User:Risker/Giano's block

Comments on recent events

Note to those watching this page: My message below is posted with Giano’s permission, in response to his request that I address several issues that have arisen over the last few days. The words are mine, and any concerns about them should be addressed to me.

I was going to write a long comment with timestamps and chronologies and who said what to whom—actually, I did that, but decided it isn't what's needed here. Instead, I'll simply look at the effects of this particular block, executed on April 14 at 23.01, and the key events and realities leading up to it.

Effect on the Arbitration Committee

The use of broad-brush remedies giving any administrator authority to carry out punitive actions to enforce Arbcom decisions has come under heavy criticism, particularly so-called civility paroles, in both the Tango/MONGO case and this block. There is no way that 1500 administrators are going to come to a common ground on what is and is not civil. While some uncivil remarks are obvious, many remarks that pass the civility test are extremely insulting. There is a huge middle ground, where context and interpersonal relations play a major role. There has been some discussion on the special ANI thread about having "spokespersons" for valued but hot-tempered contributors, creating special enforcement teams, and Werdna (showing a wisdom considerably in excess of his elders) has written an essay, Ignore personal attacks.

Arbitrator FT2 seems to have taken on a crusade to try to have Giano behave "according to norms", writing long convoluted posts that several editors have found completely baffling; several of these posts appear to psychoanalyse Giano to the point of personal attack themselves. Most distressing to me, he has used a rape analogy to explain the harm of calling someone names. It was suggested he reconsider his words - so instead of removing the rape analogy, he changed the word "skirt" to "clothes". There's a problem when an arbitrator cannot see the huge gulf between sexual attacks on women, and using a standard on-wiki and on-IRC expression ("stalker") that is misinterpreted due to private information of which the speaker is unaware.

Effects on User:Kwsn

Kwsn is a young administrator, still a student. He made a bad block. It was a bad block because, for the very same behaviour, the person blocked had been both praised and warned already within the previous half-hour; he did not include any diffs for others to determine exactly what he found to be blockable; and due to real-life commitments, he was not available to discuss the block when it was immediately questioned. These were all poor decisions, but they were all essentially resolved by the unblock. (The drama wasn't, but we'll get to that in a minute.) Kwsn has perhaps taken this far too much to heart, as he first posted he was taking a wikibreak and blocked himself for a week; and then, after a misinterpreted attempt to set things right (the IRC transcript with DragonflySixtyseven), retired from the project. Giano attempted to reach out to Kwsn once he knew the facts late yesterday, but Kwsn may be understandably wary of him right now. I can only hope that Kwsn's friends will continue to reach out, and that he will return to the project in the near future.

A greater question is why Kwsn felt the obligation to review Giano's editing and make the block in the first place. He does not normally carry out arbitration enforcement and had had no interactions with Giano before the block. He was, however, in #admins-IRC when another administrator complained about Giano, said he was involved, and that someone else should make the decision, just not "per IRC."

Effects on Giano

First, a bit of history and fact-sharing here. There is no question that previous blocks involving Giano have been cooked up in IRC, and he continues to be a periodic topic of discussion there, despite the much-touted reforms of 18 months ago, and of March of this year; it should be no surprise that he holds it in contempt.

For a lot of difficult-to-quantify reasons, many people consider Giano a community leader, or at least a high-profile editor. He edits in a fishbowl that many of us cannot imagine. His talk page averages 175 hits a day—more than many of us (including many arbitrators) get in a month—and on Tuesday it went all the way up to 1200+. With the eyes of the wiki on him, any tiny misstep is magnified beyond all reasonable value, and the reaction is equally excessive. When he tried to make a joke about being wiki-stalked, he got blocked. It isn't just one admin stalking Giano's edits, though. He can't write anywhere on the encyclopedia without someone else showing up, be it an admin, an arbitrator, or another editor.

Right now Giano is angry. When he tried to work out his anger in a constructive way by writing a personal essay, he got a warning on his userpage. When he tried to express his opinion on ANI, his perceived personal attack was compared to rape. He is told that he is not conforming to community norms, when some of the things he is trying to bring forward within the community are exactly those norms and why they are not appropriate, a perception that is more widespread than many care to admit.

Effects on the community

The community has started to realise that its dispute resolution mechanisms are rarely effective in the way they are intended. User and admin RfCs, because they are non-binding, become attack pages that linger for weeks and months without resolution, and never really go away. Arbitration fails to resolve the root causes of the disruptions that bring cases before them, in part because they do not permit decisions related to content, but also because of the haphazard way in which evidence is developed and presented. There is often no analysis of issues that drive the case, and only rarely are serious attempts made to resolve them.

The result of this dysfunctional dispute resolution system is that almost every editor who is involved, often just to a peripheral degree, is damaged. There is no effective way to heal those wounds. Once tainted, their contributions are devalued, often without conscious thought.

We need to stop this cycle. We need to let people function in this community without every keystroke being scrutinized. We need to find ways of listening when questions are asked without assuming bad faith on the part of the questioner. We need to get back to the project's goals and leave the rest behind.

--Risker (talk) 21:59, 17 April 2008 (UTC)