User talk:Iridescent/Archive 34

Franz Kafka: Das Schloss
	... about alienation, unresponsive bureaucracy,; the frustration of; trying to conduct business; with non-transparent,; seemingly arbitrary; controlling systems ...;

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Archive 30

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It's a small world

I was just browsing Flickr for free photos of a new Rwandan BLP I'm drafting, on Clemantine Wayamira, when who should pop up but our old friend Katherine Maher... [1] — Amakuru (talk) 12:54, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

She gets around, doesn't she? Before she joined the WMF she worked for the World Bank on a scheme to subsidize mobile phone banking in Africa to get around the lack of physical banking infrastructure, so it doesn't really surprise me to see her pop up on an Africa topic. Per my usual Flickr warning, if you see anything you want on there run Flickr2Commons on it ASAP, as Flickr's new owners are merrily batch-deleting the uploads of anyone who's made more than 1000 uploads and hasn't paid their ~~ransom~~ 'subscription fee'. ‑ Iridescent 13:08, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

Hmm... seems like she was a bit late on the uptake with that one - I spent some time in Kenya in 2007 and they were already veterans with the mobile-phone banking thing even back then. Toby Shapshak did a good Ted talk on the subject as well.[2] Thanks for heads-up re Flickr, anyway. Funny how, as the internet advances, some things also retrogress. Panoramio was a good example of that... not that the images were free to use on Commons, but it was still a good resource. Cheers — Amakuru (talk) 13:32, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

FYI, Creative Commons photos are excluded from the quantity requirement. --Izno (talk) 14:09, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

"Everyone a Humanitarian", apparently. How very comforting. Martinevans123 (talk) 13:13, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

I don't object to that as a slogan at all; they message they're presumably trying to get across is "humanitarianism isn't some abstract greater-good left wing concept about rich governments sending shipping containers full of blankets to disaster zones, every time you help an old lady cross the road or put your hard-earned peanuts in a tin you're engaging in humanitarianism". Consider it a meta version of Peelian principles. ‑ Iridescent 13:28, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

The seating provided at the event looks rather bizarre and uncomfortable, though. Oh, the humanity! — Amakuru (talk) 13:32, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

Personally. I'd never put nuts in anyone's tin. I'd always try to at least use a dish. Martinevans123 (talk) 13:35, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

So, about that extended confirmed flag...

I seem to recall a discussion where I and you disagreed about whether the newfangled "extended confirmed" userright would become the first step of a slippery slope towards a bureaucratic hellpit. Well, it seems like I was proven wrong, going by the RfC currently taking place on the AfD talk page...<hangs head in shame> Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 21:22, 12 July 2019 (UTC)

It wasn't a difficult prediction to make. One of the iron rules of Wikipedia is that if any new power or userright is created, someone will try to co-opt it as a mechanism for restricting the editing privileges of editors with less experience than them, and in particular as a mechanism to restrict the editing privileges of new and unregistered editors. For all the fine talk about "editor retention", the Wikipedia community as a collective entity hates the idea of anyone who hasn't committed the whole of Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines to memory touching their precious creations. ‑ Iridescent 09:49, 15 July 2019 (UTC)

Fram

Sooooooo....

....All those in favour of being secretly watched by the WMF civility gestapo raise your hands? Slightly more serious, since this has now demonstrated that it is effective to remove your opponents through direct appeal to the T&S team (bypassing ENWP dispute resolution), do you forsee a spate of 'snitching'? Arbcom and ANI/AN being defunct due to all complaints heading that way? Personally I would support shutting it all down and directing everything aimed at them to the email addresses of the T&S team.... See how long before the crap drowns them. Only in death does duty end (talk) 19:40, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

I've no issue with being watched by the WMF or anyone else. This is a wiki, and anyone can review the history of anyone else. "If you've received an allegation that someone is acting problematically, keep an eye on them to see if it's just a one-off case of someone having a bad day or if there's an actual problem" is Adminship 101, and applies just as much to T&S; that they reviewed Fram's contributions rather than taking the words of the anonymous denouncer at face value is a good thing, even if I disagree with the conclusion they reached. (That I disagree with the conclusion they reached is on the assumption that Fram's version of events is correct, given that T&S have been asked if that's the case and not indicated otherwise. I do notice a group of editors, all of whom appear to come from the same small clique, insinuating that Fram is lying. I have no idea if that's the case or not~~, but if nothing else it might give some indication as to where the anonymous denunciations are coming from and that the unfortunate Laura is being attacked for something she didn't do~~.)

~~On the broader point, I more or less agree with Ivanvector's comments here.~~ The WMF might have fucked this up badly (as I said to a WMF employee—not T&S—privately today, the very fact that they didn't expect this to be controversial and plan accordingly is as far as I'm concerned prima facie evidence of a severe competence issue in whichever anonymous coward is hiding behind the WMFOffice account). However, it looks like a cock-up rather than a conspiracy, and a unique set of circumstances that's unlikely to occur. The tiny Wikipedias outnumber the big wikis twenty to one, and T&S probably aren't used to handling issues on big wikis with advanced dispute resolution setups. As I read it, they didn't understand our processes, thought that because Fram had been rude about arbitrators that meant Arbcom couldn't handle a case involving him, genuinely thought they were being helpful in stepping in, and probably expected to be showered with plaudits and were completely taken off guard when even those who would have been happy to see Fram banned took offence at the WMF trying to impose direct rule.

Unless we start to see more people receive the night and fog treatment, I'd be inclined to assume this is a one-off screwup which won't happen again. I imagine all the people who signed off on the ban (it takes a lot of people to sign off on an office action, even if some of them are probably just rubber-stamping everything that passes across their desk) are shortly going to have an very uncomfortable meeting with the board in which it's pointed out that their inflated salaries are dependent on keeping the donations rolling in, and needlessly creating a situation where the core community that keeps their showpiece site running are talking seriously about forking or at least GAFIA is not the way to go about it. "That guy who runs the website that used to be big once before it fell apart and Facebookpedia took its place" doesn't get invited to parties, and Jimmy knows it. ‑ Iridescent 20:54, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

(adding) I'd also like to endorse Newyorkbrad's comments here, made while I was typing the above screed, which (to my surprise) are short, clear, and to the point, and with which I entirely agree. ‑ Iridescent 21:05, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

Ah spooks eh, dontcha just love 'em?? Martinevans123 (talk) 21:07, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

After the first partial ban imposed (in February this year) in de.wiki, there seemed to be this huge discussion about it. That they didn't expect a massive outcry from this then has to really be willful blindness rather than severe incompetence. Galobtter (pingó mió) 21:11, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

I don't speak the language so can't offer much of an opinion on that thread, but in my experience de-wiki are even worse than Commons when it comes to assuming that any action taken by the WMF must be the result of a Vast Global Conspiracy—the WMF probably assumed that en-wiki would be more pliant when it came to obeying the edicts of their betters. Plus, looking at the names of the T&S people (you need to scroll down to them) the only one I recognize as at all active on en-wiki recently is Karen Brown, so it may just be that they didn't realise how active Fram was and that any action taken against him would light up 447 people's watchlists. ‑ Iridescent 21:21, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

Yes, I agree. They had to have known this would be negatively received, because they received pushback the first time they tried this stunt. Enigma^msg 22:05, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

Have you followed the DE-WP interactions with the WMF much? They do actually have some justification for that viewpoint. (My German is not terrible.) Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:27, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

Well tbh if the core community ever did want to demonstrate its actual power in running ENWP, a month of 'no reversions', no admin actions and turning off the anti-vandalism bots would do it. See how the screaming starts once some high profile (and rich) BLP's get continuously vandalised. But I disagree in part regarding the 'no problem watching'. I have no problem with people's *contribution* history being completely visible and transparent, but that is a different kettle of fish to what the timeline in Fram's statement indicates is going on - that the T&S are/were actively *monitoring* him after he was on their radar. In order to have a 'gotcha'. Thats not the same as 'we have had a complaint so we have looked into it' which is what you seem to be addressing. Granted I do expect the T&S to monitor editors who present a genuine safety concern (child protection etc), editors being mean to each other is not a safety issue. Thats 'people on the internet'. That sort of longterm monitoring of Fram's editing history is concerning, especially given the imposition of what appears to be an interaction ban between a highly experienced admin who has a good track record of dealing with troublesome editors, and an editor who has a less sterling reputation. And while it may be unrelated, the imposition of *interaction bans* by the T&S team smacks of interference in ENWP's own governance. Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:14, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

To address NYB's comments in relation to the above: "please do give careful thought to how it might be possible to quickly deescalate this situation, without jeopardizing the Office's needful role in dealing with the very serious situations that are within its core responsibilities to address." - I think this may be the cause of the current issue, in that no one on ENWP sees the T&S 'core responsibilities' (or even non-core) as policing internal wiki disputes. Thats why we have dispute resolution venues. If it *is* something that would legitimately fall into what people normally would expect a T&S initiative to be involved in, none of that information appears to have been given to Fram (assuming Fram is being open) as his description of events is very far from that. Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:18, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

That, I agree with. This is the remit of T&S (in their own words); nowhere do I see anything remotely relating to interpersonal disputes or civility, and I've seen no indication that Fram made any statement that could be construed as a threat. ‑ Iridescent 21:26, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

Unfortunately I think the only way to reasonably rein in the T&S over-reach would be a trustee board-level resolution to direct WMF policy in this area. I seriously doubt, given the current board members, that will ever take place. Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:30, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

From what I can make out, they saw the local only ban as a final warning for behaviour that they otherwise would have global banned for, since it had a nexus on this project. That’s probably the biggest issue with this entire thing: they very well may have more than Fram is saying or they only gave him one diff. The way it was executed, however, implied they only viewed it as an issue here when what they were apparently trying to say was this behaviour needs to stop and this is your last chance. Hopefully there will soon be a de-brief and they can rethink the concept of project bans... TonyBallioni (talk) 22:00, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

Now that the Wikipediocracy thread has been pointed out to me, striking large chunks of my initial comment. The evidence might be circumstantial, but there's too much of it to ignore. On the plus side, someone has made lots of new friends. ‑ Iridescent 06:42, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

The Wikipediocracy suggestions could well be on target, but there are a few snippets in what has been officially said to make me mindful of at least one other (speculative but, I think, realistic) possibility (which assumes the "Fuck Arbcom" post was the trigger), and I'd hate the wrong person/people to be blamed. I'm still holding back on my judgment until we heard what the board has to say. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 09:20, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

This was one of the reasons I posted the "Elephant in the room" section. I was hoping that we might gain more clarity on why Fram was banned, though it doesn't seem to have worked (and yes, if your speculation is the same as mine, it is realistic). Black Kite (talk) 10:59, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

While it's probably not sensible to speculate pending the meeting on the 14th, I can only think of four realistic possibilities for the complainant. Three have flat-out denied it being them, and given that the identity will come out, to the board if not the community, in two days' time, it would be pointless to lie; the fourth has remained distinctly silent. ‑ Iridescent 12:37, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

The aspects of employment law being raised here and there trouble me. I also agree with what you say about the salaries of the WMF employees being dependent on not killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, see what I said here. What happens on Wikipedia and WMF sites is not at the same level, but I was reminded of this. Carcharoth (talk) 10:11, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

But again, that raises the issue as to why Fram. He's certainly cantankerous, but he's by no means the rudest editor on Wikipedia nor could any of his history realistically be construed as raising safety concerns. Given that I (and you) can think of plenty of occasions where the office haven't stepped in to ban genuine violent criminals when they've been identified, what is so special about "Fuck Arbcom" that it warrants direct action? ‑ Iridescent 12:37, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

I think there have been other complaints made about Fram (fairly obviously), and that those who made the complaints know this (and Fram may not be aware of all of the complaints - T&S may have put him in an impossible position by only partially disclosing the complaints made against him), so Fram can't really explain what is going on here. What may happen is that the Board are told (in confidence) about other matters, but this can't be disclosed outside of the Board. Oh, I see Fram has posted some more, see here. Hopefully someone will re-post that here somewhere. Carcharoth (talk) 13:55, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

Anyone can check Fram's contributions. Did anyone find anything that rises to the level of bypassing Arbcom and requiring Office action? That's what I'm having trouble understanding here. Either there is something not visible on wiki or the accuser wields a very big stick. The thing that seems the most closely related to Fram's case was another previously "clean" admin who was quietly desysop'd and blocked by Arbcom. Some of the community of course had issues, but since the decision came from the community in the form of Arb it was eventually accepted, since that's exactly what the community set up the committee to do. Side-stepping this procedure naturally causes editors to speculate. Mr Ernie (talk) 11:27, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

Yes, I agree. ‑ Iridescent 12:37, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

Futile attempt to stop this

@Everyone, it's probably not sensible to continue any of these discussions until after the board have had their briefing, as we're all at the shadows-in-a-cave level at present. While I certainly don't trust Jimmy, I do trust Doc James to give an honest account regardless of whether I always agree with him or not, and if he says that having seen the evidence he feels the WMF's actions were correct and there's a reason they needed to be done this way I'm willing to accept it. ‑ Iridescent 12:37, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

To me, this is not about Fram and what he did or didn't do. This is about the WMF attempting some sort of hostile takeover of en.wiki. Enigma^msg 15:27, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

But until we have some idea why they did what they did, we don't know that's what did happen. Sometimes things do have to happen without explanation regardless of how frustrating it is for all those who aren't in the know as to why; until the board have reviewed the case, it's impossible for us to say whether T&S did the right thing, the wrong thing but for defensible reasons, or were abusing their position. ‑ Iridescent 16:03, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

Tbh I dont think it really matters anymore. Its clear enough that it was on-wiki actions that prompted it, and its not T&S job to get involved in on-wiki disputes (especially since in this case there is zero on-wiki evidence that supports the veiled claims of harrassment). At this point it needs a board-level resolution to make it clear to the employees of the WMF that absent serious concerns (legal, child protection etc) that they are not to interfere with local wikis in order to impose their own standards. As I recall board elections are in 2020, so I will be actively seeking candidates to stand on a stated platform of curbing WMF over-reach. Dont get me wrong, I know its got very little hope of succeeding, and if it does, unlikely a board resolution would pass, but it would send a concrete message. I will be reaching out to DE-wiki as well. The DE community are also extremely unhappy with WMF intereference in their own governance. Personally I would like Doc James to be one, but I doubt he will get behind attempts to curb WMF-staff level actions. Only in death does duty end (talk) 19:32, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

If Fram hadn't been an administrator, do you think there would have been so much outrage? The cynic in me says "No", as nobody cares what happens to the bottom feeders in this kind of institutional bullying. And all these calls for patience simply play into the hands of the bullies, who know that in a week or so this will all be forgotten. If anything's to be done it must be done now, not in accordance with a schedule laid down by the bullies. Eric Corbett 19:51, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

I'd be inclined to guess yes; the issue isn't that he's an administrator, but that he's the 187th most active editor of all time (and many of those above him are bot-assisted), and that he was given a sudden year-long block with no right of appeal and no real explanation. I'd imagine that if the same thing happened to an equally active non-admin like Blofeld, Beyond My Ken or yourself, the reaction would be similar. ‑ Iridescent 20:00, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

You should be less cynical Eric, if you had been banned in the night *by the WMF* for being uncivil, there would be an equally vocal outcry. Granted there might be a bit more understanding, but like Fram, no one has ever seriously considered you harrassed people. Only in death does duty end (talk) 20:08, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

I'm pretty certain that a similar degree of outrage would've occurred had this happened to any well-established prolific editor. For the record, some of people outraged explicitly said they do not like Fram. It's not like it's a bunch of admins getting together to protect a fellow admin. If the WMF had done to this to someone who doesn't contribute much at all, I would agree that there would not be such an outcry. I don't think the affected having the bit precipitated this at all. It's about someone being banned, while circumventing the local wiki, without any stated evidence, and with no chance to appeal (or even e-mail or respond on talk). Enigma^msg 20:38, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

I suppose that time may tell which of us is right, but my fundamental point is that I felt continually harassed by certain administrators during my time editing here, who now perhaps in turn feel harassed by the WMF. So the boot is simply on the other foot. As far as I'm concerned to be able to edit here you have to be able to put up with the unchecked coercive control imposed on you by administrators and others who take a dislike to you, and I couldn't, so the only thing that's changed is that the harassment has been notched up a level. Which is why I don't see waiting as having any merit whatsoever. Eric Corbett 20:31, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

Where I'd say this situation differs is that when you felt that (for instance) Chillum, or indeed Fram, was unfairly targeting you, there was a recognised path to appeal any action he took (even though you never actually appealed blocks, you were aware that you could have), and anyone blocking (or unblocking) you would invariably explain why they'd done it and what their reasoning was. Here, we have a situation where the WMF have without public explanation blocked a long-term editor without discussion and with any appeal expressly forbidden, for something that probably did violate policy but was no worse than many (probably most) editors have said at some point. That the editor they blocked was a very vocal critic of the WMF's approach to changing the user interface and the block was enacted the day before they issued a public announcement about their proposed changes to the user interface, and that the sole editor singled out for this treatment was an editor who had been in public dispute with someone closely connected to the WMF Chair, couldn't have been more certain to set the conspiracies flying if they'd tried.

If the WMF had, for instance, issued a clear statement that from now on they were going to enforce the civility policy rigidly and anyone swearing would be warned on the first occasion and blocked on the second, I might have grumbled but I'd ultimately accept it—their website, their rules, and there's a legitimate argument to be made that if we have written rules they should be enforced—but it's the inconsistency and arbitrariness, coupled with the lack of any appeal mechanism, that's troubling, and is the reason even people who are no friends of Fram and would happily testify against him in any formal case are complaining here.

(Incidentally, for both of the two days this saga has been running the discussion page has received more page views than the TFA. Yes, admittedly that's partly an artefact of the fact that the last two TFAs have had fairly dull-looking blurbs so fewer people than usual clicked through—and of people visiting the discussion page on more than one occasion to see the most recent updates and consequently counting as multiple visitors—but even so…) ‑ Iridescent 09:14, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

Huh. Perhaps it's being linked to from offsite? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 09:29, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

More likely that it has 250 different editors plus presumably other people who have watchlisted it, and is being updated so frequently that it keeps popping up on people's watchlists so people keep looking to see what's changed. 500 editors each viewing it 10 times accounts for 5000 edits right there, and many of those people are going to be refreshing it a lot more than 10 times. (Remember, every edit counts as two pageviews; the initial view before you click [edit] and the reloading of the page once your edit is saved.) ‑ Iridescent 09:43, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

General comment Thinking over what we've seen, it's as if the WMF watched ArbCom exceed its remit on several occasions recently and said (American slang) "You ain't seen nothin' yet. Hold my beer." Enigma^msg 06:43, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

On losing admins

It seems this month is easily on track to have the most admins lost since March 2012 (which was 23, the record for any month aside from the first month where inactives were desysopped, which obviously should not count). I wonder if the WMF T&S sees this as a positive. For the record, I don't recall having any interactions with Fram, or having ever commented on him, but the WMF could hardly have handled this any worse. Enigma^msg 14:23, 13 June 2019 (UTC)
They probably don't see it as a positive, but I'm not certain they see it as a negative either. I'd imagine there's at least a faction in Community Engagement who would contend that clearing out the old guard of the class of 2006–08 would actually be beneficial in the long run and aren't going to be too heartbroken to see a mass pruning of the editor base to allow recruitment of a new crop who won't feel intimidated by all these old sweats patronizing them.
They might not be entirely wrong, either; there's a reasonable case to be made that those who've been around since the early days don't appreciate just how weird an environment Wikipedia is to those coming at it fresh who don't understand either the markup and the culture, and we could do with more admins and established editors in general who are sympathetic to the experience new editors face. (This is probably not the time to be saying it, but Fram was a consistent offender for "you didn't get the format of {{InsanelyComplexTemplate}} absolutely correct, reverted as non-constructive" or "what do you mean, you aren't aware you violated the WP:PYRZQXGL policy, everyone should memorize the whole of Wikipedia:List of policies and guidelines before they start to edit, I've undone every edit you've ever made as I can't trust you" newbie-bashing. 99% of the time he's correct, but that doesn't mean the 1% isn't there. As a member of WMF staff recently pointed out to me, I had sharp words to say about Fram myself in this thread-from-hell last year—the timing of which tallies fairly accurately with "investigations usually take four weeks" and "I received my first warning from WMFOffice in April 2018", incidentally. My I've (obviously) got serious concerns about your recent conduct there is a reference to this declined arb case the previous day.)
We could certainly do with more regulars (whether admin or not) from the other side of the VisualEditor/WikiText divide, as the number of conversations in which old and new editors are talking at complete cross purposes because each doesn't understand what the other is seeing is starting to get silly. ‑ Iridescent 15:52, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

I'm conscious that I don't want to keep sounding like the Official Megalibrarygirl Fan Club ^(TM) but one of the reasons I was keen to get her involved more in backstage stuff is she has only ever used Visual Editor, which I'd imagine is pretty rare amongst the hardcore admin crowd, and doesn't have any residual memories of what things were like more than five years ago. Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 17:43, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

Personally. I've always struggled with WP:PYRZQXGL, but it is sometimes useful. But then maybe "I couldn't give a flying fuck about how I come across." Martinevans123 (talk) 16:16, 13 June 2019 (UTC)
Amazingly, Pyrzqxgl is a blue link—I assume some decades-old memory of The Wizard of Oz bubbled to the surface there. For anyone wondering what Martin is on about there, "I couldn't give a flying fuck about how I come across" is something Fram said to me in March 2018 after I told him he was "coming across as a vindictive crank", which if the timings are right means it's possibly Entry #1 in WMFOffice's famous dossier. As I've said elsewhere, I'd consider that thread-from-hell and the rejected Arb case as a good example of Wikipedia's civility enforcement mechanisms working as they should, not the example of a broken process some people seem to be painting it as; Fram was being obnoxious, people formally complained that he was being obnoxious, he was told to stop being obnoxious, and he stopped being obnoxious, all with nobody being blocked or banned and not too much time wasted. ‑ Iridescent 16:41, 13 June 2019 (UTC)
Hmm, not tooooo much time. So regarding proper process, yes, I'd have to agree with you 100%. But as to what he's actually alleged to have said or done this time, it might take a while to find out. Martinevans123 (talk) 18:55, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

They've confirmed that it all relates to on-wiki activity so there's no invisible emails etc to find, I can confirm there's nothing remotely contentious in Fram's last four months of deleted contributions all of which are routine AfD nominations or maintenance (see right for a glimpse of what the Magical World of Admin Tools looks like), and TonyBallioni has done the same review of his oversighted contributions. Unless there's server-side suppression going on here—technically possible but well into the realm of conspiracy theories—any problem edits are in his visible history. Special:Contributions/Fram is probably the single most pored-over page on the site right now, and to the best of my knowledge nobody has found anything recent except the "fuck arbcom" diff, and if they're going to start blocking everyone who lost their temper at the thread in question we may as well all go home. ‑ Iridescent 19:55, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

Ah thanks. What a relief. [3] Martinevans123 (talk) 19:59, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

Sandstein does get it right a lot of the time: statement. On newbie perspectives, see this. Carcharoth (talk) 16:37, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

My "99% of the time he's correct, but that doesn't mean the 1% isn't there" could just as well describe Sandstein, but when it comes to interpretation of policy to-the-letter he's invariably correct; the issue is one of inflexibility and an unwillingness to appreciate that policy should reflect reality, not the other way round. On this occasion he's most definitely correct; I can't think of any quicker way to HTD than for Arbcom to allow people to railroad them into declaring Wikipexit without the community on board. (Sure, 250 people would support it, but that's still only 1⁄15 of the highly active users, let alone the long tail of occasional editors who have no idea what the fuss is about.) ‑ Iridescent 17:20, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

That's the most upside-down thing in all of this - I keep agreeing with Sandstein. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 17:27, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

On a couple of occasions, and not just recently, I have found Sandstein to be insightful and helpful, though I suspect that's probably more because I happen to agree exactly with his interpretation of policy at that time. Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 17:43, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

On a scale of "end of the encyclopedia as we know it" to "no one would notice", what do you think would happen if the entire "1⁄15" up and left tomorrow? How much of the work do the most-active 250 do? Would an admin strike work as a matter of practicality? Would editors run RfAs and replace everyone, and would the new admin know what they were doing? Has there ever been a walk out or strike before and how did it go? Is a wikipocalypse survivable and how long would it take to recover? – Levivich 02:02, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

Honestly, it depends which of the 250, but we'd survive and they'd likely be replaced eventually. This sounds really bad, but I'm sure Iri can show you the graph/stats that shows we've been maintaining the same approximate active editor number for a while. It isn't the same users. Rather there's a cycle of in and out. We are regularly losing highly active users and replacing them.

It isn't great, but it isn't the end of the world. No one is irreplaceable is true for every organization. People with specialized skills might be noticed more at first, but eventually they'd be replaced. That's one of the advantages to having reached the scale of Wikipedia: you'd need a critical mass to quit, and 250 honestly isn't it. TonyBallioni (talk) 02:30, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

A starting point may be to examine the mainspace (i.e. article-building) contributions of all the most vocal people in this whole debate and go from there. Sandstein on paper has the right idea about the board of trustees....just hoping they are pretty independent of T&S is all.....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 03:39, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

I took the top ten contributors to WP:FRAMBAN and looked at their mainspace contributions - Winged Blades of Godric, Seraphimblade, Beyond My Ken, Starship.paint and StudiesWorld have all been actively contributing there over the past few days. Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 11:16, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

Ritchie333, there? I have written 8 new articles, (near-entirely) rewrote another 3 articles for pending trials by GA and indulged in all forms of routine edits ( spanning from reverting vandals to commenting over t/p discussions and DyKs) over the past one month. What do you wish to imply; that we don't edit main-space? ∯WBG^converse 12:13, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

No, you misunderstood, "there" means "mainspace". As you just clarified. Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 12:15, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

I found the shitstorm when I took a break from an off-wiki task on my one day off a week and turned to my Wikipedia tabs intending to write one of two articles. Neither has got written. Usually my attitude is, I can best cock a snook at the WMF by continuing to write articles to demonstrate how ridiculous they are to keep proclaiming the encyclopedia almost finished (and that right there by the way is blind entrenched Dunning-Krugeresque bias), especially if I keep throwing in topics they don't care about. But right now I'm not sure it wouldn't be taken as treachery. "Oh look she doesn't really care, she's still volunteering her labour." I'm honestly not sure what to do. I know they don't care about me or any other encyclopedia writer; we're all just worn-out cogs to them, and I'm not even any good for training an AI, too variable. But I care. Yngvadottir (talk) 17:55, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

I'm not under the illusion that anyone will miss me if I'm gone, but I'll just share my reaction. I took down my userpage and replaced it with a brief message, and I've ceased my mainspace editing. I normally pride myself on being someone who is mostly in the mainspace and avoids the drama boards as much as possible, but now I've done a complete 180. This is not sustainable. Eventually the outrage will peter out and I'll have a decision to make, because at last check, the WMF is still claiming en.wiki as their own personal fiefdom to do as they like. Enigma^msg 19:27, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

Personally I write and edit for the benefit of the readers. And because I enjoy doing it. It matters little to me whether what I'm doing pleases or displeases the WMF. I would like to see answers and a positive outcome to the Fram debacle as much as anyone else, but don't particularly intend to change what I do in the meantime. — Amakuru (talk) 18:18, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

Perhaps ironically, I think this might be more likely to move me towards doing more article work. There has clearly been a power shift (however much the WMF might deny it) and there are new standards as to what constitutes harassment and related bannable offences. As those new standards are not explained, we don't know where the new lines are drawn, and bans can not be appealed, I really don't know what is permitted and what is not when trying to resolve behavioural disputes in my admin role. While that uncertainty persists, I'm really not sure I feel comfortable doing admin things. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 19:48, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

Thanks to those who replied. I'm close to Enigmaman's position. I try hard not to assume readers find my articles useful; I put them out there partly in case someone needs background on something, and it's the totality of the encyclopedia I care about, really. For the same reason, I won't be blanking my user page; I think the list of articles might be useful, if only to those investigating the dissenter (and demonstrating a type of editor not to try to replace with bots). But I don't want to contribute to letting them think we accept their terms. So, day after day, I don't do much except keep saying my piece. It's sad, really. I am a terrible politician. We shouldn't have to deal with their BS. Yngvadottir (talk) 19:57, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

All this is subject to change when the mythical Statement From The Board emerges, but I'd put my position nearer Yngvadottir than Enigmaman. I wouldn't have an issue with continuing to write uncontroversial obscure articles (which is almost all of them; only one thing I wrote here ever reaches the million-views-per-year mark). Where I would have an issue is with any but the most uncontroversial and routine of maintenance. If we're heading towards a system in which we have an "anonymously denounce" button to go with "thanks", and anyone who manages to reach a (secret and undisclosed) total of complaints is summarily disappeared, then there's no way I'd touch editing any topic on which there's the slightest controversy, let alone touch something like New Page Patrol, deletion discussions or WP:ERRORS, and I'd recommend the same to anyone. It's impossible to be involved in the administration of a website that attracts this many people without offending some of them, and I don't really see how to interpret the increasingly elliptical statements emerging from T&S as anything other than "offending anyone will not be tolerated". ‑ Iridescent 21:37, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

Really? I'd had you down as more of a 'na fuck em' kind of guy. Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:40, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

Why? Revolutionary suicide is a particularly pointless exercise in this context. This is ultimately a dispute about a change in the terms and conditions of a website, it's not as if T&S are rounding editors up at gunpoint and forcing them to work in Fluffernutter's underground lair. Assuming the ban isn't reversed tomorrow, then either the ban of Fram is a one-off incident, T&S discreetly agree behind the scenes to take a hands-off approach and eventually we all go back to normal and throw a welcome party for Fram in a year;* or, people gradually decide that they find living under the new order unpleasant, drift away, and Wikipedia goes the way of Myspace. I've drifted away before; it's really not difficult. ‑ Iridescent 21:57, 14 June 2019 (UTC)
*Statement of the obvious, but Fram is Belgian and presumably at minimum is fluent in French or Dutch and probably German as well, and still has plenty of places he can still contribute if he still wants to contribute to Wikipedia and the ban isn't lifted. I imagine that in light of recent events if he turned up on de-wiki, they'd probably give him admin status in about thirty seconds flat. (He could then find a pretext to block Jan Eissfeldt for harassment, and thus complete the Circle of Life.) ‑ Iridescent 21:57, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

I thought Jan was already blocked/banned on DE? As an aside, I routinely get jealous of the average Belgians command of multiple languages. Only in death does duty end (talk) 22:20, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

How about the Swiss? Enigma^msg 22:28, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

I've been to Brugge (actually partially took my honeymoon there) and Rock Werchter many times. I have yet to visit Zurich. Only in death does duty end (talk) 22:39, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

Well, you're not putting yourself at risk by working in the mainspace. My reasoning is simply because if I'm made to be feel not welcome (and the WMF makes me feel that way), why would I want to contribute? Indeed, I wouldn't care about working in controversial areas because I would no longer value my account, so I'd be more likely to work in controversial areas than articles, actually. Enigma^msg 21:42, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

Of course you're putting yourself at risk by working in the mainspace; all it takes is to step on the wrong person's toes. (I'll remind you that a pair of mainspace edits^[4][5] is why we're here in the first place.) If you think editors who restrict themselves to mainspace avoid controversy, switch the "highlight blocked editors" gadget on in preferences and then head on over to Talk:Shakespeare authorship question.22:02, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

I stand corrected. I was using my own personal opinion about how sticking to mainspace is "safe" while getting involved in drama boards makes it more likely you will get blocked or taken to ArbCom over something you say there, whereas mainspace I feel it's unlikely to get in trouble for your edits. I make an edit, and if someone doesn't like it, they revert it. Done. I will also note that Fram's is an atypical case. Usually people claiming "harassment" or "bullying" are doing it based off of comments, not article contributions. Enigma^msg 22:04, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

? Seems to be no nearer resolution than it was last week? Martinevans123 (talk) 14:31, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

Code of conduct

You might find this video to be interesting, wherein Sydney Poore (T&S) states that an "Universal code of conduct" for all WMF sites would be implemented next year, onwards.

Interestingly, parts of Meta (esp. the areas, linked with WMF) has a Safe-Space-Policy which includes weird stuff like any oppose comments/!votes in any discussion/proposal must be placed over some remote venue, because they think that new participant(s) get discouraged by oppose votes and like to see a string of green supports. (Sitush has some experience .... )

Also, around 1:49 in the video, someone(??) states:- If you're constantly getting negative feedback for doing something, how often you are going to do it?. What exactly, do these folks include under the purview of negative-feedback, is another mystery. Seconds back, they have deemed reversion of edits and sexual advances to be of similar forms of harassment ....

For a trivia, the video was published a day, after Fram was Office-banned :-) ∯WBG^converse 10:08, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

Hmm, a new Universal code of conduct and a new User reporting system - it's nice the way Wikipedia communities had to find out about it by seeing it on Youtube. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 10:09, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

Probably, our former arbitrator can list the various mediums that we need to subscribe to, to keep ourselves abreast of all these stuff .... Interesting times, we are in:-) ∯WBG^converse 10:20, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

Anyone else getting the 'this seems like part of an orchestrated plan' at this point? I mean, I am usually extremely pessimistic of conspiracy theories, but the timing on this is either deliberate or massively incompetent. Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:23, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

(+1) This is testing the limits of Hanlon's razor .... ∯WBG^converse 10:29, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

Yep, this was the piece of evidence that pushed me over the line of hanlon's razor. I now think that it's more likely that something nefarious is going on instead of innocent stupidity or incompetence. I'm wiling to wait for Doc Brown to get back to us about what happened in the board meeting, but if we don't get satisfactory communications then, I'm starting to wonder about foundation-ectomies. Tazerdadog (talk) 12:12, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

Fwiw, this is probably actually going to be useful on places like az.wiki and am.wiki or even nl.wikiquote. There are many projects where you have self-appointed rulers of the project and where at one point you had large enough communities to have permanent sysops, but where now the community is dead except the self-appointed rulers who can do whatever they want to anyone new who comes along. These type of initiatives tend to get panned widely on en.wiki, but when taken in the context of the other 700-something projects makes sense. Stewards are not going to get involved beyond obvious vandalism and global ban discussions are complicated to say the least. Dealing with the abusive harassing sysop on the East Fooian Wikibooks is definitely a legitimate function of the WMF, and I suspect stuff like that is where they’ll spend most of their time. TonyBallioni (talk) 12:27, 15 June 2019 (UTC)
Yes, I think it's probably a good idea (if it's implemented well), but it's not a good way to find out about it. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 12:31, 15 June 2019 (UTC)
Actually, I'll add that now the WMF has introduced the new power structure and their parallel (to ArbCom) intention of dealing with what they term "harassment" issues, we *need* a published set of the rules they will be enforcing. And no, like WBG says below, I really don't think this is anything to do with smaller Wikipedias (even if there's a spin-off benefit there) - not when we hear it via a Youtube about the gender gap on en.wiki. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 12:55, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

The foundation does not need a CoC to deal with Croatian wiki or Az.wiki; how exactly a CoC would have dealt with the az.wiki/am.wiki scenario? They have till-date denied to intervene, even in far disastrous scenarios like Croatian wiki.

The foundation is focusing on en-wiki in it's bid for a CoC; the screenshots showed over the video, all belong to en-wiki. Choosing to believe in otherwise, is to remain delusional. I agree that a CoC can be helpful but I don't trust the T&S, at the first place and this non-transparency is hugely concerning.

Also, did you know of this? ∯WBG^converse 12:47, 15 June 2019 (UTC)
Well, I know there is one at mw:Code of Conduct for the technical spaces of Wikimedia, complete with the associated enforcement systems and the like. That might be the prototype these people have in mind. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 13:07, 15 June 2019 (UTC)
I know that, and was exclusively referring to the proposed CoC for all non-technical sites. ∯WBG^converse 13:18, 15 June 2019 (UTC)
Hmm. There is nothing over meta, as to the upcoming CoC. Now, now, there does exist a page about User Reporting System, whose consultation phase ran from February, 2019 to June, 2019 and have just concluded. Per the timeline, they are currently, either designing workflows or (even better) developing the relevant software.
When and where was it advertised? Any admins or long-standing-editors, visiting this page, who have been consulted? I see none apart from Risker, Rob. NickK and Joe. ∯WBG^converse 13:14, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I don’t really follow community health initiative stuff as it rarely has any impact on en regardless of how they market it. The functionaries list does sometimes get posts about this or that consultation related to it, but to date it’s all been on-wiki that I recall, and again, I tend to ignore it since I haven’t seen any impact here. They also usually announce these things at AN. Risker would be much more likely than me to be able to tell you any relevant background.

T&S is by far the most competent team at the WMF, and they usually get the correct outcome when they do act. There is room for criticism, but there are people who watch this page who remember the pre-T&S era and they’ll tell you that having them is an improvement, regardless of their faults.

Having a CoC helps on smaller projects because it gives them something to point to when they do intervene rather than an ambiguous TOU. On am.wiki having a CoC would have made it possible for intervention even if Teles hadn’t have been blocked for trying to resolve the situation. I’m fairly certain blocking someone for having Queer in their name and then going on to explain how homosexuality is against the laws of Ethiopia would be covered, and in situations like that, having the foundation act rather than the community can be beneficial.

Finally, I think everyone is being unfair to Sydney here. This was not a WMF sponsored video, and it was very clearly edited. A five second clip in someone else’s video where there was fairly obviously a back and forth going on beforehand as part of an interview is not some secret conspiracy to undermine community governance. Whatever she is talking about has likely been discussed somewhere on meta or en before: if anything the community health initiative is overly transparent to the point of people ignoring their consultations because they happen too often so people just tune them out. TonyBallioni (talk) 13:35, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

Risker did say that en-wiki functionaries had been notified of that. But it is not clear what cross-over there is between the day-to-day T&S matters and long-term initiatives. I presume not too much. I agree people should not be unfair to the work by FloNight and others, but I do fear it will get a lot more attention now, possibly in a good way, possibly not. Let's hope the outcomes are positive (that doesn't sound quite right, but rushing a bit as logging off soon). Carcharoth (talk) 14:38, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

TonyBallioni, interestingly, WMF used to have a non-discrimination policy covering it's staff, contractors and all users for about ~ 11 years. It was only in 2017, that they removed users from under it's purview. I still don't see as to how the az.wiki or cr.wiki situations would have been any better with some CoC.

It seems that the functionaries were mailed to contribute in the consultation phase. Not sure what harm would have come of a more public broadcast.

I am not being unfair to Sydney and she is not immune to criticism. As OED said, the timings strongly indicate that they are either awfully incompetent or they are part of some sinister conspiracy. Also, any ethical video producer will show the final video to all the involved people,for their consent, prior to publishing it. ∯WBG^converse 15:16, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

You do no know who posted it right? I dont think ethics comes into it. Only in death does duty end (talk) 15:25, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

@Only in death:I suspect the silent majority, including most of our churned contributors over the years (of which I, like prolly most of us, am at high risk of - even after over a decade), supports efforts to improve civility in this place. I do think any such policy should get a bunch of collaboration and sign-off with the local wikis, but additional tooling to collect better data and make complaints easier should be welcomed. WMF shouldn't have to ask permission to think about these things, and I one reason you might have not heard about them as much so far is that they don't want to dilute attention to current focuses like Wikipedia:Talk pages consultation 2019. II | (t - c) 00:28, 16 June 2019 (UTC)

I am so sad to be proved right. Yngvadottir (talk) 16:03, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

I've collected a few links to flesh out some background at Wikipedia:Community response to the Wikimedia Foundation's ban of Fram #New "User reporting system". I hope some will find them useful. --RexxS (talk) 17:59, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

Waiting for the man

Still waiting for this mythical board statement and I reserve the right to change my mind depending on what that says, but from what's available at the moment it looks like Risker is correct that this was intended as a shock-and-awe operation to demonstrate the WMF's strength, that has badly misfired. Remember, the T&S team operate within the WMF echo chamber, and WMF employees' perception of who constitutes "the community" is filtered by who is likely to write to them (people trying to get WMF funding and people with grudges) and who is likely to meet them in person (people so obsessive they would be willing to spend their own money to attend a Wikimedia event, people with their snouts in the "Travel Scholarship" trough, and personal friends of employees). Consequently, their perception of who we are and what we want is viewed through the prism of the personal prejudices of a relatively small group of ultra-insiders, many of whom have personal reasons to dislike Fram as someone who has consistently called attention to quality issues arising from assorted WMF-funded pet projects.

At a guess, because they received a bunch of complaints about Fram at the time of the Arbcom case in 2018, they put him on their radar as a potential problem user, but failed to appreciate that he took the warnings to heart and addressed the problem elements of his behaviour. When they subsequently received a steady trickle of complaints from people disgruntled that he was flagging copyright violations and inaccuracies in articles created as part of high-profile schemes like Women in Red, they got the impression that Fram was some kind of monster since all they ever heard about him was complaints (nobody writes to the WMF to praise editors they think are doing a good job).

When they decided they needed a grand gesture to mark the start of the Age Of Enforced Corporate Values and show that there was a new sheriff in town who was going to write the rules from now on, they assumed that Fram was a textbook example of one of those incredibly toxic personalities who cost more than they are worth and should be encouraged to leave and that his crimes would be so obvious they wouldn't even need to explain them since any right-minded person would welcome his departure, and failed to appreciate that Fram had undergone a major on-wiki personality shift in the past year and that the signal they've actually sent is "once your name is on our hit-list, we'll be coming for you come what may so there's nothing to be gained by trying to improve".

(To the handful of people who are still trying to maintain that Fram's recent conduct was so problematic that it warranted this kind of sanction, show us some evidence. An editor this bad must be some kind of monster; you'll surely have no problem pointing to some diffs of problematic conduct more convincing than "was rude about Arbcom as an institution whilst carefully avoiding blaming individuals" and "expressed a fairly commonly-held view about the grammatical correctness of singular they".)

When the facts change I change my mind; while I initially pooh-poohed the wilder conspiracies, there are too many things happening simultaneously, all of which follow the same "from now on we're in charge, everyone is obliged to follow our rules but we're not telling you what those rules are" pattern, for it to be reasonable to assume the Fram block wasn't intended either to send a clear "the civilian administration of this project is now subordinate to the occupying authorities" signal, or to silence the person most likely to challenge imposed new systems and rules. WMF people can continue as much as they like to claim that they expected opposition and prepared for it, but unless they genuinely hoped to provoke a full-scale civil war and the mass suppression of anyone who isn't comfortable with top-down administration, I can't see how this could possibly be what they wanted.

Arbcom certainly has its problems—look a couple of threads up for my laying into them—but they're ultimately accountable and if we think they're screwing things up badly they can be removed at the end of their terms. If you genuinely believe there's a "silent majority" who think that the electoral experiment has failed and would rather have top-down imposition of rules by an unelected and self-appointing group, then give us the wording of your new Code of Conduct, dust off SecurePoll, and the silent majority can have their say on whether it's better to have a good king or a bad president. ‑ Iridescent 08:26, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

I would like to think the mythical board statement is not forthcoming easily because there is a moral and ethical split between the board members. More likely I suspect there is some horse-trading going on in order to put out a statement board members are willing to put their names to. Only in death does duty end (talk) 08:32, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

A less juicy but equally likely answer would be that they've decided to publish a list of diffs in detail to explain which of Fram's actions they do and don't consider problematic, and it's taking time to redact them in such a way that it protects people's identities while still indicating what was problematic. (Plus, remember that the meeting was on Friday and presumably not much gets done over the weekend, and that all these people are in different time zones and they presumably all need to sign off on any statement before it's published.) As well as the meta-issue of the future of Wikipedia/media there are also real peoples' jobs at stake here if there is evidence coming to light of misconduct within T&S; I'd rather they put some thought into it than rush out a statement they need to keep correcting and clarifying later. ‑ Iridescent 08:43, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

I'm afraid I am all too unsurprised that they have not deigned to give us even another placeholder. Another explanation: the WMF board of trustees, like many, is a gravy train and feel-good front that has little to do with actual decision-making. tldr: I wasn't holding my breath.

I have sent some encouraging and warm messages over the years, including the other day, to individuals implicated in one way or another in this endangerment of the encyclopedia and demonstration of contempt for those who contribute to it. I stopped reading WP:FRAM after seeing some messages from people I had respected that make me very angry. The roile that it now becomes apparent has been played by Women in Red (if only by having a Twitter account—and why in the name of all things EEML did they set up one of those—that has hosted diatribes against the rest of the community) also deeply hurt me. I almost joined that lizard cult. I was on the brink of doing a fast read and making a bridges-burning statement on the page yesterday, but got too busy offline. This gets worse and worse. Please tell me where to put the articles I cannot now put here. It would take a lot for me to trust this website any more. Starting with real apologies for victimising all of us as the worst possible way to go about offering help to victims, which is something I agree needs to be provided, and I do not in the least appreciate being called a victimiser and abettor of victimisation! Now must pack up ready for end of workday, would have loved to write two articles in the past week, now 3 thanks to Uncle G ... Yngvadottir (talk) 13:45, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

To be fair, boards are not really there to 'make decisions' at that level. They set policy, hire an ED to execute it, make sure the organisation does what its supposed to. But they dont really interfere on a decision level unless something goes catastrophically wrong. Boards for not-for-profits and charity organisations are even more hands off in general anyway. Only in death does duty end (talk) 13:54, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

Exactly. A lucrative résumé-padding front. Yngvadottir (talk) 16:01, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

Yngvadottir, that's not really fair. Non-executive directors are supposed to have no involvement in the day-to-day running of an organization, whether that organization be Microsoft or the local animal shelter. Their purpose is to set the general strategic direction, to act as a body of last resort in the event of a serious problem within the management (as is happening now), to make decisions that genuinely can't be taken internally such as setting Katherine Maher's salary, and to act as a body of people beyond the fear of internal reprisals if there are awkward questions that need to be asked regarding mismanagement or criminal allegations. If the board were to start making decisions as a matter of routine, we'd be the first people to complain. ‑ Iridescent 14:58, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

Do we have any indication they are acting on this other than to rubber-stamp it? Why were we waiting from a statement from them? The pose of being above it all is a very useful way to get money and a nice résumé line for presiding over the indefensible. Yngvadottir (talk) 15:05, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

They might well be trying to pull Jimmy's traditional trick of saying nothing and hoping it all blows over, but there might well be a reasonable explanation for the delays—it's only been four days since the meeting, after all, and these people all have day jobs. To repeat, The pose of being above it all isn't a pose, it's an obligation; assuming California law is the same as most other places, boards can't get involved in micromanagement; they're not technically employees of the WMF, they're a group of external people who scrutinize the WMF, in our case augmented with a handful of "community representatives". Our article at Non-executive director is shitty but summarizes the basics of what they can and can't do reasonable accurately. ‑ Iridescent 15:31, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

Jimmy still thinks that he in his capacity as founder has the ability to overrule office actions. I'm sure WMF Legal has had a nice sit down with him over that recent comment... TonyBallioni (talk) 15:36, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

He might still have the ability; the WMF's internal procedures are so opaque they're black, and I could certainly believe there was a "power to override any employee action" clause discreetly inserted back in the days of CBD that nobody ever got around to revoking. ‑ Iridescent 15:43, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

Sigh. That unfortunately does sound like something he'd do just to say he could do it and no one bothered to change it on the assumption it would never be used. TonyBallioni (talk) 15:47, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

Without wanting to overly personalize it by bringing up the names of people who've been gone for over a decade, see this and this for example. There would have been good reasons Jimmy might have felt it appropriate to quietly retain a God Mode button in the background, and I can easily imagine nobody ever bothering to remove it. ‑ Iridescent 16:22, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

WMBE has asked us to stop discussing this, and given that I know nothing more than what's already public about it there's nothing to be gained from further discussion. ‑ Iridescent 09:00, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

(We know what Jimmy Wales does.) Isn't this statement by a board member rather rubber-stampish? Linked from discussion on the FRAM page of what was done to Romaine, and unless there are 2 editors calling themselves Pundit, he's there also, denying anything bad happened. I'm sorry, I'm being proved exactly right about the WMF and its board. Yngvadottir (talk) 20:59, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

I don't think If there are rumors about physical violence, unbelievable as they may seem, the bottom line common sense is to approach the alleged would-be attacker and request politely that they stay away, to deescalate even just a potentially tense situation is saying T&S is beyond critique. It's saying that any reasonable organization when learning of the possibility of physical violence between volunteers would step in and likely tell people not to be in contact with one another or something of the sort until a full investigation could be done. That's the approach most volunteer organizations I'm affiliated with take. TonyBallioni (talk) 23:26, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

I agree with Tony; if you are running an event, someone makes an allegation that someone else threatened them, and the allegation isn't obviously-beyond-all-doubt false, you have a duty of care to investigate it and to keep the parties involved apart to minimize risk, regardless of whether on not you believe the allegations. I can dispute some of the comments being made by WMF loyalists, but I can't dispute Dariusz's post there. (Just imagine what a field day we'd be having if it came to light that someone had made a potentially credible allegation about a well-connected figure like the Treasurer of a national WMF chapter, and the WMF hadn't investigated it.) See also this comment from the Chair of WMBE; I don't know who's in the right here, but there's clearly further information here that we don't know, so we likely shouldn't be commenting on this situation. ‑ Iridescent 09:44, 21 June 2019 (UTC)

I'm not sure we even know what the allegation was, but here we have a board member—supposedly above it all and concerned with the Big Picture alone—saying that they're always right and that all allegations must be believed. With no recourse for the accused to even mention that he has a disability. I am sorry to mention the specifics and will stop there with that. To me this is a very clear example negating any argument that the board is not just a rubber stamp. In any event, I am not going to assume good faith until several things have happened, starting with a real apology. Yngvadottir (talk) 12:51, 21 June 2019 (UTC)

In light of this steaming heap of bullshit, whatever residual AGF I had for T&S is well and truly gone. Regarding the WMBE thing, I still don't see that Dariusz necessarily did anything wrong here; I stand by my position that if someone brings a complaint to the WMF they'd be remiss not to investigate it, even if it turns out to be nothing; see my very first comment in this thread. (We do know what the allegations were, as that's now public: "speaking too loud, standing too close, having touched someone's hand/arm, took MY stuff from my hands".) The issue here is that they appear to be taking complaints at face value without hearing both sides of the story, and unfairly using legitimate investigations as a pretext to take vindictive actions against people against whom people in the office have a personal grudge. ‑ Iridescent 15:26, 21 June 2019 (UTC)

(I hope I can express this clearly. Bloody awful shift at work and I am so upset.) The personal grudge thing, while quite possible, isn't even major in my thinking. What is, is the utter contempt for us. I'm afraid I didn't find any of that explanation surprising. I wouldn't expect them to consider whether they may be biased against any particular person; it doesn't matter to them. They are the sole arbiters. But I will note that those accusations do not constitute a threat of violence. Again, I am very sad not to be surprised. Yngvadottir (talk) 16:44, 21 June 2019 (UTC)

Obviously I wasn't there, but the initial email says Multiple people have testified that our former grants person was doing this, gossip like that WMBE's treasurer was planning to attack that grants person. The Trust & Safety team heard about it and … asked WMBE's treasurer not to approach or contact the former grants person., which is what I'm referring to when I'm talking about "remiss not to investigate it". As a thought experiment, just imagine how "I heard gossip that someone was planning to attack me, I tried to report it to one of the organizers, and they told me to go away and didn't bother to investigate" would have gone down. Even if something's completely untrue, if an allegation is being made and there's a possibility that it's true, as the body in charge the WMF had to act on it. I'm obviously no admirer of T&S—I've just a few minutes ago called Jan Eissfeldt a liar to his face—but assuming the situation was as described I can't see anything else they could have done here. ‑ Iridescent 17:09, 21 June 2019 (UTC)

I read that as "multiple people said the grants person was gossiping to the effect that he was planning to attack her", yet her own account in a responding e-mail does not mention "attack" or even "violence" or fear. I regard that as telling. But in any case, speak to the guy. As with Fram, they never explained what the charges were—there's a world of diffierence between specifics that would breach confidences and claiming there have been unspecified other complaints—much less gave either an opportunity to explain. And in the Belgian instance the person was not given an opportunity to state that they have one or more relevant disabilities (or that they don't swing that way with respect to sexual attention!). Eissfeldt's statement saddens me and further justifies my anger, but it doesn't surprise me. They think we are lower than employees, that we are their possessions in some way. No recourse, they claim community procedures will be tried first but they are the sole arbiters of when that is inappropriate or insufficient—I will not accept this, and none of us, so far as I know, signed up for this servitude. That they would do this to someone who falls into several categories they should be protecting is a further indication that whether some of them personally dislike Fram is irrelevant. It could be any of us tomorrow, and one of us is too many. Yngvadottir (talk) 18:40, 21 June 2019 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Sidetrack about IRC and smaller wikis

Just noting in passing that Fram has been on the WMF radar since at least 2013 (diff found by WereSpielChequers and posted to WT:FRAM). I'm not saying they've been slowly working up to the point of carrying out this specific one-project/short-term ban, though; I still think there are others who are being similarly watched and this was not particularly good target selection in order to get community buy-in; on the other hand, it might well have been a good target to get internal WMF buy-in. And I think we should be wary of dismissing the idea that having T&S/WMF step in and address "unpleasant" people is massively unpopular, in either the local or global sense. There have definitely been projects where the community was in fact unable to address what we'd consider extreme behaviour by certain individuals or small groups, whose behaviour has included blocking/desysopping/otherwise controlling users who didn't share the "preferred" point of view, and at least one case where a powerful user was likely an agent of the state. On a lower level, there's pretty open misogyny and homophobia on several projects. And on projects with only a small number of participants, there's often a dominant person who pretty much controls the project. In these kinds of cases, I'm not sure how local communities can fix these issues, and having someone with "god power" come in to sort things out may well be the answer. I'm pretty sure T&S expected at least some significant pushback (although perhaps not so much pushback that they were seeing admins line up for their chance to rebel), but the manner in which this issue was dealt with may well have some significant impact on the recommendations coming out of strategy groups. And now...back to the real world. Risker (talk) 13:57, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

Well I suppose waiting 5 years in order to get revenge for the embarressment of having one of your staff members reprimanded for talking about setting people on fire could be possible. Seems unlikely to me though. How is ol' throatpuncher these days? Still with the WMF? Only in death does duty end (talk) 14:19, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

To go by his website, his current job is "seeing how many vague tech buzzwords can be jammed into a single sentence". ‑ Iridescent 14:31, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

Of the conspiracy theories advanced (or dreamt of) about the situation, getting revenge for a 6 year old warning seems the by far unlikeliest. How much turnover has occurred in the WMF since then? Galobtter (pingó mió) 17:43, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

Not as unlikely as you'd think. Ol' Throatpuncher may be gone, but Fluffernutter was the other half of most of those IRC logs we're not allowed to quote, and take a wild guess as to what her current job is. ‑ Iridescent 18:08, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

Thank you Yngvadottir for mentioning Uncle G and leading me to this. A needed bit of distraction from what has been going on. :-) Carcharoth (talk) 15:00, 17 June 2019 (UTC) On the matter at hand, I made a small contribution here, and all the comments made so far by Risker are well worth reading. Carcharoth (talk) 15:05, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

Please, somebody do the Droll Tales. I'm not the best choice and am not going to be able to, despite a library run and JSTOR reading. Yngvadottir (talk) 16:01, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

Hi Yngvadottir, that would be an interesting project to take on, hopefully someone will get to it. In the same spirit, though one of the examples has an article already, I recently encountered two works of fiction/poetry from the past which I wanted to share and I hope might help distract (in a good way) from the current mood around here. The first is an early SF work from the 19th century by Paschal Grousset writing under the pseudonym of André Laurie, namely Les Exiles de la terre (1887), available here at the BNF. The plot is jaw-dropping for its time and described in his article as "probably one of the most fanciful cosmic tales of all times" (I wouldn't go quite that far, but it is astonishing). The other work is 400 years earlier, in Italy not France, and is poetry not science fiction, but is set 400 years earlier still in the First Crusades. It is Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso. I managed to find one of many online translations (sadly, my language skills are not enough to read either of these in their original languages), and read parts of the version here, also available here. I think it was the Fairfax translation, but maybe I should be reading a different translation. I found myself wondering how I'd not heard of either of these works before. At least en-Wikipedia has stubs on some of Victor Hugo's plays, such as Marie Tudor, though there are a surprising number of red-links at Template:Victor Hugo. Carcharoth (talk) 11:00, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

Don't get me started on the misconception that the encyclopedia is almost finished, or even almost finished except for women's biographies (I'm told Daniela Di Bari [it] probably doesn't meet FOOTY, but there's the link to her on Italian Wikipedia if anyone reading here disagrees, or agrees with my suspicion she can pass on GNG). I could show you a whole bunch more redlinks I had intended to get to if no one else did, and I already had two articles ready to be written when this blew up. And I did know about Gerusalemme liberata. But I don't feel right writing articles under these circumstances. I'd hate to be asked to strike, but I feel guilty enough improving stuff, I may have to scramble my password. We should have forked years ago. I will not let the WMF think I'm ok with them treating us like chattel, or like harassers until they decide we aren't. Yngvadottir (talk) 12:15, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

I don't know quite what the issue is with Gerusalemme liberata, of which I seem to be the main editor these days, though needless to say I've never read more than a sentence or two of the actual poem. But those bits seem to have been written by people who had. The article is 25k long, & has got a steady 60ish vpd for ever. If it wasn't for the unacceptable if laughable treatment of Islam, its battling babes in armour would surely have been turned into a movie franchise by now. As it is, for anyone who takes any notice at all of what the Baroque operas they listen to are about, it is pretty inescapable. Likewise the recurrent scenes in art and other media until Walter Scott created a replacement source of characters. Even in the 1850s it seems to have been something well brought-up English gels were expected to be familiar with, presumably in translated redactions. Now pretty much any question would probably stump University Challenge teams. Johnbod (talk) 16:11, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

Yngvadottir Someday someone will explain to me where the misconception that the encyclopedia is almost finished, or even almost finished except for women's biographies comes from. Quite aside from the fact that this is utter nonsense, many of the articles we do have are very incomplete. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 13:08, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

Aside from myopia, the WMF. A few years ago—I think before they started really pushing women's biographies—they made some kind of decision that we should now concentrate on maintenance, with the objective of getting everything to GA and FA, since we were "mostly finished" in terms of coverage. Which demonstrates how poorly qualified they are to tell us what to do. Yngvadottir (talk) 13:12, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

I'm not sure whether the emphasis was meant so much on "wow, look at how complete we are" as on the more sensible "gee, there are quality issues with what we already have (including lots of BLPs)." It was probably some of both. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 15:35, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

Newyorkbrad, you're so diplomatic. I frankly don't care what their intent was. What they said was that they were changing focus and required us to do so because they deemed the vast majority of topics to have been covered, on en.wp that is. (Note that they developed the execrable translation tool not long after, while also running the disastrous Indian education editing experiment. And note that I have always been very much aware that there's unexamined bias in what we have and don't have articles on. I just neither see the percentage of biographies that are of women as the make or break metric, nor recognize the WMF's authority to tell me what to do about it.) This meme of near completeness comes largely from them in their vast ignorance and arrogance. I would discuss civility, the treatment of new editors, the Visual Enema, and volunteerism if we weren't in a particularly acute state of emergency because these incompetent and self-absorbed people feel that by virtue of getting paid for taking credit for what we do they are our bosses and we should accept their orders and their idiotic notions about anything, what and how to write being the thing they know least about. I'm halfway out the door, but I don't have any advanced permissions to lose so I can speak plainly here. Yngvadottir (talk) 20:21, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

I can agree with what NYB is saying, for what that's worth. It's obviously nonsense to say that the project is complete—there are still huge swathes in which the articles don't exist, particularly outside the US and England (yes, specifically England; our Scottish and Norn Iron coverage is still full of holes)—my bellwether for when we start being vaguely complete is the point at which Britt Kersten is not only no longer red but has at least a couple of thousand words. That said, I don't think "this has been accumulating pages for two decades now, let's try to assess what we have so far and see what needs to be improved" is necessarily a bad thing. I just hit Special:Random three times and got Charles Sweeton House, Berry (singer) and Surabad, Isfahan, all of which are less useful than a redlink (since if we had no article, the page wouldn't show at the top of search results and consequently the first hit would be a page that actually said something about the topic). This pattern is repeated all across Wikipedia, and I don't think the WMF are at all wrong to point it out. ‑ Iridescent 22:25, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

You are better equipped than me to look for what they actually said, but if that was what they meant, it is most definitely not what their acolytes passed on as being what they said. The habit of assuming good faith is hurting us here, especially since whether we work on maintenance, writing new articles, or both, and how we collectively or individually judge the adequacy of an existing article are None Of Their Business. Yngvadottir (talk) 11:59, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Well, it's not necessarily None Of Their Business. If they had a reasonable justification for telling us not to do something, I don't think anyone would object—e.g. "The database can only handle 10,000,000 entries and we're approaching that limit, please stop creating new pages unless it's absolutely necessary for the time being", "In light of legal action by the French government we warn people not to write about anything considered sensitive information in France if they live in or intend to travel to France" (that one actually happened), "There's a major education program going on this week with a lot of new editors expected to join, please be extra careful when reverting". The issues here aren't that they're intervening, but that they're intervening arbitrarily and refusing to explain their reasoning, they're issuing warnings against "problematic conduct" without specifying what they consider "problematic" so nobody knows what they're supposed to avoid doing, that they're handing out sanctions which are hugely disproportionate for the alleged offences, and that they're (explicitly) now claiming that WMF are infallible so consequently any decision made by a WMF staff member may never be challenged. ‑ Iridescent 14:19, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Yes, now. And not unrelated, since two diffs in the e-mail to Fram concern his critiquing someone's writing. But they've also repeatedly stuck their oars in regarding what we write about and how we write it, imposing their peculiar view of how coverage is biased, pushing Wikidata, pushing infobox use as a criterion of article completeness, and again this is my recollection, maybe, just maybe someone misinterpreted teh relevant internal document(s), launching this meme of completeness and wanting us all to pivot to the spurious objective of making everything GA and FA. Those are all orders with no justification, grounded in rank ignorance and failure of imagination (not to mention that by not simply requesting we spend more time checking for and fixing incomplete sentences and bare URLs, they suggest to me that those writing the memos have never actually looked at the encyclopedia.) I didn't start contributing here in service to the WMF, and they don't merit any indulgence of their claim to be our bosses. Yngvadottir (talk) 16:21, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Well, you asked

OK, have a big stack o' data:^[1]

Number of English Wikipedia articles^[2]

Date	Article count	Increase during preceding year	% Increase during preceding year	Doubling time (in years and days rounded up)	Average increase per day during preceding year
2002-01-01	19,700	19,700	—	—	54
2003-01-01	96,500	76,800	390%	160 days	210
2004-01-01	188,800	92,300	96%	377 days	253
2005-01-01	438,500	249,700	132%	301 days	682
2006-01-01	895,000	456,500	104%	355 days	1251
2007-01-01	1,560,000	665,000	74%	342 days	1822
2008-01-01	2,153,000	593,000	38%	1 year, 302 days	1625
2009-01-01	2,679,000	526,000	24%	2 years, 326 days	1437
2010-01-01	3,144,000	465,000	17%	4 years, 29 days	1274
2011-01-01	3,518,000	374,000	12%	5 years, 284 days	1025
2012-01-01	3,835,000	317,000	9%	7 years, 257 days	868
2013-01-01	4,133,000	298,000	8%	8 years, 243 days	814
2014-01-01	4,413,000	280,000	7%	9 years, 330 days	767
2015-01-01	4,682,000	269,000	6%	11 years, 202 days	736
2016-01-01	5,045,000	363,000	8%	8 years, 243 days	995
2017-01-01	5,321,200	276,200	7%	9 years, 330 days	755
2018-01-01	5,541,900	220,700	4.5%	15 years, 273 days	605
2019-01-01	5,773,600	231,700	4%	17 years, 262 days	635
2024-04-30	6,818,884	1,045,276^[a]	—	—	537^[a]
[a] - Calculated live, so far, as only for partial year.

The rate of increase in Wikipedia's size is dropping asymptotically. While it will continue to grow as long as there are still editors willing to add articles—each year brings a fresh crop of politicians and footballers—the total number of topics covered is levelling off, so what growth there is in database size is increasingly going to come from people expanding the existing articles rather than working from redlinks. Substantially expanding existing articles is generally harder for new editors than working from scratch or just adding a sentence here and making a tweak there, as there are existing stylistic preferences to consider as well as the pitfalls of running across an article WP:OWNer. That difficulty is what will hammer Wikipedia if there's a mass resignation, as without the old-timers willing to patiently walk newcomers through editing, it will just get too confusing and people will stop joining. (As I've said before I have no issue with Visual Editor, which was meant to address that problem; my issue was with the total botch they made of its implementation, and the way in which they forced unusable crap like MediaViewer through piggybacked onto it.)

English Wikipedia editors with >100 edits per month^[3]

The figure to watch isn't the article count, article size, or the collapse of the admin corps, it's the active editor count. It's starting to drift upwards again after the steady decline in the years following our Eternal September in 2006. If, as a result of this situation, the blue line to the right sees a statistically significant drop, that's when you'll see the WMF start panicking and trying to decide which blameless T&S employee needs to be thrown to the wolves to appease the angry mob. ‑ Iridescent 14:16, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

^ Attribution here
^ "Wikistats - Statistics For Wikimedia Projects". stats.wikimedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 11 February 2022.
^ "Wikipedia Statistics (English)". stats.wikimedia.org.

@Yngvadottir, regarding "the one thing they pay attention to is increases and decreases in the "highly active editor" number", the WMF have elegantly solved the issue by removing the "highly active editor" count from their statistics altogether, so we'll never know. They're now using five edits per month as their definition of "active"; "English Wikipedia has 58,000 active editors" sounds better on the press releases and grant applications than "English Wikipedia has around 3500 active editors". (There are some genuinely interesting things on the stats site if you dig around, particularly the "most edited pages last month" list.) ‑ Iridescent 15:51, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

Ah, thanks. That dovetails alarmingly well with the meme that the community would be healthy and creative and wonderful if all us old-timers were kicked to the kerb or persuaded to leave voluntarily; and I suppose with more than ten years now, I am no spring chicken, although I came aboard in the saggy middle rather than either the Age of Dragons or the brave new world of Politi-Wiki. That means I have to manage less than five edits next month, gak. Perhaps I could ask you in advance to rev-delete any excess, especially like the two extra that their lousy maintenance caused me to make yesterday at Village Pump/Tech? Yngvadottir (talk) 16:23, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

Deleted edits still count (that's always been the case; it's why the edit count you see in Special:Preferences is always higher than the edit count you see on the edit count tool). They also now count any IP from which five or more edits have come as an "active editor" now, although there is an option in the sidebar to filter IP and registered editors. If you want to contribute to articles without your edit count rising and without touching the wiki-politics, your best bet is to work on another CC BY-SA licensed website. (If you don't mind dealing with even more self-important assholes than you'll find on Wikipedia, Citizendium is just barely alive, while you may find some familiar faces here.) ‑ Iridescent 16:36, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

It doesn't seem to have any visible faces at all, let alone familiar ones :) ——SerialNumber54129 17:32, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

Iridescent may understandably be reluctant to "out" us in the current climate, but I'm quite happy to state that I'm one of the disillusioned Wikipedia editors behind that site. Eric Corbett 18:20, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

@Eric Corbett: I remember you saying you were into another project, I think, nice work. Not that you need any permission or anything—per CC-by-SA etc—but if you want to import any of my GAs/FAs for your history cadre, be my guest. ——SerialNumber54129 18:33, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

Thank you. Despite the CC-BY-SA thing, I'm inclined to believe that it's better to have agreement that it's OK. :-) Eric Corbett 18:37, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

Better to have 'em spitting out the tent than in, as they say :) ——SerialNumber54129 18:45, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

Ditto if you want anything of mine. ‑ Iridescent 18:50, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

Much appreciated, thanks. Eric Corbett 19:04, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

I'd offer my articles, but I don't think I've written anything you'd want, and it would be a PITA to convert the citation style. But if you have seen anything, just take it. Yngvadottir (talk) 20:03, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

Of course you've written stuff that's of interest, and we'll ~~save~~ replicate it with your permission. I think you may misunderstand our citation style though; while it may look similar to Wikipedia's short citation format it's produced in a completely different way. Every source is stored in a shared library, so there's no need to remember anything other which part of which source you're citing. Eric Corbett 20:12, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

Iridescent's talk page is such a goldmine of interesting stuff. This Engole site is mostly focused on biography and English stuff, isn't it? I see that that site has a more narrowly defined scope than Wikipedia. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:41, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

I'm not a member there, but I'd imagine the focus on biography and English stuff just reflects the interests of its founding editors, rather than a particular remit. If you were to look at the original batch of articles on Wikipedia back when it was still Nupedia, you'd assume it was only interested in topics Larry Sanger and Magnus Manske found interesting. (Larry was a fan of traditional Irish folksongs; our article on Donegal fiddle tradition predates our article on United States.) ‑ Iridescent 20:47, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

Good to know about the IPs: so they count cybercafes and public libraries, too. No, I knew about both of those, but what I want is for what we have built not to be wasted by the WMF. I'm just one person, albeit with eclectic interests and good spelling and grammar. This encyclopaedia has always had the breadth of its editorship and our collaborative work as its strengths. Yngvadottir (talk) 17:28, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

Fram situation

Hello Iridescent!

I'm a reporter from BuzzFeed News and I'm hoping to talk to you about the Fram situation. I'm (Redacted). Would love to hear from you.

All best,

Joe — Preceding unsigned comment added by JosephABernstein (talk • contribs) 15:14, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

Hehe, I can think of a lot of people who want to talk to Joe Bernstein. Now that someone has shown an interest, there should be no shortage of candidates! I see he reached out to Fram on Commons as well. Enigma^msg 15:28, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

FWIW: Fram's reply. Carcharoth (talk) 15:30, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

So it begins. I wonder how accurate my prediction here on the press being unfavorable towards the community/favorable towards the WMF position will be. Might depend on how much they chat with the community vs the WMF among other things. Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:54, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

I seem to recall the last time an admin went straight to the press it ended in tears. Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 16:08, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

Have you read Fram's response on Commons? it is linked above. Carcharoth (talk) 16:12, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

Well as I recall it wasnt revealed who went to who. What I can tell you is that the story was written at the political desk (of the Guardian) and no one ran it by the tech section. Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:13, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

Also, from that page "Funtionaries-en mailing" .... Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:19, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

Oops. Butter fingers... That is a safe, edit, I think, as was this. Carcharoth (talk) 16:22, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

Only in death does duty end, I liked the end of that article. The statement by the Liberal Democrats. Contribsx has not edited since being blocked/unblocked. Enigma^msg 18:06, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

JosephABernstein, I'm happy to discuss this with you, but given that this is ultimately an issue about a lack of transparency, I'd far prefer to hold any such discussion publicly. (Actions based on off-the-record conversations, and "we can't disclose our sources but…" insinuations, are why trust between the Wikipedia communities and the Wikimedia Foundation has broken down in the first place.) Since presumably anything I were to say to you would be potentially destined for publication, there would be nothing to be gained by having any discussions privately.

Although I was the first person to comment when the ban was announced, I haven't been particularly involved in the discussions arising from it; virtually everything I have to say about the issue has already been said on this page from this point onwards. The best summary of how and why the actions of the Wikimedia Foundation are being perceived as a declaration of war against Wikipedia's culture of openness and diversity has already been made by Risker in this lengthy comment. ‑ Iridescent 14:21, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

JosephABernstein has published his article. He's communicated with a few people one-on-one, including apparently someone from T&S. Mr Bernstein, a block is distinct from a ban. If you decide to run for admin at any point, you'll get asked about that '-) Yngvadottir (talk) 20:11, 27 June 2019 (UTC)

Wow. That was a pleasant surprise. Which is to say it was for the most part, factually accurate and editorially neutral. I'll give him a pass on the block/ban error given he is a newbie. -Ad Orientem (talk) 22:23, 27 June 2019 (UTC)

There were a few errors I noticed (most notably relating to xe and LH) but given that it was written by someone who is not immersed in en.wiki culture, I think it was pretty good, overall. Maher's response to it was disturbing and reminiscent of Raystorm's response... Enigma^msg 03:19, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

Yes, it wasn't bad. I considered commenting, but it looked as though one had to have a Facebook to do so. But all levity aside, I think the block/ban distinction is important here given that the WMF have previously imposed global bans and this time have imposed a one-year and single-project ban; as opposed in both cases to a block. (Haven't seen Maher's response, just got up.) Yngvadottir (talk) 05:05, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

IMO JosephABernstein did a good job explaining to outsiders both why T&S did what they did, why there was such a backlash, and why it has the potential to affect people who have no interest in Wikipedia's politics; it's considerably better than most external coverage of Wikipedia, which tends to be either hopelessly fawning and idealistic, frothingly hostile, or unreadably technical and boring.

I'm not going to nitpick over the handful of errors; the only ones that aren't minor technicalities seem to be: the use of "wiki" as a synonym for "Wikipedia" (which I know irritates some people but given the number of occurrences of "on-wiki" and "off-wiki" in that conversation, nobody could be blamed for assuming "wiki" is the accepted abbreviation); describing Fæ as trans (a reasonable if wrong assumption from 'I no longer want to be described as "he"'); and describing LauraHale, an ultra-insider former vice-president of Wikimedia Australia who prior to joining Wikipedia a decade ago operated her own independent Wiki which she lobbied the WMF to absorb[[6][7], as "a fledgling Wikipedian" (presumably just a case of taking her 'how was lil ol' me to know it was against the rules?' act at face value, and we do keep telling people to Assume Good Faith after all).

Katherine Maher's response and continuing responses, not so much. I actually find plausible the implication in her follow-up comments that she didn't appreciate the strength of feeling about the issue, and assumed the Bernstein piece was a journalist trying to manufacture a story based on a couple of disaffected editors. Given the dysfunctional nature of the SF office, it seems entirely plausible to me that an over-zealous employee was intercepting and deleting all the incoming emails of complaint and that the Board hushed things up from her because they didn't want her involved until they'd agreed on a common position, so she was never aware anything was going on until suddenly people started asking her for a response to the Buzzfeed article; until Opabinia raised it with her today nobody had made a comment on her talk page since 2017. All that said, it's still totally unacceptable for the Executive Director of a major tech firm—particularly someone whose own publicity is burbling about her record in "preserving a free and open internet that supports digital rights and free expression" and "advocating for the rights of ordinary internet users"—to be publicly trading insults with insufficiently-fawning journalists like a third-rate Elon Musk tribute act. When the senior management of Wikipedia is handling a situation so badly that people are begging Jimmy Wales to be more active, something is seriously wrong somewhere. ‑ Iridescent 14:38, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

I don't buy that she was unaware of the strength of the issue. A BoT meeting does not happen w/o her presence and James has further said that the BoT liaise with other wings of WMF, only through the ED. ∯WBG^converse 14:53, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

I don't believe she wasn't aware of the issue; I can believe she wasn't aware of the strength of feeling. The Wikimedia movement—and particularly English Wikipedia and Commons—has a long history of "controversies" that on closer inspection turn out to be a handful of people vehemently disagreeing with a decision, but the overwhelming majority not having a strong opinion either way, and unless she had the time to read a thread which must now be above the two megabyte mark, there would be no particular reason for her to think this was any different to the reaction to the ban of (for instance) Russavia, Betacommand or Jytdog, where a handful of people vehemently opposed it but the reaction of most people was some variation of either "good, they had it coming" or "I personally wouldn't have banned for that but I can totally see why they did it".

Bear in mind that the WMF currently operates 881 different wikis so senior management aren't going to be aware of all the internal politics; most of what Katherine Maher sees is going to be through the prism of what Jimmy Wales, Doc James, and her own employees choose to pass on to her, so presumably "many editors think the board are ineffectual and the staff are incompetent" is something that's unlikely to reach her desk. ‑ Iridescent 15:08, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

She's responsible. The buck stops with her. I didn't expect much of her, but another stone has just fallen into place. I am sad that anyone is still counseling patience and assuming good faith of the WMF. If tehre is any way to be rid of them, we must take it to protect the encyclopaedia. Yngvadottir (talk) 17:32, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

Her response to DuncanHill—claiming that the reason she's made more comments on Twitter in the past 24 hours than she's made Wikipedia edits in her entire career because "I've only been with WM for 5 [years]"—doesn't exactly fill me with confidence. I don't know if ED is one of those jobs like football manager where it's impossible to succeed because the expectations are unrealistic, or if the WMF just have a really bad track record in recruitment, but whatever residual good faith I have is rapidly dissipating. ‑ Iridescent 17:41, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

@Iridiscent: From her further replies to me it looks like she hasn't received/noticed emails from the 25th. I've told her I'd rather converse on wiki. I'm going to the shops now. I would go up the allotment but it's too hot. I am struggling to retain my good faith assumption of a massive cock up followed by an unconscious cover up. And as for her not knowing what's going on - it's her job to know. DuncanHill (talk) 17:58, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

I'm sorry to say I believe you are being far too kind, although it's her job to be responsible even if she was ignorant. Iridescent: I was one of those who had some hopes of the previous ED. You have an apposite pic/caption in the rotation at the top of this page. She messed up, but she tried to clean the Augean stables, and she got axed for it. So it's not automatic that a WMF ED will wave her hands and say "Carry on" to whatever horrors the organisation perpetrates. Yngvadottir (talk) 18:08, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

Coverage in The Signpost

Just a heads-up that The Signpost is preparing an initial Discussion report on the Fram situation also. We are planning to include the graphic from this userpage showing deleted contributions. ☆ Bri (talk) 18:32, 17 June 2019 (UTC)

Help yourself, although make it clear in any caption that deleted contribution histories are more dynamic than vanilla page histories, and such screenshots only show deleted contributions as they appeared at a particular moment—i.e., it won't show anything that was deleted subsequent to the image being captured, and will show anything that was oversighted subsequent to the image being captured. The image did—as it should—have an explanatory title which made it clear the exact moment of capture, but in what I'd consider a clear abuse of the filemover right FlightTime has renamed it without explanation to an actively misleading title which suggests it shows all of Fram's deleted contributions as opposed to being a screenshot of a limited subset of them at a particular instant. ‑ Iridescent 17:35, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

I was just actioning the move request posted here. If there's special qualifications that I'm not aware of for screenshots, I will stay away from those request. - FlightTime (open channel) 17:50, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

The requested title was dated. The person who moved it to an undated title was you.

(Not that it probably matters all that much. The only things in that screenshot that aren't publically available anyway are the revision summaries.) —Cryptic 18:20, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

Not sure how that how that happened, but I assure you it was an accident. Do you want me to moved to the dated name? - FlightTime (open channel) 18:27, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

I've done so. Not my upload but it seems like this rename was a mistake and the rationale proffered is sensible. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:34, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

@Jo-Jo Eumerus: Thank you very much. - FlightTime (open channel) 18:37, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

FlightTime edit-conflicted with me adding a date to my requested title. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 23:07, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

WMBE has asked us to stop discussing this, and given that I know nothing more than what's already public about it there's nothing to be gained from further discussion. ‑ Iridescent 09:00, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

In related Fram/Signpost news. The Belgium chapter and wikimania events (covered in the signpost here) have been brought up at WP:FRAMBAN. I remember being livid about it at the time, being partially deaf myself. But never saw the followup on the mailing lists (because, you know, mailing lists are an obsolete archaic method of communication for old people). Any thoughts senpai? Only in death does duty end (talk) 19:58, 19 June 2019 (UTC)
At least one of the people being complained about there is vehemently contesting WMBE's version of events, and the WMF is denying that anyone was banned from any event. (You can follow the discussions in real time here.) I'm not inclined to comment on what may or may not have happened at an event at which I wasn't present, based solely on the statement of one side in a dispute. (As Dariusz says here, if T&S receive an allegation of a threat of violence, regardless of whether it's justified or not, they'd be in serious dereliction of duty if they didn't investigate it. AFAIK nobody has an issue with them investigating any accusations against Fram, the issue is that they appear to have taken the allegations against him at face value despite a lack of evidence.) If I ruled the WMF I'd shut down Wikimania without blinking, as I'm not sure I've ever seen it mentioned in any context other than either people complaining about how toxic it is, or the WMF using "travel scholarships" as a way to pay bribes to people willing to toe the party line on controversial issues (the "reports" the recipients of freebies are obliged to write to prove it was necessary the WMF pay them hundreds of dollars and that they weren't just freeloading on donor funds are unintentionally hilarious: anyone for I had various conversations about Wikidata Infoboxes with conference attendees?), but I don't rule the WMF. Unless and until people have clarified exactly what went on in Cape Town—there were about 500 people there, there must be plenty of witnesses to any alleged bad behaviour—I'm inclined to treat it as a distraction from the issue at hand. ‑ Iridescent 20:19, 19 June 2019 (UTC)
Actually the "they appear to have taken the allegations against him at face value despite a lack of evidence" is the bit that that drew me in the WMBE statement. From what they have stated, there seems to have been a lot of 'taking at face value' - the first part of 'case 3' there is what was interesting. If you have a complaint from someone that someone else came into a room and said something so distressing they were unable to present well, it should have been trivial to confirm that given the room was full of other people as handy witnesses. It just sounds bizarre that that wasnt done. Only in death does duty end (talk) 20:31, 19 June 2019 (UTC)
Sometimes I wonder if the WMF people who handle harassment are working from real life procedure - where harassment accusations often dissolve into he-said-(s)he-said as there is often no evidence but also no counterevidence - without realizing that the MediaWiki software by its nature always leaves a record and thus one can work from that instead of taking things at face value (or not). Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:38, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

ec, re OID It may have been done. It gives me no pleasure to defend T&S, even hypothetically, but I can certainly imagine that they did receive corroborating complaints but feel they need to withhold names.
This is a situation where I think we genuinely do need to hear their side. I know nothing about WMBE but I can think of at least two occasions where "the conduct of a prominent person in a local chapter got progressively weirder until eventually they started flinging allegations of harassment around with little or no basis in fact against whoever they happened to feel had wronged them, and eventually had to be kicked out" has occurred. ‑ Iridescent 20:42, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

WMF legal counsels

Random question: given that you seem to know the history of the WMF and its employees, and given what you said to Kudpung and given what Dave (WTT) said on his talk page (see also my comment there), where is it possible on the WMF pages to find a history of who the legal counsel has been over time? I have Brad Patrick and Mike Godwin so far, but embarrassingly have forgotten the one that was there at the meeting I refer to in 2012. This trend for WMF Legal to get more involved in community matters (if I am reading WTT's comment right) is concerning, but maybe the seeds were there in 2012 as well? Carcharoth (talk) 10:34, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

Will answer properly when not on phone but you're thinking of Geoff Bingham. ‑ Iridescent 2 11:11, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

Geoff Brigham (meta user page), not Geoffrey Bingham, but yeah, thanks for remembering that. Carcharoth (talk) 12:46, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

GorillaWarfare had a very useful timeline/table affair detailing when the senior staff came and went and which crisis each departure coincided with, during the period of chaos after Sue Gardner resigned, but she seems to have taken it down. There's an archived version (~~in which the filters don't work so you can only view the whole thing~~ ignore that, the filter buttons do work in Chrome) here. ‑ Iridescent 13:08, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

Thanks. Very useful. Didn't know Oliver changed his name to Os. Carcharoth (talk) 13:11, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

Oh gosh, thank you, I redid my website and didn't realize I'd inadvertently broken it. Will get it back live right now... GorillaWarfare (talk) 17:21, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

Update: It's live again at https://mollywhite.net/wikimedia-timeline/. GorillaWarfare (talk) 17:31, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

GorillaWarfare, loving the pained expression of the cat.^[8] ‑ Iridescent 18:41, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

<mv my post to lower down> Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:57, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Fram's criticisms of the WMF

I have completely lost track of this, but somewhere I remember you pointing to Risker's pointing out of an old comment by Fram being very critical of the WMF, can you or Risker remember that? Anyway, while over on meta (to where Fram has been asked at COM:AN to move his 'responses' on Commons to the en-wiki discussions), I looked at Fram's contributions (like many heavy users of en-Wikipedia, the shift to contributing heavily and consistently at meta can be difficult to effect and he does not have many contributions there), and I found this from 2014. The archived thread is here (the whole of that page is almost a potted history of various matters from back then). See also here. A consistent theme seems to be that (on some matters) the WMF don't engage with the community because they don't know how to or are unable to deal with the end result. It is a real and recognised problem that keeps recurring. Carcharoth (talk) 11:16, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

Is this diff (posted by Risker in the morass above) what you're thinking of? The personalities involved then are one of the prime things making me think that this is potentially motivated by personal grudges rather than a misplaced good-faith attempt to act on what they mistakenly thought was a genuine problem: while the WMF is finally—years late—rid of the wretched Oliver "30-feet double-ended dildos coated in acid and razor wire in the ARSE for all eternity" Keyes, his cronies are still very much present at the WMF.

Regarding this, I can't fault Fram's assessment of the first two. James Forester I never had any dealings with so can't judge. Regarding WAID I think Fram is being unfair; when someone's job is to try to come up with justifications for whatever the WMF does, and the WMF has a cannon as loose as Jorm, there are going to be some verbal gymnastics. Being a spokesperson whose job entails putting a positive spin on your employer is not always going to be easy; I imagine every British Ambassador in the world is right now trying to work out how they're going to put a positive spin on "incoherent racist drunken oaf". ‑ Iridescent 12:58, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

You mean the British PM-in-waiting? With reports of a domestic splashed over the papers. I have a feeling Jeremy Hunt might actually pull off a surprise. Well, here's hoping. Still not sure how likely a second referendum or general election is. Hmm. Nothing like UK politics or Brexit to take your mind off things... :-) About T&S, I am on friendly terms with a number of them, though some of my criticism might have upset some of them - who knows who has read what? Hmm. Can you link to when Oliver Keyes left the WMF? Also, some of this is years ago, but the way Wikipedia works (keeping a record of everything), works against it in that respect. Imagine an office dispute being recorded in a wiki. Carcharoth (talk) 13:07, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

Here's Oliver Keyes's ragequit (this isn't outing, the link is on his Meta userpage). Assuming Boris wins I would think the government would last weeks rather than months. Even with the DUP to prop them up they have an upcoming byelection which will reduce the working majority to three, and the DUP continuing to prop them up is a big ask; while Christian fundamentalists could work with the vicar's daughter from Wheatley, being seen to prop up a bumbling thug who refuses to disclose how many children he has by how many different women is a very different proposition. ‑ Iridescent 13:21, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

Where Os Keyes has got to now (academia) is actually (as far as I can tell) impressive (see his personal home page). I'm glad for him on a personal level (I did speak to him a couple of times in a pub in London, though I doubt he would remember). As for UK politics, yes, the effects of the by-election may be interesting. Carcharoth (talk) 13:30, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

If Wikipedia_talk:Harassment#RfC:_Clarification_of_OUTING closes as option #2, it may very well be considered outing even if something is linked on someone's meta userpage.. Galobtter (pingó mió) 17:05, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

If T&S want to add me to their Nacht und Nebel list, I'm sure even Jan could find a pretext more convincing than "outed Ironholds as ironholds.com". ‑ Iridescent 18:44, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

In case it gets missed, see here. Logging off soon. Might not be checking back on all this until Monday now. Better things to do. :-) Carcharoth (talk) 13:15, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

[moved from above] Keys changed and changes many things depending on whose flavour of the month he is. All I can say is that following his resignation from the WMF, the projects I was working on, such as NPP and ACTRIAL, into which he was imposed on us by the WMF as 'coordinator' (causing at least one of my NPP team to resign), leaped forward like a spring lamb. If anyone wants to know what it was really like to have to work with O Keys (WMF), drop me an email. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:46, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Crossroads

Actually, one more point. Re-reading that timeline by GW reminded me how much of a 'crossroads' people thought the WMF and the wider movement was at at that point back then. Two questions: (1) Was that as much of a crossroad as people thought and did anything change? (2) Are we/the WMF at a similar crossroad now? Ironically, at times of great change and stress like this, those most likely to be affected/move on are (eventually) not the middle managers, but the executives and chairs. We will see how this one goes. I do feel sorry for the rank-and-file employees who have to wait out the storms caused, frankly, by mismanagement. Carcharoth (talk) 13:21, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

Risker or NYB are probably better placed than me to judge that one; I largely missed the Tretikov period. The most obvious change I can see between then and now is Visual Editor, which has created a de facto caste system on Wikipedia between old editors who speak Wikitext with a native level of fluency, and new editors who've grown up with VE and consequently get confused and upset when they have to engage in discussions (VE doesn't work on talkpages; while you can puzzle out what wikitext does, for new editors editing talkpages must be as confusing as being forced to write in Scots or IPA.) ‑ Iridescent 13:30, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

OK, thanks. Am now trying to work out what to make of this. It may actually be what happened. Though surely the machines of loving grace should know how to manage backlashes? :-) Carcharoth (talk) 13:55, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

Personally I find it improbable; the Facebooks et al that FeydHuxtable mentions certainly can and do conduct endless research into online community dynamics, but in my experience most of the tech types at the WMF would have trouble counting to twenty without taking their socks off; it's no secret that the WMF gets the programmers Google, Twitter, Apple and Facebook didn't want. (FWIW, A Nobody/LGRDC wasn't banned because of some kind of anti-inclusionist witch-hunt, but because he got caught red-handed socking while he was the subject of an open arb case. If there were some kind of deletionist cabal running banning policy I guarantee that the Colonel wouldn't still be with us.) Besides, if the WMF were doing this (a) someone would have leaked it during the Knowledge Engine fiasco, (b) that kind of project would appear in the budgets, and (c) the devs would be boasting to anyone in earshot about their new AI system. I'm far more inclined to believe "we thought this was what you wanted" or "there was a coordinated campaign to get people to file complaints and we made the mistake of taking them at face value" are the most likely possibilities, with "there was indisputable wrongdoing which we genuinely can't discuss", "we intentionally wanted to send the message that nobody is safe pour encourager les autres" or "pretext to enforce a personal grudge" less likely but possible. ‑ Iridescent 14:44, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

Is "the community didn't deem this sanction-worthy but we don't agree" a possibility as well? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 15:06, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

I don't see how that could be; there was no recent complaint of any kind filed against Fram anywhere since March 2018 (there's a handy table here), so whatever it is, it's not "you didn't act on this issue so we had to do it for you". ‑ Iridescent 15:14, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

See, to me that list comes off as a list of things that were processed onwiki, which may not necessarily include whatever-brought-this-ban if it was a "last straw on the camel's back" situation. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:44, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

Direct quote from T&S explaining what the "last straw" was:

This decision has come following extensive review of your conduct on that project and is an escalation to the Foundation’s past efforts to encourage course correction, including a conduct warning issued to you on April 2018 and a conduct warning reminder issued to you on March 2019. With those actions in mind, this ban has been triggered following your recent abusive communications on the project, as seen here.

Either Fram is fabricating that email (which I assume nobody is alleging; T&S would have pointed that out immediately); or Jan is lying (eminently possible but AGF and all that) or the 'last straw' genuinely was "hurt Arbcom's feelings". ‑ Iridescent 19:22, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

Well, considering the output here... Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:38, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping Iridescent. With enormous respect, I doubt even you know the full story of the Inc / Del wars. A hero like Le Gran Roi doesn't take a fall due to regular wiki -politics. Unlike most Inclusionists who tend to avoid personal conflict, he had the stomach and skill to take on deletionists champions, helping to get even deletionist sock-master admins desysoped and perma-banned This put him right to the top of the Deletionist hit list. They had emails chains with dozens of recipients where they plotted to get their revenge for years on end. (The squad has seen these emails as they made the distribution list so large the emails were seen by folk who weren't true deletionists, one of whom forwarded to us after being overcome by guilt.) Just to be clear, Kww who started the threat you linked to wasn't on the dist list, but some of those supporting his ban proposal were, as were several behind said arb cases & other older attacks that had set it up. It was death by a thousand cuts.

Getting back to Framgate, not all the Foundation's work on AI / machine learning was done behind closed doors. Many big name Wikipedians knew about it, e.g. see comments on this blog by Cullen, Carrite, Doc James, etc. WMF doesn't have to recruit the best data scientists, as they run collaborations with folk from Google etc. Also, some of their recruits are top line talent, for example Ironholds himself. Interestingly, Ironholds is now a data scientist at University of Washington, where team behind the June 11 Harrassement & Gender gap Vidoe are based. I wonder if he had a hand in compiling the study? As another coincidence, Ironholds was also present at the 2010 meeting with Sue Gardener & the Colonel. And so were you Carcharoth. We had a 5 minute conversation about the imminent threats facing the once mighty rescue squad. It would be amazing if you remember that or even the various things Sue was saying about the Del/Inc history, as you were mostly discussing other pressing matters with fellow Arb Roger Davies. But just goes to show it's a small world. FeydHuxtable (talk) 19:37, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

There are many words I could use to describe Ironholds. "Top line talent" would definitely not be one of them. The WMF talks a good game on AI but is all lead and no whippet; any time playing with their showpiece product will give you a sense of just how ropey their systems are. (Install this script which theoretically provides a "quality assessment" for articles you visit to get an idea of the level they're at. In their own words, the metrics used for assessing 'quality' are How many sections are there? Is there an infobox? How many references? And do the references use a {{cite}} template?.) ‑ Iridescent 19:47, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

There are also many words I could use to describe Ironholds - and with the support of many users. But if I did, I would be dragged off to ANI for PA. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:33, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Back to the original question

Going back to the original question, I'd say that, yes, that was a very major crossroads for the WMF. It was a time where I had a bit of additional insight, as I was actually in the SF offices in November of 2015 for FDC deliberations (comments about the WMF by the FDC are here), and I was back again as the invited speaker at the staff all-hands in January 2016. I think anyone from the FDC would agree that there was the impression that the WMF was experiencing serious internal problems when we were there in November, and my view was that it was in full-fledged crisis mode by the time I was there in January. This was an organization that was in very serious trouble; while I won't go so far as to say its demise was imminent, it was certainly the first time that I thought its demise from anything other than senescence was a real possibility. I'll also point out that it was almost all happening in the background; few "community" members were consciously aware of the extent of the problems happening at the "head office", although the increasingly high profile resignations were starting to raise eyebrows. (Aside: I've seen a surprisingly large number of quiet but significant resignations and terminations in the last several months; while some are undoubtedly for positive and personal reasons, it's certainly made me start looking more closely. Many of those resignations were not announced in any public forum, and their staff list hasn't been updated in at least a month.) By mid-March of 2016, the Lila era was over, but it has taken a very long time to right the ship, so to speak. The WMF had already been largely leaderless for almost a year after Sue Gardner announced her resignation, and then we had that long stretch with Lila in the ED chair; during that time, the WMF had no strategic plan of any significance, no medium- to long-term direction. It is only the past 18 months that it's started to do that kind of planning, with a medium-term plan now approved, and the major long-term movement strategy development in progress right now. It is the latter process that is the current crossroads, and one that could take the "movement" in a lot of different directions. I'm involved in that process, as a member of the Roles & Responsibilities working group, and it's not going to be easy to come up with recommendations that make sense and will get global buy-in. There are a lot of pressures, from affiliates, from the WMF, from "marginalized group" stakeholders, from the technology perspective; unfortunately, the group that seems to be least involved/interested/vocal in this process are the content-contributing communities (all the wikipedias, wikisources, etc, including Commons and Wikidata). There have been a few points where I almost had the impression that the projects are considered the least important part of the "Wikimedia movement"; certainly the outreach to the projects has been very limited compared to other groups. I suspect a big reason for that is that it's easy to reach out to the affiliates and chapters since they all have an identified point of contact, as do various committees and semi-formal groups, but there's no such thing with the content communities. Risker (talk) 18:07, 22 June 2019 (UTC)
Things like meta:Talk:Community health initiative/User reporting system consultation 2019? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 18:41, 22 June 2019 (UTC)
To me that "Community Health Initiative" stuff is emblematic of the WMF approach, of trying to find a technical fix to everything. They're so dominated by programmers, they constantly lose touch with the fact that these are people they're dealing with here. I never thought this would be a sentence I'd ever write, but while I don't think it's likely I at least now think it's possible that Larry Sanger's latest wheeze could inflict genuine damage on Wikipedia; it will be a case of who scrambles fastest to get a collaborative environment working instead of constant tinkering with look-and-feel. At the moment the trickle of resignations is still only a trickle, but I know for certain that quite a few people are holding their breath from the Board before they decide whether to jump ship. We only have ≈500 active admins; when you're looking at 6,818,884 articles it wouldn't take that many to abandon ship for the seams to rip. ‑ Iridescent 18:57, 22 June 2019 (UTC)
Given that "Larry Sanger's latest wheeze" claims to have already forked the entire English Wikpedia, it may soon only be Google's search rankings that keep Wikipedia afloat. It hasn't been done very well of course, and Sanger obviously isn't being entirely open, as contrary to the hype about getting paid to edit, in reality the business model only makes sense if most editors actually pay to edit. But it ought to serve as a warning shot across Wikipedia's bow nevertheless. Eric Corbett 00:00, 23 June 2019 (UTC)
(Pointing out here that after seeing the latest Everipedia thread on the Unnameable Site, I checked two articles, and both had substantial text missing from the introductions that made for nonsense; in one case the cut left a pair of unclosed square brackets visible. Bad, bad, bad job. Yngvadottir (talk) 11:50, 23 June 2019 (UTC)))

Don't get me wrong, I think Larrypedia has no chance of success; their business model relies on people paying to add advertorial and have it locked in place against reversion, and why would anyone volunteer to write something neutral when someone can just come along and overwrite it with spam with no redress? Plus, unless Larry has had a total personality transplant he won't be able to resist the temptation to interfere and micromanage and will end up annoying all his writers. One of Wikipedia's strengths is that Jimmy, the Board and the WMF management generally have the sense not to try to interfere unless they feel they genuinely have no alternative (if the WMF had submitted MediaViewer, Project Winter, Flow or even Knowledge Engine or Enforced Civility for community discussion and restricted themselves to offering technical support and explanations of what they saw the benefits as, there's a good chance that they'd all have been accepted with appropriate modifications). What Larrypedia does have an outside chance of doing is creating enough of a dent that Wikipedia ceases to look invulnerable, and one of the big players decides it's worth their while working on what an Encarta or Knol for the social media age would look like. I don't think it's likely, but on 9 June I would have thought it impossible rather than unlikely. ‑ Iridescent 07:09, 23 June 2019 (UTC)
Incidentally, seeing as I can't find African humid period at all and Payún Matrú is still in a stub state, I would qualify "already forked the entire English Wikpedia" a bit. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 07:58, 23 June 2019 (UTC)
As I understand it, their fork was a copy of the database as of 2017, but their site is editable they can't now update when our articles change, because doing so will overwrite the changes their own editors have made—consequently they still retain all our subsequently-remedied errors and omissions. (That's not so unusual; the WMF did exactly the same when they "liberated" the contents of WikiTravel to create WikiVoyage.) ‑ Iridescent 08:06, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Sidetrack about the WMF's corporate culture and office

...the WMF approach, of trying to find a technical fix to everything, echoes what I have been saying for years. Software programmers are not sociologists , psychologists, marketing, or CRM specialists, and they are very often notoriously poor communicators (at least in my experience). Instead of being allowed to attempt to identify non technical problems themselves so that they can justify their jobs by developing technical solutions, they need to be told by experts what problems need to be addressed from a technical aspect and just get on with writing the code. If the WMF can't be encouraged to understand that, then maybe they could accept a technical solution to the deep rooted issues within their own management and hierarchy. Then it would take a very astute individual to explain to them why that can't be done. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:32, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

These are people who can hear someone say I had begun visualizing open knowledge existing in the shape of a universe. I saw the Wikimedia movement as the most motivated and sincere group of beings, united in their mission to build a rocket to explore Universal Free Knowledge. The words "search" and "discovery" and "knowledge" swam around in my mind with some rocket to navigate it. However, "rocket" didn't seem to work, but in my mind, the rocket was really just an engine, or a portal, a TARDIS, that transports people on their journey through Universal Free Knowledge. and take it seriously. There are some excellent people at the WMF but my respect for either their organizational culture or their collective ability to relate to normal human beings is not high. ‑ Iridescent 08:15, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

They have no organizational culture. It's partly due to them being so global (probably with people who believe in fairies from the wisps of mist deep in Siberian forests) - there are too many cultural dichotomies on the SF office floor for anything cohesive to crystalize. Decades ago when I was a teacher, I have seen kindergarten children in a schoolyard organise themselves better into work groups with self-emerging leaders and workable hierarchies. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 14:59, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Oh, they definitely have a culture; things may have changed as I don't really know any of the current crop, but in my experience when they're off the record their staff consistently talk about an atmosphere of bullying, senior management who expect their peons to treat them with deference, and a stereotypical Californian attitude of enforced fake civility. (They even have a page on their website boasting about it, which to anyone outside the West Coast bubble—and certainly anyone outside North America—reads like an excerpt from the manifesto of a particularly crappy 1970s hippy cult.) The cynic in me says that the fact their own recruitment website lists "snacks to fuel your thinking, monthly massages, gym, yoga classes, weekly farmers market, gender neutral bathroom, monthly staff lunch, and more" as supposed perks says all one needs to know about their organisational culture.

I'd be willing to bet that at any given time the SF office contains at least three out of: toy animal mascot with a comedy name; "If you sprinkle when you tinkle be sweet and wipe the seat" sign in the toilet; signup sheet to sponsor someone's charity fun run; noticeboard with photos of Z-list celebrities the staff have met; employee sitting on a couch in the reception area staring blankly into the middle distance. ‑ Iridescent 15:28, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

I genuinely laughed out loud when I read that because it's exactly the image I have of them. These ageing and not so ageing leftovers of a mix of hippy and yuppy who have moved from smoking dope to a culture of people wearing 'Don't photograph me', 'Don't touch me', 'Don't look at me', 'Go away!' buttons and hiding precisely behind that attitude of enforced fake civility which isn't actually confined to California. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 15:49, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Conducting my own "deep dive", I find File:Wikimedia Foundation Offices in San Francisco.webm. As far as I can tell every single one of them has the expression and general demeanour of Aeroflot cabin crew c. 1988. An interesting list of names visible on the whiteboard at 0.32 in. ‑ Iridescent 16:08, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Wow, that's an old video; Erik was still there, and the Wikipedia Education Program still existed, so I'd say 2014, 2015 at the latest. They've since moved from those offices to one that is reportedly about half the size (I've never been in the current offices); more than half of the people who are seen in the video have left the WMF, although I suppose that's fairly commonplace for just about all workplaces in the US/California nowadays. The last couple of times I was there, I think every single element you described in your post above was present. Keep in mind that until about a year ago, they used to include photos of the stuffed animal mascots in the staff list. Risker (talk) 17:01, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Dated March 2014, so would have been just before Year Zero began on May 1. Looking more closely there's still a stuffed cat in the staff list.

Commons:Category:Wikimedia Foundation offices is the gift that keeps on giving if you want an excuse to roll your eyes. The new office looks fairly grim, if this is the best spin they can put on it. ‑ Iridescent 17:35, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Sometimes I was thinking of going to the USA at some point. Not San Francisco though, I don't care for this at all. These images don't look like "inviting" either. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:16, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

The climate in SF isn't as bad as those photos make it look—it's fairly similar to that of England or northern France. Unless there's something there in which you have a particular interest, I certainly wouldn't say it's worth going out of your way to visit. What I always tell people is that if you're only going to visit one US city make it Chicago, which is the equal of anywhere else not just in the US but in the world when it comes to visitor attractions, museums and general things to do, but is cheaper and friendlier than NYC or California, has a superb transport system, and is much more walkable than most US cities. If you want a "various cultures of North America" tour that doesn't involve travelling huge distances, Chicago–Detroit–Toronto–Ottawa–Montreal takes you through five wildly different places, and can be done in easy drives or by public transport without any need for internal flights. ‑ Iridescent 08:54, 25 June 2019 (UTC)

Hey now... not everyone in North America is that... err.. something. Get away from the big cities, and you'll often find genuine civility even in areas where the culture is very conservative. Although rural areas are often looked at as bigoted, they are often very much "live and let live" - if you want privacy, they won't push themselves into your affairs. Although those seat signs are common in areas where there is only one public bathroom for a business...usually when the business is mostly female but has occasional male customers...<�/small> Ealdgyth - Talk 15:54, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

I'm from North America away from the big cities; you don't need to tell me. It's not even all big cities, but specifically the coasts; Houston, Chicago, Denver etc manage to still have people who are actually polite rather than "have a nice day" polite. ‑ Iridescent 16:08, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

I am now disinclined to cut them any slack, but my skin would crawl if someone slowly filmed my workplace without me having a chance to run and hide. And I am mentally hitting myself to keep from liking the stuffed animal thing. I bet many of them wish they were here in Silly Valley instead of dealing with all the poop in the streets in SF. And those perks aren't great; what are the office snacks like? Luckily they are very tolerant of working from home. But they are (or were) over Kaplan; that's sort of appropriate and I believe I know people who work there. However, that's as far as I'll go in extending sympathy to them. They chose to work for that awful outfit and get paid for getting in our way. Yngvadottir (talk) 20:08, 24 June 2019 (UTC)

It was filmed by commons:User:VGrigas (WMF), who I've never heard of but to judge by the userpage appears to be the WMF's Leni Riefenstahl, so I assume the filming was all done with consent. The WMF are so paranoid about their own security—until relatively recently they wouldn't even publicly admit where the head office was—I can't imagine them filming people without permission. ‑ Iridescent 09:04, 25 June 2019 (UTC)

"someone we're trying to negotiate with"

Do you actually think there is any real point in negotiation with the WMF/T&S team at this time? Negotiation reguires that both parties actually want to work together to resolve something. I dont see either the WMF or the ENWP (or DE for that matter) communities have any real common frame of reference to start from now. Only in death does duty end (talk) 18:10, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

The announcement is somewhat buried in the chaff because is was only a one-liner and posted in the middle of the page, but T&S are apparently now speaking with Arbcom about this. We're all still digesting and considering followup could be taken either to mean the talks broke down and they're debating whether to go back, or the talks were constructive so they're deciding how best to follow up, but at least T&S have opened the door of the ivory tower a crack.

In either case, something is going to happen at some point; the Mythical Board Statement seems to have been punted into the long grass, but I assume the arbs are all watching WP:BN and are aware that those who've walked thus far are the tip of the iceberg as there are a lot more admins and editors who don't like the idea of serving as the militia of Vichy Wikipedia but are still sitting on their hands and holding off "officially" walking in the hope that this can be resolved amicably but will resign en masse if it becomes clear that there's neither a satisfactory explanation provided to the board or arbcom for why the block was made, why it couldn't be public and why it couldn't be appealable; or an admission that T&S exceeded their authority and a return to the status quo ante. I presume none of the arbcom, trustees or employees is particularly keen to go down as "the one who broke Wikipedia". ‑ Iridescent 18:35, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

When a veteran of the WP creation big bang speaks out, and follows up with this (which would have had more impact had he posted it on the FRAMBAN page), then it really is time to cut the repetitive cackle and speculation there and do something - like a total shake-up of the WMF and Arbcom and preferably by consensus of the unpaid volunteers. But after all these days of Jimbo limbo it's unlikely for anything new to be forthcoming apart from the demission of those responsible (which is unlikely to happen), and more admins and 'crats handing their bits in (which might happen), a chat with James and a few privileged visitors and invitees in Stockholm (at least I sincerely hope Risker will be there and banging with her gavel), will take place when all the hooha has died down and everyone will be trying hard to forget it ever happened. That's what happened with the ill fated IEP which cost millions in squandered funds with the only people benefiting being those who escaped the office in SF to enjoy yet another salaried junket to an exotic location, and leaving the volunteers once more to clean up the mass of rubble in the war zone. All I can say is: does it ever end - what's next year's major WMF disaster going to be? Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 13:09, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

At the rate at which responses aren't happening, it might still be this one ;-) Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 13:20, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

Regarding "admins and 'crats handing their bits in" I assume there are quite a few others in a holding pattern, not taking any administrative or maintenance actions until this is clarified but not jumping as long as there's even the slimmest possibility the WMF was in the right. There's still as slight but not zero chance that the ban was enacted for good reason and the silence and stonewalling is the result of Legal ordering staff not to disclose anything. If it does transpire that both the ban, and the unwillingness to talk, were for good reason, then every functionary who's resigned will be taken by the WMF that Wikipedia is dominated by a group of hotheads who can't be trusted to run their own affairs, and needs T&S to install a viceroy to keep the natives in order.

Regarding "what's next year's major WMF disaster going to be?" I'll say Wikimedia Space will be a fairly safe each-way bet. ‑ Iridescent 2 13:29, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

I doubt it. Another Wikiversity in the making, or full of notices of meetups and museum "partnerships". Johnbod (talk) 14:04, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

The FRAMBAN page is an echo chamber of outrage. There's no point in trying to persuade the community of anything because the community can't fix this. WMF is willing to exercise the ultimate authority that comes from control of the servers, and has made it clear that they will not back down. It's clear that WMF is united behind this internally. The only way to fix that is to change the leadership and get someone who doesn't want to turn Wikipedia into something like a Social Knowledge LLC community, or Facebook, or Youtube, or Amazon Marketplace, or any of a dozen other commercial ventures who arbitrarily ban people and content for all kinds of reasons or no reason at all. So it is really up to @Jimbo Wales: and @Doc James: at this point because they are the only ones connected to ENWP who get a vote and therefore the only ones who have the power to do anything. I'm keeping my bit in the hope that I'll wake up one morning to read that Jan Eissfeldt has resigned to pursue other interests. Otherwise it isn't much good, because the real power will be vested in a couple dozen paid reviewers responding to the flood of complaints that will come once everyone figures out that mobilizing T&S over a TOS violation is the best way to get the upper hand in any dispute. We're now seeing the thin end of the wedge, and that's where it's going. Uninvited Company 21:26, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

Yes Risker has agreed to try to make it to the meetings about this at Wikimania. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 17:42, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

Mention in upcoming issue of The Signpost

Just wanted you to know your name is included in a report about FRAMBAN in the upcoming issue of The Signpost. If you have any comments you can leave them on my talkpage or other Signpost official channels. ☆ Bri (talk) 19:01, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Bri, why are you talking about harassment of non-majority editors in that article? That's not something that's been alleged either by the WMF statements or by the emails released by Fram (the full allegations are collated in detail at Wikipedia:Community response to the Wikimedia Foundation's ban of Fram/Summary#What has WMF effectively told us?); unless you're privy to information that hasn't been shared, this comes across as a baseless insinuation. There have been many, many allegations made against Fram over the years—many of them made by me—but that's certainly never been one of them to the best of my knowledge. ‑ Iridescent 19:03, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback. The E-in-C is going to take specific allegations in a separate writeup; I'm mostly interested in the community/WMF interactions in the Discussion report I'm working on. So I'll trim that to make it clear I'm talking here as a background issue where historic issues where exclusion of minorities, women especially, has been of concern. If you can point me to the genesis of the gamergate DS, maybe I could work with that. ☆ Bri (talk) 19:48, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Bri, women are not a minority; in fact, in the world, they are a majority. They're under-represented in the editing community compared to the general global population. Please be careful how the term "minority" is used, because we do have some *real* minorities editing on this and other projects. Risker (talk) 19:54, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

"Underrepresented" may be a better expression of what I was trying to get at. Also, women as minorities is a non-controversial thing, is it not? ☆ Bri (talk) 21:00, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

@Bri:, the article you link to above has enough "problem" tags on it to question anything written there. The single link to the assertion in the article inferring that "many" social scientists have studied women from the perspective of being a minority goes to a study that, in its opening paragraph, says "...there has been little serious consideration of women as a minority group by sociologists...". I think you can safely say that it's at least a somewhat controversial subject. Risker (talk) 21:21, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I read that as "no, we insist on retaining this insinuation despite a total lack of anything to suggest it has any relevance" which is deeply concerning. Given that you don't know Fram's gender, ethnicity or sexuality (we use "he" as a pronoun because Fram has long been vocally opposed to singular they and novel pronouns, so the use of anything other than generic he would come across as a deliberate insult), I find your insinuation particularly problematic. Nothing in any of the material provided by anyone—and there are some people who really hate Fram in those threads—has made any claim of anything remotely related to "harassment of non-majority editors", which is a fairly meaningless phrase in any event (are you trying to claim that it's Fram who is being harassed? Belgians are certainly a "non-majority"? If you're using it to refer to women, they're certainly not a "minority" in the world, and even the evidence that they're a minority on Wikipedia is based on WMF research which could politely be described as "problematic"). ‑ Iridescent 20:01, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Fram has long been vocally opposed to singular they and novel pronouns, so the use of anything other than generic he would come across as a deliberate insult Huh - I got used to using singular they because I keep bumping into people whose username reflects the wrong gender. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:11, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

So has everyone; for most editors you have no idea of their age, gender, race etc unless they choose to make it known. In Fram's case Fram was literally just involved in a very noisy argument about gender-neutral pronouns before Fram was banned—it's one of the only four things anyone has been able to find in Fram's history that could even theoretically be considered the mythical "last straw" that led to Fram's ban, and unless we're going to have every discussion that mentions Fram refer to Fram as "Fram" and consequently have sentences that look like this, generic he is the only option that doesn't look like baiting. You presumably know better than me, but IIRC Dutch speakers often find 'singular they' annoying as there's no equivalent in the Dutch language. ‑ Iridescent 20:23, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Well, I don't know anything about Dutch...Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:38, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

I made a similar comment here. That's why what Raystorm said was so outrageous. Enigma^msg 21:23, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Don't you have the same grammar and they just have more vowels and fouler beer? ‑ Iridescent 20:46, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Close. I am a dyed-in-the-wool teetotaller in Switzerland. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:48, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Huh, I could have sworn you were Austrian. Must have just assumed from all the mountains. ‑ Iridescent 20:51, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Austria and Switzerland are close and both are mountainous, so yes. I prefer it warm and dry and open landscapes, though. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 09:50, 24 June 2019 (UTC)

Bri, why is the Signpost even raising the issue of Gamergate and harassment? None of these allegations have been substantiated. We know ... exactly nothing. At this point T & S has torn down trust project-wide, yet the Signpost will claim, "oh, it's a Gamergate issue?". This is seriously problematic. Sorry, Iri for butting in. Didn't know where else to post. Victoria (tk) 20:35, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Oh, good gods ... is the Signpost REALLY going to drag Gamergate into this??? REALLY? Talk about throwing fat onto the fire... Ealdgyth - Talk 20:39, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

TK don't apologise, I entirely agree. This looks like an exercise in flinging enough mud in the hope that some of it sticks. The issue here isn't Fram or anything Fram may or may not have done, it's that the WMF have self-granted themselves to disappear editors without apparent cause on the basis either of personal grudges or of allegations which taken on face value without investigating. ‑ Iridescent 20:44, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Just going to put these here for reference before they're lost in the archives:

Possibility 1: Amitamitdd. Fram moved three of their articles to draft space (Draft:Hyderabad Custody, Draft:Wetalwadi, Draft:Anand Vidyalay) and criticised them for creating pages in mainspace that were not up to snuff ([9]). They would later take them to AN/I (Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/IncidentArchive1010#User:Amitamitdd), where Lourdes indef'd them due to their total and utter uncommunicativeness.

Possibility 2: CyrilleDunant. Cyrille took the opposite position of Fram in the Rama arbcom case, and appeared to be convinced there was a conspiracy to sanction Rama (WP:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Rama/Evidence#Evidence presented by CyrilleDunant, WT:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Rama/Evidence#Comments by CyrilleDunant). Fram directed four comments on the talk page to their allegations both on the evidence subpage and the talk page of same (WT:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Rama/Evidence#Comments by Fram), but did not submit any evidence in the case that I am aware of.

Possibility 3: The gendering dispute with Fae. While we know that Fae did not ask for a ban, it's not unreasonable to assume a T&S user (or someone unrelated, given T&S did not investigate the issues at WMBE) saw the conversation and interpreted it (in good faith) as harassment.

Possibility 4: The totality of the edits Fram made to WP:Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard on 04 May, of which the "Fuck ArbCom" post was only the first. Fram made 9 posts to that page (not counting the T&S-cited diff: [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17]), all of which were scathingly critical of ArbCom and the new deopping policy. They also got into a bit of a spat on BU Rob13's talk page, with Fram's opening edit summary there being "Perhaps shouting will get the message thru?".

The above from Jéské Couriano, but my and AFAIK everyone else's investigations have not found anything else other than routine NPP and adminny stuff. ‑ Iridescent 20:44, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

We might add this edit to (4). Too confrontational? Might be ..... ∯WBG^converse 09:52, 25 June 2019 (UTC)

@Ealdgyth, that would be the Chair of the Board of Trustees who tried to drag Gamergate into this. ‑ Iridescent 20:51, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Thanks Iridescent, this needs to be in the report. ☆ Bri (talk) 22:06, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Buzzfeed News article about the Fram drama!

[18] Benjamin (talk) 01:35, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

Look up. ‑ Iridescent 14:29, 28 June 2019 (UTC)

The mythical board statement appears to be out

Wikipedia:Community response to the Wikimedia Foundation's ban of Fram#Board statement, there are some replies below it. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 08:54, 3 July 2019 (UTC)

Between the board statement and Katherine Maher's statement that was probably as good as we were ever going to get. IMO the people complaining about the vagueness of the board statement are missing the mark—it's the job of the board to give broad strategic direction, not to micromanage, and Katherine Maher's statement is about as close to "we fucked up" as she could get without actually using those words; I assume after the minimum time necessary for plausible deniability has elapsed, Jan Eissfeldt will find himself promoted to an exciting new job in procurement or facilities where the public will never have to interact with him again. (I doubt those calling for the board to start firing employees or intervening directly in the writing of English Wikipedia policy have thought through the implications of what they're asking for. Do you really want these people getting the idea that it's within their powers to rewrite the Civility policy or the General Notability Guideline, or to dismiss anyone they think isn't showing sufficient zeal for Jimmy's personality cult?) ‑ Iridescent 12:09, 5 July 2019 (UTC)

Should heads roll?

I was 3metres away when Mahers's position as ED was confirmed by Wales in Esino Lario. For the reasons stated (cost over $3,000), I will be 5,500 miles away from Stockholm, but I'm with TonyBallioni on this, I will expect to hear the announcement of her resignation. The buck stops somewhere, and it be on her desk. Sorry to say, but her comments today reveal that after all these years with the WMF and the last 3 at the top, she doesn't fully understand how things work. Time for her to earn the salary that our volunteer work generates or move over. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 15:54, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, they’ve bungled this to the point where only new blood can move forward. The issue isn’t who is right or who is wrong. The issue is that we can’t move forward with current leadership in place. Even if they were 100% right, the current position is untenable. And that’s coming from someone who has recently been taking a wait and see approach to this. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:02, 29 June 2019 (UTC)
- Also, just to clarify, while I think Katherine resigning could solve the problem, I think Jan would be the more obvious choice. That’s why I said her or Jan. The issue is that trust needs to be rebuilt, and it can’t be done without a leadership change. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:21, 29 June 2019 (UTC)
It depends; a head needs to roll, but I don't know if it should be hers. I do believe that my earlier comment that it seems entirely plausible to me that an over-zealous employee was intercepting and deleting all the incoming emails of complaint and that the Board hushed things up from her because they didn't want her involved until they'd agreed on a common position, so she was never aware anything was going on until suddenly people started asking her for a response to the Buzzfeed article is likely to be correct, and whatever rumblings she heard she just assumed were the usual handful of malcontents, and genuinely didn't know she had a crisis on her hands. If blame is being apportioned, then based on the limited information we have I'd think it more likely lies with Jan Eissfeldt for failing to appreciate that he'd created a situation that was beyond his competence to handle, and not escalating the issue upwards sooner. (Someone said that Maggie Dennis is away; I'd be willing to bet we wouldn't be facing this if she'd been there.) AFAIK the job of ED is primarily flying around hob-nobbing with potential donors and occasionally passing on the Board's decisions to the staff, rather than day-to-day management, so I wouldn't necessarily hold her responsible for something that happened on her watch. That's not to say I think she's doing a good job—despite Lila and Sue's flaws, I would think either of them would have instantly seen what a bad idea T&S planning to start intervening directly in en-wiki's internal affairs was, and told them immediately to stop—but I wouldn't necessarily hold her responsible for having an incompetent employee. Besides, replacing the ED would be difficult; anyone competent would baulk at taking on a job where the last two holders had been forced out by internal revolts. ‑ Iridescent 16:16, 29 June 2019 (UTC)
- Personally, I've always thought that jobs like the ED are to a large degree professional fall guys rather than people who are actually responsible for stuff. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:36, 29 June 2019 (UTC)
- Iridescent, with very kind respect, I don't think the idea that Maher knew nothing about the gravity of this crisis until the BuzzFeed article dropped holds water. The reason I say this is according to this time line, WMF board member Doc James was aware there was a serious problem as did Jimbo Wales as of June 11th. The Buzzfeed article dropped June 27th, more than two weeks later. I can not imagine a scenario in which an in-charge CEO of an organization would have not known about this crisis as anything other than "rumblings" until the BF article dropped. There simply is no excuse. If the position of CEO of the WMF isn't a day-to-day involvement in management of the organization, then in the very least Janeen Uzzell as COO of the WMF should have been aware and directly involved in managing this crisis. Either the CEO and COO knew and chose not to manage this crisis and demonstrated in the very least a complete lack of appreciation of its impact, or they did not know and the communication pathways between the board and the WMF are woefully inadequate. In either case, the responsibility of this lies squarely on the CEO and COO either for inaction in the immediate case or inaction in the extended case of not putting in place appropriate management and communication structures. They can't have their cake and eat it too. --Hammersoft (talk) 17:54, 29 June 2019 (UTC)
  - We have a deadline now of the afternoon of July 5th, and I'd recommend to everyone waiting to see what appears then. If it's another block of meaningless boilerplate, or another variation on "peasants, how dare you question the nobility?"—or worse, if nothing appears at all or there's another attempt to kick the ball into the long grass—that's the time to break out the pitchforks and start calling for heads on poles. To judge by Katherine Maher's string of non-answers I'm not hopeful, but that may not be her fault; she may have been ordered by the board to stall and not to commit to anything until they've made their statement. ‑ Iridescent 19:15, 29 June 2019 (UTC)
    - I'm sure Doc is doing his best. But that's not a deadline in the sense of "With respect to a timeline we will have a statement within a week." It sounds to me more like another example of corporate damage limitation speak. Martinevans123 (talk) 19:23, 29 June 2019 (UTC)
    - I like Katherine Maher, but only as a decoration, which is undoubtedly what she was hired for. Nothing of any significance will happen on July 5th, and I'm sure we all know that. Eric Corbett 22:04, 29 June 2019 (UTC)
I have known for a fact for almost two years that Katherine's job is mainly that of a ambassador on a high salary and expense account and has little to do with the actual day-to-day management except as CEO occasionally having to sign a few papers and stuff. I was told once privately by a WMF staff that she is deliberately shielded from the community and the staff will not allow any direct communications between her and the community. A far cry from the days between 2009 and 2015 when Gardner used to hold the weekly Office Hours on IRC (something I never joined in with because I can't abide IRCs). Hence my article in The Signpost and Cullen328's comment: ...this is a major WMF scandal that requires an immediate and substantive response. Katherine (WMF) should get off her transcontinental jet, sit at a desk for a few days, and fire the responsible people. And then report fully and frankly to the community in a transparent way. (albeit on a different scandal). Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 21:28, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

That particular scandal was bad, but the current debacle is orders of magnitude worse. I am mildly encouraged by some of Maher's comments today, but this is a moment when dramatic action to restore community confidence is needed now. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 00:05, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

@Kudpung, according to the infamous flowchart she has to sign off on every office action. I imagine she just rubber-stamps whatever is put in front of her on the (reasonable, to be fair) assumption that the professional Trust & Safety staff are supposed to be better informed about what is and isn't a good idea when it comes to trust and safety issues, but it does mean the buck formally stops with her. ‑ Iridescent 07:36, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

I think the point is that she's responsible for putting competent people and thus, you would hope, efficient, community agreed processes in place that would prevent changes in T&S policy to become shock and awe events. Or at the very least, create clear, self protective lines of upwards communication so she wouldn't be left so exposed to random sub-tweets :) Daily, or, fine, even weekly briefs from direct reports, as well as channels of upwards escalation for middle management are normal in even smallish companies. As you and many have pointed out over the years; there are deep structural Org issues here. My opinion is that the struct is too steep and hierarchical; a recipe for kingdom building and keeping bad news form the many higher ups. Ceoil (talk) 08:14, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

*She's been too busy to continue answering questions onwiki since about 4 hours ago, but 3 hours ago she did find the time to post a short video of ladies soccor and declare (and this is a quote) "WomEN’S SocCer IsN’T As exCiting as MeN’S" [19]. I am getting the feeling she doesn't take any of this very seriously. And this was after she declared she expected to be busy onwiki all weekend.[20] (She made two brief posts after that declaration, then silence) Dennis Brown - 2¢ 00:35, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

@Dennis Brown, that tweet isn't from her? ‑ Iridescent 07:30, 30 June 2019 (UTC)
My eyes are so fried, I've been too focused on this shit, but I do have the solution. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 10:53, 30 June 2019 (UTC)
Not that it matters at all, but it was a retweet. Opabinia regalis (talk) 20:48, 30 June 2019 (UTC)
I think we'll let both her and Dennis off—Dennis because that's a legitimate mistake to make, and Katharine because a retweet takes no time. BTW sorry for making a comment that has the potential to drag you in to something in which you have no interest, but that was a point that really did need to be made from the outset before anyone got ideas. Although it will for obvious reasons be tempered by the fact that one of the most problematic editors has vanished and one of the most zealous quality inspectors is banned, any attempt to clean up the dungheap at DYK is just going to lead to a slightly smaller dungheap and everyone involved ending up covered in dung. The estimate I gave of the proportion wasn't an exaggeration. ‑ Iridescent 20:59, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

It was a retweet with a comment which took about as much time as the original tweet. Maher is more concerned with pushing Rapinoe's agenda than this Wikipedia mess, clearly. 74.105.155.6 (talk) 15:07, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

"Did you know ... that Carburetor Dung, is a Malaysian punk band which is also known as "DUNG"?" Martinevans123 (talk) 15:14, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

Just in case people haven't seen it

As probably not all of those here have any reason to be reading the Arbitration Committee Noticeboard, y'all should probably be aware of Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Noticeboard#Open letter to the WMF Board. ‑ Iridescent 08:47, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, I saw it from WP:AN where the newfashioned ArbCom bot has politely posted it. I think that in light of the very recent azwiki debacle the WMF will want some reassurance that "let us do our own thing" won't cause further problems down the road, though. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 08:56, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for posting this. Been over dozens of pages trying to catch up and may well have missed this. Kafka Liz (talk) 09:08, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

Personally I see a universal code of conduct as a minimum baseline. Ideally you could start with it on day 1 and the 10 biggest wikis would have to change little if anything. But a code of conduct should include more than civility, it should also include "don't upload copyvios" and "don't block people over personal disputes" and "don't block people over Facebook comments" and "don't put up genocide denial crap". --Rs chen 7754 13:01, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

A universal code of conduct is harder than it looks; your "genocide denial crap" may well be my "legitimate questioning of the consensus", and different countries and different schools of thought within those countries will often have different views on what constitutes "genocide". (Liz lives in Ireland; she can explain why the line separating "deliberate genocide", "intentional lack of response to a natural disaster" and "well-intentioned mismanagement leading to mass casualties" is blurry.) See Talk:Bengal famine of 1943 or Talk:Holodomor and their many, many pages of archives to get an idea of what you'd be dealing with; or just compare and contrast Genocide of indigenous peoples#Native American Genocide and American Indian Wars, both of which are equally "right".

Plus, without stating the obvious but some of the most egregious examples of consistently abusive and aggressive editors on Wikipedia have been current or former WMF employees, even discounting Ironholds. Good luck getting T&S to take any action against those. ‑ Iridescent 14:39, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

(Adding) If you want an object lesson in cultural relativism and the ways in which different cultures can place different significance on events, compare Texas Revolution and es:Independencia de Texas, both about the same event, of roughly equal importance to the histories of the United States and of Mexico, and both Featured Articles on their respective projects. The word "Alamo" appears 43 times on the former and twice on the latter. ‑ Iridescent 15:18, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

Personally, I am thinking of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant vs. de:Kernkraftwerk Fukushima Daiichi the latter of which spends five paragraphs discussing safety issues that the former does only touch on ... while admitting that many didn't play an important role at the end. I see such a pattern in other dewiki NPP articles as well. JoJo Eumerus mobile (talk) 09:31, 3 July 2019 (UTC)

(Page stalker): Heh, that is nothing. Try Taibe, Galilee where the he.wp version of the history is "The settlement was established in 1920 by Muslim Arabs from the Zoabi family who were brought to Israel by the Turks". Or Tamra, Jezreel Valley, where the he.wp version says "The settlement was established in 1918 by the Zoabi family of Jordan, although it was already inhabited by tribes". Virtually of Palestinian/Arab villages in Israel was established by "bedouin" in the early 20th century, according to he.wp, no matter if they have a thousand years documented history, Huldra (talk) 20:54, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

Another question would be what to do if someone actually breaks the code. What sanctions are applied, who gets to decide on them, and what happens if both sides in a dispute have broken it to some degree? I am especially interested in the latter case. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:36, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

"What to do if somebody actually breaks the code" ought to be relatively straightforward; it would just slot into the existing "discuss / warn / short block / escalating blocks / site ban" structure (possibly with T&S's harebrained meta:Partial blocks slotted in if the community is stupid enough to allow them here; if you think the last month has been stressful, the backlash once admins are able to selectively ban opponents from particular articles will make WP:FRAMBAN look like the Queen's Garden Party). In the cases where both sides have breached the code, I would assume arbcom will fall back on "A. Which of these people is complaining loudest? B. Block that one and see if it makes the rest of them shut up; C. repeat until the complaining goes away" approach. I would think the main issue won't so much be the administrative side, but how to deal with the passive-aggressive types who make a game of constantly trying to bait other people into slipping over the line, if we do have an explicitly drawn red line. ‑ Iridescent 17:19, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

^ this. After the account creation log, partial blocks are on the top of the list of bad ideas from a decade ago no one bothered to rethink. TonyBallioni (talk) 17:25, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

It's actually a bad idea from only four years ago. At least for this one, rather than a faceless WMFOffice role account you actually do have a named individual to blame when the Defenders Of The Wiki start unilaterally banning anyone who's rude enough to flag errors from WP:ERRORS and WT:DYK to prevent them hurting the nominators' feelings by pointing out mistakes. ‑ Iridescent 17:45, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

I thought it'd been in phabricator or Bugzilla for a while before Ritchie proposed it? I can't navigate the blasted thing for historical tasks, but thought that it was a 2006/7 request. I could just be venting my frustration on the account creation log and how no one bothered to think how much of a pain in the ass/liability it would be. TonyBallioni (talk) 17:51, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

That certainly wasn't the thinking behind partial blocks. My rationale for coming up with the proposal is I was sick to the back teeth of Eric Corbett threads on ANI with people squaring off at each other for a few days then giving up. My use case is when two long-term editors (who for the sake of argument we'll call Andy Dingley and Eric Corbett) have a mild dispute on some automobile article and get up to 3RR; now the "Defender of the Wiki" who would erstwhile have blocked the two can't without somebody saying "why didn't you lock them from the page for 12 hours and force them to discuss?" If cowboy admins go pulling cowboy blocks, partial or otherwise, they can be strung up at ANI as per present. Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 17:53, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

Oh, I get the theory behind it. I also understand that it'll be forced on AE which means that we'll have the people who argue over whether or not religion in Israel/Palestine is sufficiently related to the Arab-Israeli conflict for them to have to not edit war over it arguing that they thought their topic ban from Foo didn't cover Foobar because the block setting weren't set right. TonyBallioni (talk) 17:57, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

No, that wasn't what I intended it to be used for at all. Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 18:01, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

(butting in) I thought the best use for partial blocks was for copyvio offenders. Block from all pages except the ones they have to fix...Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 01:13, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

I am bothered that D "Go complain at T&S because ArbCom is punishing the harassment victim" will become common then. I am idly speculating that part of the reason why WMF took action against Fram was the perception that we are (perhaps unduly) fond of "Well, you broke the rules too" as a defense in conduct complaints. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 17:32, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

This thread has reminded me of this gem. You're right; never underestimate the willingness of people to claim 'harassment' rather than admit the reason people keep accusing them of making mistakes could possibly be that they keep making mistakes. (At least Arbcom had the sense to immediately decline that one; had it been made to T&S, would you have trusted Jan and his little friends not to have taken the complaint at face value?) ‑ Iridescent 17:48, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

The issue at az.wikipedia is that the article title was called, translated, "Armenian genocide hoax". Other statements from admins were saying that all the Azerbaijani sources call it a hoax. But what I'm getting at is that there are some Wikipedias who believe NPOV is optional, that admins can do whatever they want with the tools, etc. Without any policy at the global level, it is difficult to set expectations for behavior. Stewards are not a global ArbCom, so there is only so much they can do in that regard. But the policies at en.wikipedia should supercede any global policy in any regard. --Rs chen 7754 20:41, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

I think everyone, Arbcom included, is losing sight of the fact that the English Wikipedia community *does* in fact address harassment on a daily basis in a way that protects the project and the individuals being harassed. There are literally hundreds of blocks a month for harassment, even if they aren't labeled as such; many "vandalism-only" and "NOTHERE" blocks are related to harassing edits. That doesn't even consider the number of discussions and warnings about behaviour with users who are acting in a way that some people consider harassment. We certainly don't get all of them, but then we also don't get all the socks or the UPEs or copyvio perpetrators (all of these being behaviours that are unacceptable under the TOU), and the WMF doesn't seem to have any interest in addressing those "problems", even though they're every bit as disheartening to new/underrepresented/minority/sensitive users. We do as good a job with harassment as we do with other TOU violations. I think we could do better; I just hope people don't go off on tangents that wind up with us shooting ourselves in the foot. Risker (talk) 17:50, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

You don't need to tell me that; in addition to the examples you cite, there's also a not inconsiderable stack of people who've been blocked for fairly vanilla-sounding reasons so as not to ruin their lives by making "banned for harassment" the first Google hit on their name. This whole saga ultimately boils down to "somebody didn't think mommy would give them candy so they went to daddy". ‑ Iridescent 18:02, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

Now why you gawn and use American spelling?? "mummy"!!! Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 01:01, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

ArbCom statement length

Despite the obviously ridiculous length of the statement, this appears to be a free pass. Combined with ignoring the BLP policy, it's a hell of a way to run a circus... - SchroCat (talk) 20:09, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

As I said in the context of Eric's recent block, if we're going to fight the Wikipedia Civil War over the principle of Arbcom being sovereign, that means accepting Arbcom's bad decisions. If we disagree with them, all we can do is either convince them to change their minds or make notes for the next election. (You'll be able to see the same principle at work in the real world in a little over three months when the population of the UK suddenly realise what the implications actually are of having either Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn running the country, without the European Commission to talk whoever it is out of his crazier ideas.) That entire case is a shit-show anyway, given that Smallbones appears to be the only person on Wikipedia who doesn't know that the allegation he published was a lie (enough of the current arbs were present when it allegedly happened, to know that it didn't). ‑ Iridescent 20:23, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

Very true - on both counts. My Irish passport application should be through before the end of October which is one relief - shame it won't help the mess here. - SchroCat (talk) 20:43, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

OTOH, if ArbCom feel that the thing is ok but are not saying, for example, that Thr Signpost is an exception to the BLP requirements then I could encourage people to write to me and then I could compile some anonymised scrutiny of Smallbones, safe in the knowledge that recent precedent would enable me to describe them as anything I chose. I could even make up such anonymous emails. It's a weird world. - Sitush (talk) 21:36, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

I can't believe the case has been declined. Anyone up for MfDing The Signpost? Espresso Addict (talk) 23:04, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

Apparently the plan is to wait out the current storm and then it's off to the races. [22] Haukur (talk) 23:25, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

Espresso Addict, we literally just had that discussion. I'll stick with what I said there; the Signpost in its current incarnation is a thoroughly unpleasant mix of score-settling, personal grudges and unwarranted self-importance, often laced with a generous helping of casual bigotry. But, there is a legitimate place for an internal newsletter, and if we MFD'd it we'd just end up recreating a replacement under a different title. The way to go isn't yet deleting the Signpost as it's not yet irredeemable; the way to go is to start being more pro-active when it comes to reporting problematic content (in the appropriate places, not on their own internal talk pages where their circle of True Believers can mob and harass complainants into keeping quiet), and being willing to start liberally blocking authors and deleting articles when they step over the line until they get the message that they're supposed to be an internal bulletin, not a low-quality Wikipediocracy tribute act. ‑ Iridescent 07:03, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

WMF Question

Back in February of 2017 the goals of the WMF were changed (in the article, I'm not sure when they actually changed in practice) to include "political advocacy".[23] Do you remember (or know) if there were any extended discussions on this around that time? I understand that the intent there is to establish some legal protection from lawsuits and copyright issues - but it is a rather open ended way of stating it.

Also the Guardian article had a quote from Katherine "...This is a community with a foundation, not a foundation with a community.”[24] which struck me as something that may be changing, but perhaps that's just me going about with blinders on. Anyway, thanks for your (or tps) time. (again) — Ched : ? — 07:41, 20 July 2019 (UTC)

That diff appears to be Katherine Maher expressing a personal opinion about what she thought the WMF should be doing, rather than a formal change in the party line—this is the WMF's official position on advocacy. Looking at Foundation:Policies, there doesn't appear to be a formal policy either for or against political advocacy; I'd assume that what Katherine was doing was clumsily restating the existing (and non-controversial) position of "the WMF only gets involved in lobbying if it's on an issue that directly affects the WMF's activities", rather than trying to make up a new policy on the hoof. Here's every resolution the Board has ever passed, and while I have no intention of reading all of them I don't see anything that's immediately obvious as a change of policy. (Aside from anything else, getting involved in lobbying on any issue other than those like copyright or censorship that potentially directly affect the functioning of WMF activities would likely compromise the WMF and its affiliates' charitable status.) Either Doc James or Whatamidoing (WMF) would be able to tell you what the current official position is and whether it's changed. ‑ Iridescent 08:00, 20 July 2019 (UTC)

The statement "...This is a community with a foundation, not a foundation with a community.” is defensive - it would not be necessary if the WMF weren't such an ivory tower. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:37, 20 July 2019 (UTC)

It might only be lip service, but I'd still prefer she be saying that than the alternative. As you may have noticed recently, a certain department at the WMF appears to have forgotten that the WMF was set up to serve Wikipedia, not the other way around. ‑ Iridescent 13:07, 20 July 2019 (UTC)

That should keep me busy reading for a while, but there's information there that I've been curious about. Thank you. — Ched : ? — 19:02, 20 July 2019 (UTC)

Well, I'd prefer to hear people say that the foundation is merely one part of a large and complex movement, since there are a lot of groups that aren't what we (that's the volunteer-we) think of as either being "the community" or "the ~~movement~~ foundation". I'd also like people to remember that there's more than one community involved. You could also say that it's a foundation with a mission, because that is indisputably true, independent of its relationship to any other part of the movement. (Whether this community has one mission or multiple missions is something y'all could settle here and ping me when you've sorted out the answer. ;-) )

As for the "political advocacy" thing, I gather that Legal is in favor of freedom and privacy and all the good things, and against politicians harassing editors and all the other bad things, and that they have a "public policy" project to do stuff related to that, e.g., the annual transparency report (the next edition of which is probably due soon). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:28, 21 July 2019 (UTC)

I know in your work capacity you're not allowed to say this—or even think it—but realistically when it comes to The Community then English Wikipedia and the WMF are first among equals. If even one of the big other language Wikipedias were to shut down tomorrow (say, if the WMF annoyed WMDE enough that they actually made good on their regular threats to secede) it would be bad PR but readers who don't speak the language in question would barely notice, and even the shutdown of Commons would be an inconvenience rather than a disaster; if English Wikipedia were to be shut down or if the WMF were to be slashed to a server-maintenance-only function, what would be left would drift apart within weeks. For better or worse, this is where both the written policies and the unwritten codes of conduct that set the direction for the other WMF projects, and the broader open editing culture in general, are set. (One-third of all edits to all Wikipedias are made to English Wikipedia.) So yes, we're a part of a large and complex movement, but it's the dynamic between en-wiki and the WMF that sets the direction for that entire movement. (To be clear, I don't believe that this position is what Katherine was trying to articulate—I'm sure she was just trying to summarize a complex situation in a pithy one-liner for a journalist, whilst paying lip-service to the "the Party exists only to serve the masses" line—but it doesn't mean she's wrong.) ‑ Iridescent 20:45, 22 July 2019 (UTC)

IMO the German-language Wikipedia community (which generally considers itself quite a separate thing from WMDE) would probably disagree with the idea that their departure would be barely noticed by the rest of the world. There are other projects that take relatively little from this community (e.g., the Japanese Wikipedia) or which actively resist importing enwiki's approaches.

Within the WMF, I agree that this community might get more than its "fair share" of attention and support in some respects (e.g., all official announcements are made in English). It likely gets less in other ways (e.g., some categories of WMF funding). I think there is also a strong awareness of the problem of assuming that the core community at enwiki is representative of the entire movement. We're the loudest and best connected, but we're not everyone. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:23, 25 July 2019 (UTC)

I'm sure the German Wikipedia community would be horrified and offended by my suggesting that de-wiki could be shut down tomorrow and no non-German-speaker would even notice, but I'm equally sure that it's true. For better or worse English and to a lesser extent French and Spanish are where the action is and where it will remain for the foreseeable future. Ultimately, English Wikipedia is the site speakers of other languages check when the article in their own language doesn't give them enough information or doesn't exist, and as long as English Wikipedia has as many active editors as every other Wikipedia combined, that isn't going to change any time soon. ‑ Iridescent 18:28, 26 July 2019 (UTC)

Absolutely correct, but the Germanophone Wiki ain't just Germany but all it's chapters and users have one thing in common: German language region cultural reputation for efficiency (I do know - I spent the best part of 20 years in the region). Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:14, 28 July 2019 (UTC)

@Kudpung The Swiss maybe, but the rest of the German-speaking world not so much; currency manipulations around the Euro have kept German productivity at an adequate level (at the price of ripping the guts out of the Mediterranean economies), but the legend of Teutonic efficiency has had a Brandenburg Airport shaped hole punched through it in recent years. In the country that made the trains run on time, Deutsche Bahn is now such a laughing-stock (at one point last year the proportion of trains arriving on time dropped below 1⁄3) that neighbouring countries are formally complaining that their late-running trains are messing up their own timetables,[25] the proportion of homes with access to high-speed broadband is below such high-tech powerhouses as Italy and Cyprus (and well behind the legendarily inefficient British Telecom)[26], and that's before we get on to such things as Deutsche Post; meanwhile Austria has an unemployment rate not only higher than Britain but higher even than Poland and Hungary, and their last presidential election came down to a straight vote between the Greens and the neo-fascists as to which fringe party the voters least mistrusted. Europe is not a great advert for itself at the moment. ‑ Iridescent 20:50, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

Interesting, but the people involved there are probably not quite representative of the kind of people who are generally Wikipedia volunteers. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 03:26, 30 July 2019 (UTC)

Wow. And I thought the US was alone in its unrelenting march towards a third-world stature. (Having the largest stockpile of nuclear bombs only helps so far in our claims to being "Nummer Wun".) -- llywrch (talk) 15:42, 31 July 2019 (UTC)

Re: databases and private wikis

Saw this when I clicked on Risker's contribs and wandered over there based on her edit summary, but replying here since I don't really know Kafka Liz that well: ArbCom still handles all the disclosures, though from a practical point of view, most of us look at the behaviour of the accounts before blocking, and if I see two longstanding editors with different personalities editing kinda similar topics but also acting differently, I'd either assume family members or I'd just ask them directly the relationship and tell them they could email me or ArbCom if they didn't want it public.

The bigger issue, imo, is with "clean starts" that are disclosed to ArbCom, which per policy can't grant permission so they just note it in their records, and then the account gets blocked for actually violating the clean start policy in some way, and gets mad because they told ArbCom. Zawl is probably the most recent high-profile version of this. That is something that I would like to see devolved from the committee somehow in at some point in the future, even more than family things since those honestly don't cause many issues. TonyBallioni (talk) 04:49, 31 July 2019 (UTC)

CU is largely irrelevant in that case. While spouses are not prohibited from editing in the same area, for the purposes of consensus discussion they will/should be treated as one voice, as it's impossible to determine who is actually in control of the user accounts at ant one time. WP:Meat lays this out clearly. So yes telling someone they can't contribute to an rfc their partner is involved in is wrong, but it's pointless doing so if you are going to be treated as one person anyway. Only in death does duty end (talk) 10:29, 31 July 2019 (UTC)

I liked Risker's suspicion of who it may have been...I doubt you'll get great odds ;) 4-1 on?! ——SerialNumber54129 10:38, 31 July 2019 (UTC)

You know, I was surprised that in 2019 two married people with separate accounts would be considered sockpuppets in an RfA... Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 10:45, 31 July 2019 (UTC)

There was an RfC a few years ago about it, specifically to do with that specific couple. TK. Victoria (tk) 13:06, 31 July 2019 (UTC)

I don’t read FAMILY as applying here: they’ve made the disclosure and it’s so well known that even I know about it, and I’m not a part of the FAC-regulars crowd. That’s just my reading of the policy. TonyBallioni (talk) 14:39, 31 July 2019 (UTC)

I knew something rang a bell about this, turns out I commented extensively at that RFC... Only in death does duty end (talk) 19:37, 31 July 2019 (UTC)

[1] Attribution here

[Wikimedia_Stats-2] "Wikistats - Statistics For Wikimedia Projects". stats.wikimedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 11 February 2022.

[stats.wikimedia.org_editor_metric_graph-3] "Wikipedia Statistics (English)". stats.wikimedia.org.

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