrative actions in those areas. Is this the case? Again, this is something I cannot find existing guidance on. In the event that you believe there is a consensus in this area, at what length is an administrator required to post on a subject before, say, blocking someone to enforce an Arbcom ruling?
4. "Content contributors" and uncivil conduct. It is suggested in a number of discussions that it is really important for Wikipedia to retain people who have extensive content contributions even if their conduct is uncivil, aggressive, and generally destructive to the contributions of other editors. Essentially it is argued that there is a community consensus that certain policies (e.g. civility) may not apply to some editors who write lots of articles, or possibly particularly good articles. Is this the case?

Kind regards, The Land ( talk) 10:29, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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In true Der Process fashion, it appears the Kafkaesque result of EC discussing gender, (politely even), will be the desysopping of another female contributor. Bravo. Read NewyorkBrad again, fix idiotic process, lather, rinse, repeat. -- DHeyward ( talk) 10:56, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply

And ....

Read Newyorkbrad's addendum. Rinse. -- DHeyward ( talk) 04:54, 26 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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Just to observe that the process does not benefit from participants using minor edits to leave argumentative edit summaries. If anyone has something to contribute they should do so in their sections on this page. AnonNep ( talk) 11:51, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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I believe the Arbitration Enforcement process is dirty and that the actual problem implicit in this case is the fact that AE attracts vindictive personality types as a general rule and fosters battleground behavior. You wanna do something? Do something about that. This is, as Brad notes, part 95 in an ongoing soap opera between a circle of Wikipedians who feel Eric Corbett is emblematic, or even in the most shrill telling directly causal, of the gender gap and another circle of Wikipedians who accept the premise voiced most eloquently by Wehwalt that "We are here to build an encyclopedia, not sing Kumbaya, and this is a shop floor." Link. My sympathies lie with the latter perspective.

Kudos to the unblocking ex-administrator for making #95 a particularly ironic episode of our ongoing wikidrama. There is nothing for ArbCom to do here other than maybe resign en bloc as a fitting conclusion to their catastrophically bad year. Of course, it's already October and it takes them more than two months to do anything... Carrite ( talk) 13:52, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply

@ Doug Weller - "Of course this isn't the best time to be holding this case." — Ya think?!?!?!? You people are like a slow motion school bus rolling over a cliff... Carrite ( talk) 21:10, 27 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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I don't recall participating in an ArbCom case before, so I welcome the clerks to straighten me out. I don't have much intent on participating, outside of providing my unsolicited opinion on this matter:

1. Eric catches a disproportionate amount of flack, simply because he is Eric.
2. Eric gets a disproportionate amount of support when he catches said flack, for exactly the same reason.
3. There was a breach in sanctions.
4. There was cause for a breach in sanctions (one should be able to defend oneself).
5. The block was correct by the letter of the sanctions.
6. The unblock was ill-advised, but correct by the spirit of Wikipedia.
7. The desysop was correct by policy.
8. The desysop appears punitive rather than protective.

What I would like to see out of this:

• Return to status quo ante bullshit, where Eric is not blocked, and Yngvadottir is not desysoped. In my mind, both actions were justified, even if incorrect based on policy. I believe I read something about that somewhere.
• ArbCom take over future AE actions towards Eric. The community has proven time and time again that they cannot come to terms with handling this (see points 1 & 2). To my knowledge, none of his blocks have been so pressing that it needed to be done right now, lest the Wikipedia explode. I think waiting for ArbCom to act on a report to AE would be prudent, and it removes what Dennis (and others) have referred to as first to block advantage.
• I don't see any actions towards Kirill Lokshin as necessary, except perhaps suggesting he being a little less trigger happy with the block button next time. Or not... Whatever.

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Please accept this case.

The issues surrounding this case will repeat themselves ad infinitum unless and until Arb disposes of them firmly and finally and by remedies that can actually be enforced. Minor 4th 17:54, 25 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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Pursuing obvious misrepresentations, libels and scurrilous tittle-tattle in a BLP is a sanctionable offence and we also go to some lengths to accommodate reasonable concerns raised directly by BLP subjects. It seems that the same does not apply if the living person is Eric Corbett, for whom no article exists but who is a significant contributor here. One of the principles of WP:BLP is to protect the WMF etc from the legal issues of libel etc and I see no reason why the same legal issues are somehow irrelevant when they relate to a contributor rather than a subject. The "right to reply" is an absolute minimum courtesy in such situations and to deny it looks like the actions of a dystopian society with which I want no involvement.

The misrepresentations in this particular instance have been repeated time and again by a small band of shout-y people (Lightbreather, MarkBernstein etc), including in the recent thread on Jimbo's talk page. They should know it is false because they've been involved in discussions where this was pointed out. What I do not understand is that people are quick to remove and even oversight references/links etc that libel me (thank you) but the same courtesy is not applied to Eric Corbett. He is a far more worthy contributor to Wikipedia than I, as any fule knoe. - Sitush ( talk) 14:59, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply

@ Khazar2: the issue at hand has nothing to do with civility. I don't think anyone has suggested that the comments in question were even unreasonable, except in the context of a topic ban that relates to a different issue. You're hanging your hat in the wrong place, sorry. - Sitush ( talk) 00:37, 25 October 2015 (UTC) reply

Various calls are now being made for blocks/desysops/topic bans etc by people closely involved with resolving the perceived gender gap. This is turning into yet another attempt at censorship etc by the usual suspects. Please don't make this thing any broader in scope than is absolutely necessary. - Sitush ( talk) 19:20, 25 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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I've been watching this case from afar, except for a brief comment in the Wales talk page on the Atlantic article, because I've become interested in how Arbcom interacts with admins and whether Arbcom is a good mechanism for desysopping or otherwise dealing with admins. This case has some complications and subtleties, chief among them that Eric Corbett is a real-life name, and evidently he feels ill-treated by an Atlantic article. If that is the case, then he should take it up with the Atlantic. However, what is bothersome is that he cannot here, where he "dwells" so to speak, offer any kind of reply. Not on Jimbo's talk page and not even on his own user page. That bothers me a great deal. True, he appears to have possibly violated his topic ban. Also the "c--t" diff I've seen here does indicate that this person, while using his real name, also doesn't seem deterred by that from making stupid comments on-wiki. But I think it was ham-handed for this admin Kiril to come in and block him, and I believe that User:Yngvadottir was right to unblock. I have no opinion on the underlying issues except that apparently other people were also treated badly. So now we have another. Maybe there will be more. Wikipedia efficiency at its best. Coretheapple ( talk) 16:03, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply

Just to add, to be perfectly clear: Desysopping or otherwise penalizing User:Yngvadottir in any way whatsoever would be absurd. I favor making it easier to desysop admins, but that is clearly not warranted in this instance. I agree with Mongo and Jehochman below. Coretheapple ( talk) 16:35, 25 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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Amend to: All AE blocks should only be implemented after an AE report. Only sitting arbitrators will perform AE blocks. The committee needs to take the helm in these matters. While surely they are busy enough with cases, members of the committee are elected only after undergoing a rigorous vetting and are generally esteemed to have been placed on the committee due to achieving a high level of trust. Henceforth, any overturn of a committee member blocking an editor after an AE report would lead to an immediate desysop.-- MONGO 22:50, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply

Jehochman is spot on. Of course Corbett had a right to correct any information which was defamatory. It's recognized he also made comments in addition that violated his topic ban which, while blockable, should have been let off with a reminder/warning and those edits could have been removed. Instead, all his comments were removed and he was blocked. That is excessive zeal.-- MONGO 04:35, 25 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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The extensive efforts arbcom and the community have made to avoid site banning Eric have resulted in months of problems and enormous amounts of disruption. Lesser restrictions have resulted in intentional and frequent breaching experiments. Rather than appreciate the efforts to keep him here he consistently creates drama after drama.

He is not stupid, he is very much aware when he is about to do something that gets him back into trouble. He does not seem to mind that those who try to help him get themselves in trouble. He takes the path a maximum drama. Every time it happens people get a bit more jaded about the project, and on more than on occasion we lose an admin or an editor leaves.

How much are we going to let the project be damaged to help this person stay if they are not willing to work with us? At what point does the community come before Eric? HighInBC 23:39, 24 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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Eric Corbett is not the problem. He's just an editor who has his pluses and minuses, like everybody else. The problem is the editors who want to subvert or change Wikipedia's processes to accommodate him, and harass or attempt to desysop anyone who even suggests that he be held to the same standards as everyone else. For all the blather here about Jimbo's talk page being some kind of 'safe space' exempt from the rules, it's clear this is an ad hoc justification just for Corbett. No one is calling for justice for Mark Bernstein or anyone else sanctioned in exactly the same manner, because those other editors aren't popular and they don't have loud friends willing to harass, intimidate, or self-immolate on their behalf. They want one rule for one person, and one rule for everyone else. We don't change the rules to suit the howling mob, no matter who they are. We didn't do it for the Scientologists or the Gamergaters, and we shouldn't do it here.

Any admin like Kirill Lokshin who is willing to make a tough, unpopular call that he or she knows will result in a torrent of abuse should be commended, even if the decision is not one we agree with. The Committee should note this in a finding of fact. The other editors, especially the administrators, should be ashamed of their juvenile response to this and should remember there are ample processes with which to register their disagreement in a civil and mature manner.

The behavior of Black Kite in this manner leaves much to be desired, including calling Kirill Lokshin " a complete fucking idiot" and implying that Lokshin, Gorilla Warfare, and Keilana are engaged in some kind of plot based on zero evidence. This is, of course, not the first time that Black Kite has attempted to subvert the enforcement of the Committee's sanctions against Corbett. The Committee should decide whether or not this behavior is compatible with the role of administrator. Gamaliel ( talk) 01:55, 25 October 2015 (UTC) reply

Update: In the greater scheme of things, Eric Corbett himself is not particularly disruptive. He crosses the line, he is sanctioned, he grumbles a bit, and accepts his punishment without socking or tying up the appeals process in a disruptive manner. Outside of the initial offense, in some respects this is model behavior. The real problem is his hardcore fan base who insists that Corbett never be held accountable and disrupts every attempt to do so. If we remove this problem, Corbett is just another editor. The Committee should:

• Topic ban the worst offenders from the matter of Corbett's sanctions or pass discretionary sanctions allowing admins to do so.
• Mandate that any retaliatory attempt to desysop admins for sanctioning Corbett be brought to the Committee itself and not other forums like ANI.

Those unable to distinguish between harassment and dissent may complain about censorship, etc., but it is actually quite easy to tell the difference. For example, one could look for the phrase "a complete fucking idiot". Gamaliel ( talk) 15:29, 27 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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1. No articles were damaged in this incident. It should have been handled more slowly and thoughtfully.
2. We are presently engaged in self destructive fighting, navel gazing, and rule enforcement for sake of exercising power. (Kiril, I'm looking at you, and you Salvio, and you Thryduulf.) Please stop this cycle of provocation and response. You can't control what Eric does, but you can avoid acting like ninnies in response.
3. Eric has the right to respond to attacks on his character. Basic human decency trumps any topic ban. Lightbreather found a proxy to attack Eric for his activities on Wikipedia. He had every right to defend himself at an appropriate venue such as Jimmy's talk page, where Eric's name was mentioned and he was pinged.
4. If you want to be more welcoming to female editors, don't desysop them for no good reason. In this case, there was no urgency to take the action against Y'daughter. (Don't make me spell her username). Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you must do it. Try to be more tuned in to subtleties. You arbitrators dither around for months on most cases. Why leap before looking on this one?
5. If you ban Eric, the editors who have been hounding and baiting him will simply turn to another target and the problem will relocate . This wasn't the incident that should get Eric banned. There were chances to ban him, but those are water under the bridge.
6. The current system is biased in favor of action. To prevent this bias, binding arbitration enforcement actions must be the result of a complaint lodged at WP:AE and decided by a patrolling admin (not one summoned there by a party looking for a sympathetic hearing). If an admin does an action prior to filing a report, that action should be considered a normal admin action, subject to possible reversal. One cannot simply state "arbitration enforcement" to become invincible. One must actually follow the arbitration enforcement process. Public posting of complaints enhances transparency. We can see who complained, and why, and who is looking into the matter and how much time they spend investigating, and if a decision of "no action" is made, it is binding.
7. I have left Kirill my thoughts, and hope he will support Yngvadottir, even though they disagreed. Admins have to try to get along because we set the example for other editors. If somebody wrongs you, don't retaliate, try to extend the olive branch.

What exactly does the committee hope to do here? If Eric wants to appeal, he can. If he's stubborn and won't, too bad. If Yngvadottir wants to appeal or go to RFA, she can. I don't see anything you can do right now that will make things better, but I see a lot of things you could do to make things worse by cementing grudges and badwill. Please reject this case. Jehochman ^Talk 20:38, 27 October 2015 (UTC) reply

The above is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

I urge the Committee not to take this case.

Everything that the Committee has done related to this matter has only made the situation worse. someone has so frightened the admin corps that nobody else will step up to the plate? That someone is the Committee. It was the Committee that desysopped me for blocking over this comment, which I misconstrued as a personal attack. It was the Committee that accorded Eric a special exalted status in that case, which it reaffirmed in subsequent cases. It was the Committee that declared that it would decide cases on their political merits, so if you can command enough votes, you can secure the outcome you want.

The Committee redrafted the definition of wheel warring to include administrator action without consulting the original admin. Thus, Yngvadottir wheel-warred, in addition to deliberately violating the procedure for appeals of arbitration sanctions. Given prior case history, she would have had every reason to suppose that the Committee would let her off, as it has done with so many others.

Nonetheless, I do not feel that the desysopping is appropriate. There is no way for her to regain her editing privileges, as an RfA would become a referendum on the Committee, due to the Committee's own actions. Hawkeye7 ( talk) 06:44, 25 October 2015 (UTC) reply

The Committee should not take this case. You will only make fools of yourselves. Again. Hawkeye7 ( talk) 02:46, 25 October 2015 (UTC) reply

@ Jehochman: Per WP:NOTFORUM, Wikipedia is not an appropriate venue to respond to defend yourself against off-Wiki attacks. Hawkeye7 ( talk) 06:44, 25 October 2015 (UTC) reply

@ Courcelles: I've heard that one of the definitions of insanity is repeating the same process in the expectation of a different outcome. Hawkeye7 ( talk) 02:32, 26 October 2015 (UTC) reply

@ Viriditas: Which infamous incident are you referring to? this one? Or this one? Or perhaps this one? Hawkeye7 ( talk) 07:04, 26 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

I'm hoping that "may" rather than "should" in "If however, in the opinion of an uninvolved administrator, Eric Corbett does engage in prohibited conduct, he may be blocked". and "as necessary" in "An uninvolved admin may - impose blocks as necessary." Means we may enforce topic ban breaches if we think it merited. Not that every breach merits a block. Clearly some disagree with me, and Kirill thinks of himself as one of the few willing to do what others are frightened to do. For the record I saw that discussion unfolding, and saw no need to sanction Corbett, in fact I thought his response very reasonable. This is a general arbitration enforcement issue. Could Arbcom please rule whether admins should use judgement before blocking, or whether "may" means "must".

Our current system doesn't lend itself to admins indicating they have decided an action is unneeded, so we don't know if other admins similarly declined to act. We could upbundle blocks and unblocks of editors who have >thousand edits to the bureaucrats.

The gendergap mess needs revisiting. Your GamerGate decision and the reporting of it leaves uncertainty re how much rope misogynists get.

As a community we mishandle off wiki issues. Atlantic despite thrice correcting themselves still say Arbcom didn't sanction the harasser to avoid outing him. You actually said "The functionaries team reviewed evidence submitted about off-wiki sexual harassment of Lightbreather, but was unable to reach a consensus over whether or not it was sufficient to connect a Wikipedia editor to the harassment. - functionaries and the Arbitration Committee also reviewed evidence of a separate, apparently unrelated, pattern of off-wiki harassment. As there was conclusive evidence of the identity of the perpetrator of the second series of events, User:Two kinds of pork was blocked." The community, Arbcom and editors such as Eric need better ways of liaising with the press. In this particular case Arbcom should now affirm Thryduulf's comment in that case with a statement such as:

Arbcom regrets that its decision in the Lightbreather case not to sanction a suspect due to lack of evidence that they were the harasser has been misreported as prioritising a harasser's privacy over the need to stop harassment. We take harassment seriously and had we been able to conclusively connect the perpetrator to a Wikipedia account action would of course have been taken.

A simpler issue from this saga is the rule that if you are going to do a bad block make it a sufficiently bad block to drive the blocked editor away. Arbcom needs to reverse that and allow anyone to appeal bad blocks. Of course only a blocked editor can commit to change their behaviour.

Technically you have justification to desysop Yngvadottir, but that would be an overreaction. It is within your power to merely trout or admonish. If anyone merits admonishment it is Black Kite for this.

The above is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

It seems like only yesterday that ArbCom concluded Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Arbitration enforcement. That case was explicitly set up in order to specify the "ground rules" for subsequent cases, and this is exactly such a subsequent case. The way to clarity here is to remember that recent decision, and to use it as a template. I helped you craft that decision (yes, you are welcome), and it was crafted carefully. It will seriously harm the dispute resolution process at Wikipedia if ArbCom second-guesses that earlier decision now.

I see two questions before you now. The first is whether Kirill's block was right or wrong, partly in the absence of what was characterized in the previous decision about a consensus of uninvolved administrators (and not of editors who have already taken "sides"!) at AE. There was nothing that precludes a single administrator from making an enforcement unilaterally, but editors above have raised reasonable arguments on both sides of the question of whether the block was the best available choice. I don't know what the right answer is, but you should try to express it via motion, much in the way that the previous decision presented things in terms of "optimal" or "suboptimal", but without rising to the level of considering sanctions.

The second question is about the overturn of the block. You already did what you needed to do, per the previous ground rules. That's not to say that there weren't good reasons to reconsider the block, but the ground rules make it clear that administrators warring over block-unblock renders AE dysfunctional; the concerns could instead have been raised as a request for clarification. Please do not give the editors who have picked sides a forum to relitigate it via a full case. You can deal with all of this via motion. -- Tryptofish ( talk) 17:19, 25 October 2015 (UTC) reply

I'm seeing calls to de-sysop Black Kite. ArbCom, please don't go there. The previous case made a correct finding about Black Kite, and you should not de-sysop anyone for subsequently expressing opinions, nor (and here, I am especially sensitive right now) for being a filing party. -- Tryptofish ( talk) 19:16, 25 October 2015 (UTC) reply

I think that Gamaliel's novel idea that he labeled "Update", is a particularly good one, in the event that you decide to treat this as a full case instead of as motions. Of course, that would require some careful work on revising the list of parties. -- Tryptofish ( talk) 18:10, 27 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

Not really a statement, just some random thoughts, observations and rhetoric in no real chronological order.

• It's claimed Wikipedia has a gender gap
• Evidence suggests that Wikipedia does have a gender gap.
• Some of the more militant female editors decided to brief a journalist to promote the gender gap.
• When talking to the journalist, they focused too much on one individual, Eric Corbett, and not enough on generalities
• The journalist was not paying much attention and littered the article with errors.
• The women chose to ignore the errors, thinking the article marvellous as it hit their perceived adversary hard.
• The article was then promoted on Wikipedia's most high profile page.
• It is widely known that Corbett is forbidden to respond.
• Taking advantage of this, the page owner, Arbs, Admins and the foundation allowed the article littered with errors to remain and be debated ad nauseum
• To hype the vitriol on Corbett, a female Arb relates her own experiences of sexual discrimination on Wikipedia - Sad though it is, little of it is connected with Eric Corbett.
• Unsurprisingly, Corbett responds - quite mildly.
• Out of literally nowhere, comes an Admin closely connected with both the Arbcom and Foundation and blocks Corbett for a Draconian period.
• A much respected female Admin unblocks him.
• The respected female admin is desysopped in double quick time.
• A large number of editors of both sexes from all schools and faculties of the project smell a rat and don't like it.
• We now have lots of shrieking and shouting because the militant women are even crosser because most thinking male and female editors are smelling that rat.
• An attempt to promote the Gender Gap has been clumsily and unskillfully handled and it's now pretty obvious to all.
• Now, Corbett and the rest of us must pay the price for a monumental cock up with this time wasting exercise to save the reputation of a group we are supposed to respect - a group Jimbo and the Foundation are keen to promote.
• Who's on trial here? A group, a theory, an ideal, a Wikipedia Promotion or a single individual editor?
• Who is supposed to be the winner here? We've already lost a good female Admin - how is any of this helping the cause?

I offer no solution to the Gender Gap, but the aggressive targeting of one individual is unlikely to solve the problem or be beneficial to the project. Giano (talk) 17:51, 25 October 2015 (UTC) reply

@ User:MarkBernstein: Sensible people only have contact with the press for their birth, marriage and death. People who play with fire invariably get burnt; anyone who thinks giving an interview to a reporter is a sure-fire way of promoting their cause is very naive indeed. Giano (talk) 14:11, 26 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

1) Kirill is an ex-arb, known for exercising excellent and judicious judgement. I seriously doubt he consulted anyone prior to blocking Eric, although I would expect he reviewed Eric's previous violations of his arbcom sanctions in making a call about whether or not to block according to both the current situation, Eric's past blocks under the remedies previously passed, and Eric's statement that he DGAF about the sanctions. I'm sure Kirill also spoke to a large part of the uninvolved admin corps about whether or not they would be willing to possibly action Eric, given that their unwillingness to for fear of the storm it would generate was one of his cited reasons for getting involved.

2) It's unfortunatey Yngva got desysoppped, but she knew her move would get her desysopped. Besides general understanding that reversing an AE block out of process = desysop. She posted a long mostly retirement message several months ago, and intentionally jumped on a desysop grenade knowing what she was doing because she disagreed with Kirill. This is an inappropriate action taken by a mostly retired user, and her level 2 desysop was absolutely appropriate. Besides the last AC case reinforcing this, it was even explictly reaffirmed in a recent AC case.

3) If arbcom accepts this case, it should only be to examine the behavior of Black Kite as expressed in this diff and many others. The way Black Kite has acted is incompatible with his duties as an ENWP administrator, and if the case is accepted I'd hope the end result would be BK stripped of his tools, and the behavior of all other users launching inappropriate attacks be examined for appropriate sanctions, such as Giano here and elsewhere, including literally the section directly above mine.

4) I can see no other reason to take this case, and think that most issues I see (Black Kite, Giano, Eric) can be handled by motion.

5) Kirill's enforcement of an arb remedy without going to AE would be utterly uncontroversial except for the fact that it involved Eric. It's well established that individual admins can enforce arb remedies without going to AE, and there's no doubt that Eric violated his restriction. I suspect Kirill would have handled the issue differently if Eric had not already violated his sanctions so incredibly often, and if Eric clearly did not understand he was violating them again. For those pointing towards legal issues: obviously WMF legal has final say, but having interacted with a lot of lawyers about related issues recently (and I'm in the same jurisdiction they are) - California recognizes no legal right of response, and the US doesn't recognize defamation decisions from countries like the UK whose defamation laws differ very significantly from our own. Under California law, Eric would be considered at least a limited public figure in this context and to successfully sue for defamation would have to prove actual malice against whoever he was suing - that is, that the allegedly defamatory statement was not only factually incorrect, but that whoever repeated it either actively knew it was false or acted with reckless disreguard as to it's truth or falsity, and that they were not protected by any privilege. WMF would be isolated from any direct claims by the Communications Decency Act.

Best, Kevin Gorman ( talk) 18:41, 25 October 2015 (UTC) reply

• I'd request a brief word limit extension on my statement - mostly because of point #5 of my statement. The second half of point #5 of my statement relates to legal issues brought up by multiple other commenters here. I've had multiple meetings unrelated to Wikimedia events with at least two groups of California-based lawyers (the likely jurisdiction where most potential claims would be adjucated) that had to deal in part with exactly the type of claims (like a legal right of response on the part of Eric) that have been suggested by multiple other people here, and feel that it's significant that arbcom understands the state of the law in California and in the US. My statement (minus this request for more words, which Amortias pointed to as the way to request additional space on-wiki with my further edits is still under 600 words. Obviously arbcom can also try to consult WMF legal, but their response is both likely to be limited to WMF-only concerns, and the material in #5 is of interest not only to arbcom, but also to other community members. Kevin Gorman ( talk) 17:28, 26 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

== It now appears to be ok for someone blocked by Arbcom to attack editors via an inaccurate and wildly one-sided article in the "media" and for links to be strewn on high-profile pages but not ok for editors to defend themselves, even politely, on Wikipedia. I note that a link to the attack is now " advertised" on the gendergap page, and archived so it isn't lost. At the very least it should be removed as a personal attack. Damage is being done to the encyclopedia's reputation but not by Eric Corbett. J3Mrs ( talk) 19:06, 25 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

Can this place turn even further into a fucking joke than it is now? Let's just keep desysoping good admins cause... rules... or something. That's a couple in about a month now right? An African American man who faced a racist attack and a woman making a stand because she knows the bizarre meme that EC is somehow the face of misogyny on WP is so much bullshit. It's my understanding that ArbCom exists to aid the community in resolving intractable conflicts. It's now simply a rule creating committee that creates more issues than it fixes because of some need to find a sanction for every party to a case whether it's in the best interest of WP or not. The EC sanction during the GGTF case was stupid on its face. It came about solely due to the undirected use of the word cunt even though there was no preventative need for the sanction. The conflict was long over (especially given ArbCom takes months to do anything) and the "disruption" used as an excuse was literally just someone disagreeing with other editors claims.

Now we're here. EC gets lambasted in national media as, once again, the face of misogyny on WP. Someone who generally works with more women editors than 90% of the people commenting here. Do you people get that? National media calling you the reason the gender gap exists. An article a sitting Arb contributed to. The same Arb that wanted EC banned in the GGTF case. And then he's blocked by an admin who appears out of the ether to make their first block in a year. Yeah, everything looks kosher there. The saddest thing about all this? Everyone here, everyone on Jimbo's page, if they had some class should have come to EC's defense for being horribly misrepresented on a national level. But, no, it was just an opportunity for many to finish the misguided job they started. The funniest, and saddest, thing about all this is I've watched Eric and his supposed "fan club's" interactions with people since I presented evidence at the GGTF case because I was curious if they were as bad as they were portrayed. Are they brusque? At times. They're also open to any input on the article they're trying improve, ip, man, woman, whatever, and they're willing to review what any random editor asks them too. In other words none of them seem to be the face of what's causing the gender gap.

But, hey whatever, stupid rules must be obeyed and common sense need not be applied. Battle lines have long been drawn. The irony that a woman admin is one of the casualties has already been elucidated. Capeo ( talk) 19:50, 25 October 2015 (UTC) reply

Yes, Reso, we'll be back here in a month when a national publication makes a completely false accusation about you. At that point I just expect you just take those lies about you "like a man" and just suck it up. Capeo ( talk) 23:45, 25 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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• Preemptively removing my previous post, just in case it is considered soapboxing. — Ched :  ?  15:44, 28 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

I wasn't going to comment here fearing that I would be brought to ANI for speaking out against Eric, but I just cant sit here and watch this unfold like it is. What bothers me is this over and over assertion that Wikipedia is going to self-destruct without Eric Corbett, that this one editor is the pillar that unites everyone. He has been blocked for behavior problems again, and again, and again so why are there still issues? Eric is not the problem as so many have said, in my opinion I feel he is a grown adult that can speak for him-self. Admins avoid issues that have to do with Eric as Kirill has mentioned all because of a group of editors. They tell others to "Stay out of it" and that "He is one of our greatest contributers" whenever a problem comes up. As for the GGTF, had Eric stayed on topic defending himself he most likely would not have been blocked, evidence presented has shown that he knew he was wading into trouble. - Knowledgekid87 ( talk) 21:03, 25 October 2015 (UTC) reply

@ Viriditas: If I were to visit another country, and knew a word in my language was taboo there I wouldn't use it. It isn't a culture issue, it comes down to respecting others. - Knowledgekid87 ( talk) 02:26, 26 October 2015 (UTC) reply

@ Salvio giuliano: I don't know if you have kept track but so far every admin who has given Eric a block from as little as 48 hours has been blasted by a handful of editors. This is normal in some cases, but in this case I feel the committee should look into if it crosses the excessive line. - Knowledgekid87 ( talk) 12:01, 26 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

I agree with this statement by Arbitrator Courcelles, who pointed out: "It is our job to sort through such messes, what happened in last year's GGTF case is clearly doing absolutely nothing but increasing the drama all around."

It is clear the prior Arbitration case, Interactions at GGTF, did not resolve the ongoing issues.

— Cirt ( talk) 22:25, 25 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

EC is topic banned from pages related to the GGTF. EC (once again) violates this ban by engaging in a discussion thread about an article directly related to the GGTF. With any other editor, this is an open and shut AE block. But because it is EC, his enablers come out of the woodwork to once again argue that yet another blatant breach was only "technical" and that Wikipedia's policies should not apply to him. Once again, ArbCom is presented the opportunity to take the one action that will end this drama once and for all. Alas I suspect that, once again, ArbCom will abandon its duty. Rinse, repeat, see you all in a few months. Reso lute 23:08, 25 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

It is worth noting that editors that are often at odds with each other seem to be aligning here. There are principles and ideals which are strived for and then there are legalisms. Two things seem to have happened here, 1) principles and ideals were not met which lead to 2) the letter of the law not being met. Actually there are multiple instances of principles and ideals not being met in this case; I would say upholding those principles and ideals are more important than legalism. IAR. ForbiddenRocky ( talk) 00:51, 26 October 2015 (UTC) reply

The attitude shown in the quote "This is a mess, caused by the community, once again, collectively being incapable of acting in mature fashion regarding Eric Corbett, and it is up to us to clean up such messes." from User:Thryduulf is actually part of the problem. The problem is in part that the Arbcomm solution was not very good. ForbiddenRocky ( talk) 15:08, 27 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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Good block. The sanctions against swearing at, insulting, belittling, etc. are working: his behaviour in that regard has vastly improved. Just keep escalating the blocks per those existing remedies. The ban on discussing the gender gap is working too. He has nothing but denialist trolling to add to that discussion. I'd like to see you apply that ban to a few others.

Ignore him and the Greek chorus. Really. Do that and Eric stays - with the occasional holiday - relatively well-behaved and productive. Don't let your irritability at having this thrown back to you affect your judgment. Don't let him waste another minute of your time. The remedies you put in place are working exactly as they should. -- Anthonyhcole ( talk · contribs · email) 01:25, 26 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

I guess I might be involved. After Eric's block, I removed all of his comments from Jimbo's talk page, under the banned-means-banned principle. I don't know if someone restored them afterwards and frankly don't care.

I don't frequent drama boards much, but every single time I've looked at one, Eric Corbett's name has been there. If an editor can't avoid constant drama, they shouldn't be here.

I'm not watchlisting this crap, so let me know if I need to respond to something. Oiyarbepsy ( talk) 01:31, 26 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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I am not a member of the EC cabal nor do I interact with EC all that much. I will say this, however: Lightbreather was impossible to work with, and I doubt she ever successfully collaborated with any editor in any article improvement process (DYK/GA/FA). She was stubborn, exemplified IDHT in all its forms, and often misrepresented simple matters of fact and created drama to support her misconceptions. The infamous C-incident is one of many examples. Although I know little to nothing about the specifics, I do know that the US and the UK use the word differently, hence the original problem. I personally believe that the gender gap is a real issue that needs to be addressed, but it needs to be done with a fuller understanding of the global, cultural baggage at its root, for which no single editor is to blame. Yes, EC needs to work on his civility, as do we all. Viriditas ( talk) 01:40, 26 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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The following is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

First of all, I generally agree with the comments of NYB above. I have commented on Jimbo's talk page from time to time, and have read several of the threads there relevant to this case, but not posted in those threads. I can't recall ever interacting with EC.

1. EC's comments do appear to be a technical violation of his topic ban, but that indicates that the ban was overly-widely drawn and should be modified.
2. The block was not discussed at AE, and was in response to reasonable, measured comments, which would not be even mildly objectionable if not for the topic ban.
3. Posters on Jimbo's talk page had mentioned and in some cases endorsed negative comments about EC from the Atlantic article, some of which are at least arguably inaccurate. I feel that EC had at least a moral right of reply. Given that the page in question is a de facto public forum, he may have a legal right of reply, and denying this might lead to legal jeopardy for the WMF. (Struck because I appear to have been incorrect on this point.)
4. I have not been involved in AE blocking, but had someone asked me to look at EC's edits I would have done so, without fear of his "clique". I suspect many other admins would have also.
5. I think the block and how it was handled showed poor judgement, and while I do not endorese the unblock, I can understand it.

I urge the committee to take this case and address several issues:

• Given that Jimbo's talk is a forum, WP:NOTFORUM notwithstanding, should topic bans apply differently there?
• Should admins be expected to discuss controversial AE blocks before making them?
• Should there be a way to appeal blocks and restrictions on behalf of another?

This need not have happened. DES ^(talk) 03:23, 26 October 2015 (UTC) reply

@ Kevin Gorman: "I'm sure Kirill also spoke to a large part of the uninvolved admin corps about whether or not they would be willing to possibly action Eric..." I am a fairly active admin of late (thought not with AE), and have never been involved with Eric in any way. Neither Kirill nor anyone spoke with me about this. I rather doubt that any wide discussion with "the uninvolved admin corps" occurred. DES ^(talk) 23:55, 26 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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Whether this case is accepted or not, I hope the committee will seriously consider a modest modification to Eric Corbett's restriction. I think the restriction was imposed upon the belief that gender gap discussions, often contentious by themselves, could get derailed if he contributed. The goal, I believe, was to make sure that Eric did not interject his own opinions into those discussions. I hope we can all agree that if such a discussion is occurring, and someone chooses to discuss Eric Corbett, especially when done in a disparaging and inaccurate way, it is manifestly unfair to insist that he cannot defend himself simply because the discussion involves the gender gap. It would be best if all editors refrain from bringing him up in such discussions, but if they do so, I think we should craft an exception which allows him to respond.

I recognize the potential for gameplaying; some friend (or enemy) might invoke his name just to give him a chance to contribute. I trust the clever wordsmiths can find a way to create a legitimate exception without creating a massive loophole.-- S Philbrick (Talk) 15:26, 26 October 2015 (UTC) reply

The above is a preliminary statement exempt from evidence length limits. Please do not modify it, except to delete some or all of your own statement. Further evidence should be added in a new level 3 subsection.

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At what point does a user's tendency to become a magnet for drama/disruption outweigh their "good work" to the encyclopedia? I assert that the editor who was blocked leading to this case has long passed the point in which their good works outweigh the disruption that is either caused by them or is induced by taking action against them. Those editors enabling the blocked editor (by being apologists, hounding editors/administrators/Arbitrators/Jimbo, questioning viewpoints to the point of deliberately breaking AGF) should take a step back and ask themselves if these actions were taken by annother editor behind the Veil of ignorance (i.e. judging only the content of the disputed edits), would they still voice the same support? I do not need to be, nor do I wish to be, involved in future updates to this case as I will be observing from the visitors gallery. Hasteur ( talk) 15:31, 26 October 2015 (UTC) reply

With respect to Littleolive oil, your claim that Yngvadottir acted within the spirit of Wikipedia is beyond the reasonable limits of good faith. Getting an arbitration case accepted takes a significant amount of prior conduct dispute resolution to have taken place, and on top of that you have to convince the committee that there is cause for restricting a user from specific actions (or topics), on top of this specific user's restriction (which has been re-affirmed in follow ups), on top of the user knowing very well that prior to his block he was dancing a hairs breadth away from violating his sanctions, on top of the block being clearly marked as Arbitration remedy enforcement, Yngvadottir should have known (as Administrators are supposed to know policy prior to taking action) that reversing an Arb Enforcement block absent a successful appeal approved by the committee and absent an appeal presented at ArbEnforcement is grounds for immediate desysopping for cause. Would it have been better if Kirill had warned EC about their comment, sure but how many warnings do we have to give the same user who knew that their commentary was already in danger of getting them sanctioned. Hasteur ( talk) 18:48, 26 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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Some thought:

Kirill acted within the letter of the law.

Yngvadottir acted within the spirit of Wikipedia, a fundamentally collaborative community.

Admins are not bots. As long as we have single admins making judgements we will have a disparity between what some think is correct action and what others believe to be appropriate. Admins unlike bots are capable of deep thinking, of subtle discrimination. We should never expect them to think and act alike, although this is often what happens when we say, "so and so should have known".

None of it is wrong or right when the admin is acting honestly. All of it is based on the subjective nature of each individual

Had Kirill talked to Eric and warned him, had Eric been able to voice his concerns to Kirill, had Yngvadottir felt she could talk with and discuss her concerns with Kirill; I doubt we'd be here now. People have to assume good faith and talk to each other.

The desysoping of an admin with no past record of overturning blocks was hasty and ill thought out per the spirit of Wikjpedia although, perhaps not per the letter of its law.

I doubt this is arbitration material except that there should be clarifications on whether Jimbo's talk page is a "safe" zone for banned editors, and whether editors have a right to defend themselves at least with a single statement. Admonishments all around for not talking it out.

Wikipedia despite our "assume good faith standards" and "we are not punitive" talk, actually functions on a judge and punish punitive model where wrongs are seldom forgotten and improvements ignored, where a single admin's responsibilities and powers have evolved way beyond what is reasonable for any single human being...with no reflection on any admin here. Its easy to identify diffs where, without context we can convict editors of wrong doing while much harder to identify the behaviours such as assumptive accusations, blatant attempts to remove other editors through baiting and traps, vindictiveness, off and on Wikipedia stalking and harassment, and much more that works away insidiously at the integrity of a collaborative environment

I would prefer Arbitration to work on issues that are are so deep seated we can't even see them anymore, to restructure our model and paradigms for DR rather than deal with this particular situation.

Give Yngvadottir her tools back and suggest she notify the blocking admin and talk to him, next time, notify Kirill that while right, suggest there were other ways of dealing with the issues given the circumstances, tell Eric he has improved per the civility of his comments, but to be careful, then move on to more pressing issues. The encyclopedia will not fall apart if we reduce the mountain to the mole hill it actually is. In fact, those who have despaired at the way WP is moving may feel relief and even return. ( Littleolive oil ( talk) 18:16, 26 October 2015 (UTC)) reply

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I have been asked to edit this statement down because it was too long. A reasonable request, but the 500-word limit might have been easier to enforce if it had been added to the pagenotice and stated prominently. So I'll just reduce my argument to bullet points:

• I endorse NewYorkBrad's remarks entirely.
• The block was within reason
• The committee should take seriously Brad's suggestion that no remedy should include an automatic desysopping for unilaterally reversing enforcement actions; instead consider it on a case-by-case basis, as it seems to have done here.
• There are some issues here apart from the administrative actions that the committee should consider:
  • The status of Jimbo's talk page. To what extent does policy apply there? What does Jimbo prefer? If he expresses no preference, what would best reflect the community's views?
  • The suggested amendment to the GGTF decision allowing an administrator to simply redact the offending comments without a block should be given serious consideration.

I have moved my original, longer statement to my userspace. Daniel Case ( talk) 03:44, 27 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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It is fairly clear that the regulation of the community was, once again, dysfunctional in these events.

1. Providing a "journalist" with unbalanced material with which to attack the Wikipedia community
2. Supporting the poorly written, error filled, article as an expose - the errors being classed as irrelevant, the story being the thing.
3. Hasty blocking from Kirill, who has a track record of not examining things in any depth.
4. An unwise (but principled) unblock from Yngvadottir.

The common theme is a blinkered approach. Let's examine the results and see why this is bad:

1. The entire community is branded as "hostile to women".
2. A wedge is driven into the community - those who feel attacked by being told that "if they care they should resign", those who feel civility and harassment problems are being ignored, and those who feel alienated by the whole battleground that has been created.
3. A new episode of the eternal saga. Creation of moral dilemma for other admins. Propagation of the idea that behind the scenes machinations are the Wikipedia norm.
4. A (most unreasonable) de-sysopping. A huge amount of potential wasted time on another go-round at ArbCom. Yet more division.

Can we not simply agree that the Atlantic article is a huge mess, that the vast majority of active Wikipedians want to and generally do edit co-operatively, that controversial blocks and unblocks should be made after discussion?

All the best: Rich  Farmbrough, 20:22, 26 October 2015 (UTC). reply

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Really, gender gap or not, this could have been headed off a lot sooner if we took our civility standards seriously. My wife worked in a shipyard, and I worked in a warehouse for a while, and we both know that a "shop floor" standard of civility is just not good enough. We need a "front office" standard, where it is not considered appropriate to make catcalls, throw around profanity and insults (sexist or otherwise), and otherwise engage in adolescent hostile behavior that is par for the course in male-dominated lower class workplaces hidden from public view.

Be that as it may, if ARBCOM isn't going to establish such a standard (which I rather doubt is within their purview), there's not a lot of reason for them to amplify this dramafest. Mangoe ( talk) 20:53, 26 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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Seriously people. What's so hard about this:

1. If you're an arbitrator, you shouldn't be going around commenting off-wiki about on-wiki issues. You can always quit being an arb and then comment all you want. That would be the ethical thing to do.
2. If you haven't blocked anyone for donkey's years, don't dive into a contentious block. People will wonder, and the base rate probability that something is not quite kosher in the state of Denmark is extremely high. And, if you do dive into the block, try not to be too high minded with talk about spineless admins when you do. It doesn't take a lot of backbone to block someone when there are no consequences. Try unblocking someone instead. That takes real courage.
3. The law is sometimes an ass. The whole point of that phrase is that there are situations where rigid and mindless application of the law is not a great idea. No amount of 'valid and proper' excuses is going to change the fact that the masses can see that justice has gone one way while the law has gone the other way. It is disappointing that our chosen ones are unable to see that.
4. Sorry arbs. You're not going to be able to fix this one however hard you try. Just let it go. That's what you should have done when yngvadottir unblocked. That's what you should have done when confronted with the original arb case instead of throwing prohibitions around. I wasn't paying attention but banning people from talking about gender issues - whatever side they may be on - what were you thinking? But it looks like you're going to try to fix the unfixable anyway. So good luck. -- regentspark ( comment) 01:52, 27 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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I am not an Eric Corbett "fan" (we have never interacted), nor a member of any faction. We are all supposed to assume good faith and treat each other with respect, even those with a history of foolish behaviour. As others have noted (particularly Cullen328), Eric took care to avoid breaching his restrictions, even under exceptionally trying circumstances. Since he was blocked for breaching them anyway, I can understand some frustration. I have seen at least one other mistaken block overturned without any subsequent drama; in this case I don't think there was any need (urgent or otherwise) for any desysop or block.

Despite errors in its detail, the Atlantic article points out that Wikipedia needs to improve its atmosphere of hostility. Punishment of the innocent is not the answer. Burninthruthesky ( talk) 08:33, 27 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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Yes, the committee should take on this case in order to clear up the unholy mess they created in the first place. This whole problem was created by the sanctions applied to Eric Corbett by the Arbs presiding over the GGTF case. New York Brad — the only Arb that shows any integrity — suggested that Eric should be just banned from the GGTF pages, which would have sorted out the perceived problem. Unfortunately, other members of the committee weren't satisfied with that and wanted to take things further and stop EC from ever mentioning the GGTF again.

Richerman (talk) 11:17, 27 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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Aaaaaaaand, this is why I stick to cleaning up at WP:BADAFD. I fully endorse and support Newyorkbrad's statements, above, as well as the addendum, and would incorporate them herein by reference, if it were proper to do so. And while I agree that the unblock was out of process, I also find myself wishing that I had been around to do it instead. Yngvadottir is a good admin - was, and will be again I expect - and a better editor than I am. And it would have saved me the trouble of resigning the bit. Because, god love you, every time we crank up the stupid like this, it just makes me sigh and ask why we bother at all. UltraExactZZ ^Said ~ Did 13:04, 27 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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Kirill Lokshin did his job as an administrator. There is nothing wrong with it according to rules. If we look at it from ethical point of view, I don't think Eric needed a block for 1 month. He was just defending himself. How would you feel if you were put in jail, for parking the car in no parking area, for 1 month? Even some police officers will forgive in real world. Yes, Eric was blocked previously for violating the sanctions but this is a different case. IAR should be used in these kind of situations. We should only block people when it is necessary. I don't think that block was necessary. - Supdiop ( T🔹 C) 13:34, 27 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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Frankly, you are screwed if you do and screwed if you don't and in the context of being the worst ArbCom in years that must be a painful place to be. You have two choices:

• ban the witch .. er Eric or
• lift all restrictions on him and pass a motion to desysop anyone who blocks him in future to make it explicit that he can do anything he damn well likes.

Anything that falls short of either option will see us here again in a few months after engendering even more rancour and hatred. Frankly, I couldn't care less but the community can't deal with this and frankly neither can you. Just make a choice of it and be done. If you don't - well you will be officially the worse arbcom ever. Spartaz ^Humbug! 17:56, 27 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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This is like watching someone try to glue a broken plate back together, but only managing to glue themselves to the table, their fingers to their face and then managing to drop the plate breaking it into even more pieces. Then repeating the same nonsense all over, several dozen times. The Eric situation is unfixable, and if it's not Eric, it'll be someone else who will take his place. ArbCom will keep trying to fix the situation and it'll keep making the situation worse.

I've read a lot of the comments, some of the more comical ones coming from committee members. The project is fucked. Give up people. That is all. Nick ( talk) 19:56, 27 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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In my view the committee shouldn't accept this case and I urge the members to decline because the specific issues at hand are either outside of the committee's remit or have been taken care of by the community (albeit a little messily). The committee's remit does not extend to defining the extent of or solving the problems of gender bias on en.wp; nor does the committee's remit extend to reacting to what goes on at an external website. As for the rest, the community acted: one editor blocked another, yet another editor made a dissenting unblock, (and to protect the project the committee quickly enacted a desyop). It was all a little messy, not everyone agrees, but we're fundamentally an argumentative and vocal community and the dust always settles. I have to disagree with Thryduulf – the community is capable of handling this. I believe it was Wehwalt who above suggested thinking outside the box: not taking this case would be thinking outside the box. The time spent on these cases has been enormous, but more crucial is that the cases make everyone furious at each other, which really is not a good state for a collaborative project of this magnitude. Let's just give it all a rest for now. Victoria ( tk) 17:39, 27 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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Most of the comments here fail to address the real issues which are:

• Why was a committee member talking about wiki business to a member of the press at all? The only comment that should have been made, especially by a committee person, is a firm "No comment!"
• The apparent anomalous status of Wales' talk page, which needs to be resolved and normalised, just to make the point that this is a website concerned with encyclopedia-building, not scurrilous tittle-tattle based on an inaccurate media piece making allegations about wikipedia editors. To build on this:
  • The chatting that provoked this was not concerned with any specific, recent and non-stale bad behaviour in need of attention that might have warranted a preventative block or something similar, it was just, as I said tittle-tattle. If specific, recent non-stale bad behaviour had happened that had not been scrutinised and decided upon by an admin, it should have been made known and reported at far more relevant pages. It was not!
  • Instead, WP:NPA and WP:BLP should have applied, and rapid removal of the chatting should have happened to prevent any escalation. That this did not happen, and that escalation happened and we are here in a mess is regrettable. Indeed, statements about others have been removed in the past by various admins, but not the ones about Eric Corbett in this instance.
  • Furthermore, should not the owner of the talk page have been far more attentive and removed the chatting comments himself? Or shouldn't those taking part have not let their desires to comment outweigh their adherence to wikipedia conventions, and removed these comments themselves? They should all consider this carefully, because they have compounded a breach of WP:NPA and WP:BLP and done exactly what they comment (often) on others for doing! Too many people, on either of any alleged "sides" have brought too much baggage into this.

I suggest the committee restricts itself to passing out multiple trouts all round, reminding people of their obligations ( WP:NPA, WP:BLP), and leave it at that. An appeal to use better judgment would also help. Anything else will just dig deeper holes in this instance. To reverse the desysopping would appear courageous and morally just, and not create any precedent, I think.  DDStretch   (talk) 23:23, 27 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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I have no opinion on Eric as an editor and the misogyny claim looks to be BS but it really does not matter. If you want to maintain a viable organization in the long term you need to choose whether you are going to manage the chaos or allow Wikipedia to choke on its own anarchy.

You have established rules for AE and you need to stand by them to do otherwise is to trash whatever moral authority you have with both sides. You already have none with one side.

The other options are a) revolution or b) kick the can down the road for another group to face the same choice after unknown further damage is done to the community and the project. Some group must manage the intractable issues here. Managers are seldom liked by those they manage - at least not when they are trying to manage a bunch of anarchist wanna-be's - but they are necessary otherwise the wanna-be anarchists will find they have no place to indulge in their anarchy and no one wants to play in their sandbox. I hope none of this is new to any of you but based on many of the comments I have read here I fear it might be to some.

Best of luck.

• Note to clerks. I have no need to be notified of anything relating to this case. Thank you. Jbh ^Talk 01:06, 28 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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I suggest that you implement an old suggestion of mine: desysop any admin that ever unblocks Eric Corbett for any reason. The problem of Eric being unblocked will quickly be resolved.— Kww( talk) 04:35, 28 October 2015 (UTC) reply

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