Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2022/Candidates/GeneralNotability

GeneralNotability

Hello everyone, I'm GeneralNotability and I am running for a seat on the Arbitration Committee. I bring two specialties to the table: anti-abuse/anti-harassment (particularly in terms of the CheckUser tool) and keeping the mail answered.

I've been an SPI clerk since shortly after I was elected as an admin in May 2020, and I was appointed as a CU a little over a year ago. I've spent a lot of time dealing with abuse – LTAs, spammers, undisclosed paid editing operations. That's the role I've grown into during my time on Wikipedia: keeping the place safe and harassment-free so that other folks can spend their time doing what they enjoy. Joining ArbCom is a natural extension of that; I know the committee does a lot of behind-the-scenes anti-abuse work, and I think my experience will be helpful there. As for the CheckUser tool itself, I've learned a lot about it in the past year and have grown into a pretty confident CU. Since ArbCom is responsible for both handling anti-abuse cases that involve CheckUser and overseeing English Wikipedia CUs, I think my expertise will be quite useful.

In terms of keeping the mail answered: during CUOS2021, I said I would work the checkuser and paid queues. I did. When I was appointed, there were hundreds of tickets in both queues and the backlogs for both went back over a year. As I write this, there's maybe ten unanswered tickets between the two queues and the average response comes within a week, and I worked something like 80% of all tickets handled in the past year. I want to bring that to ArbCom, too: if an editor emails the committee in good faith, they deserve both timely acknowledgment of their message and (if appropriate) prompt action.

And as a final thought: every account that gets pulled into an ArbCom case has a real live human behind the keyboard, and I want to make sure everyone who goes through the process is treated as a real live human. Arbitration is a confusing, bureaucratic, and stressful process, and the least we can do is show compassion, understanding, and assume good faith. Thank you for your consideration.

Disclosures: I am identified to the WMF and have signed the meta:ANPDP. A long time ago, I edited as geekboy72, and I currently use SubjectiveNotability on untrusted devices and GeneralBotability for bot tasks; I've also created (and blocked) a couple of doppelganger accounts.

• GeneralNotability (talk · contribs · count · logs · target logs · block log · lu · rfas · rfb · arb · rfc · lta · checkuser · socks · rights · blocks · protects · deletions · moves)

Individual questions

Add your questions below the line using the following markup:

#{{ACE Question
|Q=Your question
|A=}}

There is a limit of two questions per editor for each candidate. You may also ask a reasonable number of follow-up questions relevant to questions you have already asked.

---

Questions from Indignant Flamingo

2. Whenever I see your username, I remember reading this discussion from your creffett days, which made a strong and lasting impression on me at a time when people in my life were targets of real abuse from racists who made similar kinds of "jokes". My sense is that you were going along with the "jokes" to get along with a group of wikifriends. In my opinion the Arbitration Committee doesn't need people who go along to get along, but I also don't want to assume that one discussion is representative of how you handle things now. So, my question: can you provide some on-wiki examples of times when you've handled a situation like that differently, for example by steering an inappropriate discussion toward (to use the words from your statement) compassion and understanding? Indignant Flamingo (talk) 00:09, 23 November 2022 (UTC)

   Hi Indignant Flamingo. I'd like to start out by saying that I'm truly sorry that people in your life have been subjected to abuse like that and that my comments left such a negative impression on you (and if others were put off or even hurt by my words, I offer you my apologies as well). I'm not going to wave it away by saying I was "going along" with other folks, since that just shifts the blame. What I will say is that both in "real life" and on Wikipedia, I've spent a long time working on being more thoughtful about how my words (and particularly my humor) will read to those around me, and I still get it wrong sometimes; this was one of them. Reading over the linked discussions now, I'm pretty sure I know exactly what my thought process was: "I know there are people who genuinely using this sort of language to harm Chinese folks, but I don't mean it in a racist way, so it's okay, right?" The answer, clearly, is no, and looking back now, those comments were not in keeping with the person I want to be.

   As for your actual question, I don't think I have any examples at hand; since becoming an admin I've definitely been less "chatty" on talk pages and in projectspace, so I'm not involved in these sorts of discussions anywhere near as much as I was back then. I have definitely commented on discussions that got too close to personal attacks/inappropriately ascribing motives with words to the effect of "can we please focus on conduct," though I don't have specific examples at hand other than one I made on my alt a while back (before someone asks how I found that one...I do tend to hang out at the noticeboards when I'm on my alt and there's way fewer edits, so it's much easier to search). I also made a number of comments during the recent Athaenara case that might be what you're looking for here, though I think those were less "steering the discussion" and more "calling out what I felt was inappropriate" – see, for example, Special:Diff/1115437648. I hope I've managed to answer your concerns.

   And really: I do appreciate you bringing this up. My userpage says in part that I won't be perfect on [civility], of course, and if you think I'm being uncivil, please feel free to drop me a note about it, and this is exactly the sort of thing I was asking for there.

Questions from Red-tailed hawk

2. Hello. Thank you for volunteering to serve on the Arbitration Committee. Would you please explain your understanding of WP:INVOLVED, and would you summarize the extent to which you agree and/or disagree with how the Arbitration Committee has applied the principles of involvement with respect to administrator conduct in Reversal and reinstatement of Athaenara's block, Manning naming dispute, and Climate change? — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 00:12, 23 November 2022 (UTC)

   Hi Red-tailed hawk. At its core, INVOLVED is about administrative neutrality, both in terms of ability to act neutrally and external perception of actions as being neutral. As for the cases you've cited:

   * Instead of giving a whole list of my thoughts about the Athaenara case, I'd like to refer you to some comments I made in the PD phase (first two paragraphs in my section) that are specifically about INVOLVED. I do believe that TNT was INVOLVED in that case and should have handed the admin actions off to someone else, but I think there's more to consider than just the bright line test.

   * Manning: wow, nine years already? This one I honestly have a harder time with. Policy-wise, David Gerard was in the wrong; the article move was clearly the sort of editorial decision that makes one INVOLVED, and the subsequent use of tools were textbook "using admin tools to gain advantage in a dispute". On the other hand...I think I agree with his rationale, or at least sympathize with it, even if his methods were wrong, and those are the tough cases. I'm curious how that case would have gone if it happened today; I think our treatment of transgender subjects has changed a fair amount since 2013.

   *Okay, now we're into 2010...I'll be honest, this is well before my time and is a very complex case (an RFC/U on whether an admin counts as INVOLVED? wow.) and I don't think I can give a sufficiently informed opinion on how INVOLVED applies. I will say that I'm generally leery of calling someone INVOLVED with respect to a whole topic area without very good cause, and yet I find remedy 10.1 interesting (makes me wonder if an ArbCom remedy of "in this topic area, you should always be considered INVOLVED" could be viable...need to mull on that more).

Questions from Izno

2. As an arb, you will have to deal with messes which often have a lot of reading attached to them. Some of them will be the reasonably ordered messes most cases are. Some of them won't be. One mess I regularly think about is this case request (last revision before archival and first revision). Assuming (for simplicity's sake) that the entire discussion was held onwiki, can you share some thoughts on how you might have responded to the original case request, the changes in aggregate that occurred while the request open, and the ultimate case request? Izno (talk) 02:31, 23 November 2022 (UTC)

   As originally presented, I probably wouldn't have accepted – the initial request was about a specific problem between a couple of editors, and my impressions based on the initial evidence alone are that the core question (If a newspaper publishes an article critical of an editor's editing, can the editor remove that newspaper article, and content sourced to it, from Wikipedia? isn't something that rises to case-worthy and that this was still something the community could handle; at the very least, I would have pressed hard on why this needed to go to arbitration and what fundamental problems were preventing the community from solving the problem. And then the final version...well. A shift to the specter of Icewhiz and expanding to more of the APL mess. There are clearly problems in the topic area, but the case request spent a lot of time wandering back and forth and I don't think it ever actually hit on anything new that the committee could do that weren't already covered by previous cases/sanctions areas. I do like NYB's summary of the situation. As for "how I would have responded over time", well, a glib but accurate answer is "one diff at a time" (that's how I prefer to review complex noticeboard discussions: step through them edit by edit so that I get a good feeling for what answers were made when, which is hard to do on a normal noticeboard and doubly so when doing ArbCom-style one-section-per-editor). I think my responses would have generally been "give us specific diffs," "what new behavior differentiates this from previous cases in the topic area," "what do you think the committee can do here that wasn't done in a past case." There would also have probably been a handful of frustrated "can we pick a topic, please" comments, and I might have suggested closing the case request as-is and starting with a clean slate once the shift from "newspaper article COI" to "general problems in APL" happened. Hoping this gets at what you're looking for.

Questions from TheresNoTime

2. How do you foresee the role of the Arbitration Committee changing with regard to the adoption of the Universal Code of Conduct (namely, due to the enforcement guidelines, and the introduction of the global Coordinating Committee)? — TheresNoTime (talk • they/them) 05:58, 23 November 2022 (UTC)

   I don't expect a huge amount of change – assuming ArbCom is the "local governance structure," a lot of UCoC topics look like they're things ArbCom already deals with. My biggest concern is whether people will decide that all UCoC violations need to go to ArbCom for a "case". UCoC sections 3.1 (harassment) and 3.3 (vandalism) are things administrators routinely handle on their own, and I think it should stay that way, while 3.2 (abuse of power) look like things that would usually go to ArbCom right now either because of complexity or because they involve abuse of permissions. As written, it looks like the U4C isn't going to become a "super-ArbCom," which I believe was a common concern. Of course, none of this has actually been put into practice ( GeneralNotability is not a crystal ball), and we'll have to see how things actually work out in practice; I do think that ArbCom needs to be an active stakeholder in the UCoC roll-out process to advocate for the enwiki community.

4. Is ANI pronounced A-N-I or Annie? Thank you for standing, and good luck. — TheresNoTime (talk • they/them) 05:58, 23 November 2022 (UTC)

   A-N-I. Full stop.

Questions from Gerda Arendt

2. Do you believe that we still have infobox wars? If yes, do you have better ideas than the 2013 arb ruling to end them?

   Ah, infoboxes...along with MOS/article titles, they're the topic areas that I'm simultaneously astounded that we need DS for and yet, somehow, it also makes perfect sense. All I can say here is that I have not personally witnessed "infobox wars" in my editing.

4. Thank you, and I believe DS has made no sense, because I witnessed not one instance of them being helpful, but many where they were presented to harmless users who didn't even know there was any conflict. - Follow-up question, the same for all who answered the first: Where does the recently closed RfC for Laurence Olivier sit in your perspective?

   It's clear from a brief read of the RfC in question that this is an issue that goes back a long, long ways. An RfC appears to be an appropriate way to determine a way forward, but beyond that, I don't feel sufficiently informed about the history to have anything to say.

One candidate has asked for more time due to a health emergency. To give you all the same chances: please look at Olivier talk again, and feel free to modify your answers. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:50, 6 December 2022 (UTC)

Questions from 53 Angle

2. Do you think that there should be an independent body (short of the relevant Californian statutes regarding data protection and service provision) tasked with looking into evidence backed allegations of the improper use of the CheckUser tool? How do you rate the effectiveness of the current quasi-independent Ombuds Commission in investigating and reporting on such allegations? Could you provide details of any current or past investigations by the Commission into your use of the CheckUser tool, and their outcome? Privacy concerns notwithstanding. 53 Angle (talk) 07:42, 24 November 2022 (UTC)

   — 53 Angle (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic.

Question from BilledMammal

2. Would you ever support a principle or finding of fact that is based on the Universal Code of Conduct?

   I don't see any inherent reason not to. I don't think we're compelled to cite it, and enwiki already has a well-developed collection of policies and large body of ArbCom "case law" to cite, but I see nothing wrong with using it as a basis where it's relevant to the case.

Question from Dreamy Jazz

2. What experience from clerking, if any, do you think is transferable to being an arbitrator?

   I'd say a fair amount transfers, but only in a way that gives me a head start rather than a real "advantage" over non-clerks. Clerks certainly get to see arbitration proceedings up close, but you get that as a party to a case too, and I think the detached perspective of a clerk doesn't translate to being "in the weeds" as an arb as well as being a party does (since clerks generally only act at the direction of arbs and so the weight of decision-making doesn't really rest on your shoulders, whereas commenting on a case or especially being a party has a good deal more pressure). I feel like I've gotten the chance to see more of some of the behind-the-scenes areas (paying more attention pages like WP:ARCA than I would otherwise), and I've gotten to spend a lot of time staring at the clerk procedures and am familiar with minutiae like word counts, case opening/closing procedures, etc. Basically, I think that my experience as an arbitration clerk means that I don't need to spend time reading up on arbitration policy before I can start doing on-wiki arb things.

   And since you asked about clerking experience, and since I've been asked privately why I didn't highlight my arbclerk experience in my statement, going to digress briefly with a comment: I intentionally did not highlight my arbclerk experience in my candidate statement because of what I said above, and also because I don't want people to see arbclerk as a stepping-stone to ArbCom, part of a cursus honorum if you will.

Question from Nosebagbear

2. Currently, outgoing arbs retain their CUOS rights indefinitely (subject to the normal). Would you be open to a change of process so that outgoing arbs only retained their CUOS rights until the next CUOS application round, where they would have to request and be granted them in order to retain them?

   A question very close to my heart! Yes, I would be open to discussing something like that (obviously caveated with something like "they don't need to reapply for rights they held pre-election", not to sound too self-serving). I've also mulled over the idea of a view-only role for arbs (that is, can view CU logs, OS'd material, and OS logs, but can't run checks or suppress), though I don't think that would work out in practice; arbs do need CU at least for investigations. My stance on the matter is basically this: arbs are elected because of community trust, but I don't think the average voter is picking arbs specifically because of their CU/OS suitability. Don't get me wrong, some of our best functionaries got their funct bits through election to ArbCom, and arbs are generally elected because the community trusts their judgment, but I think that once an arb has left office they should be subjected to the same appointment process as anyone else. My main concern is that process becoming a rubber stamp: the next committees routinely saying "so-and-so held the bit for two years as an arbitrator with no concerns, keep it" when the next CUOS appointments come around.

Questions from Kudpung

2. Findings of Fact: Should the Committee have a duty to investigate the veracity of the de facto evidence presented by the complainant(s) and/or uninvolved commenters?

   I'm not clear what makes evidence "de facto" evidence, but the committee should be reading the diffs presented with any evidence (and their context) and making sure that those diffs actually support what the commenter is saying.

4. In your opinion, are sitting arbitrators exempt from due process if and when they commit an indiscretion that would get a normal editor blocked or sanctioned?

   Bit of a pointed question, isn't it? Kind of ambiguous phrasing, though – "exempt from due process," to me, implies that the problem is they're not receiving due process, which generally is about the rights of the accused (that is, they're not being treated fairly, perhaps that they're receiving summary judgment instead of a proper "trial"). The tone, however, suggests that you're saying arbs aren't being required to follow the rules that everyone else does. My answer's actually the same either way: nobody is above the law, if two people do the same thing wrong they should be subject to the same process.

Thank you for your answers. I asked all candidates the same questions. You appear to have understood the questions. Wrg to Q1, you could have elaborated as to whether diffs should be investigated if they are cherry picked or even taken deliberately out if context for impact. But I didn't ask you that. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:46, 27 November 2022 (UTC)

question from lettherebedarklight

2. why do you edit wikipedia? → lettherebedarklight → 晚安 → おやすみ → 13:46, 27 November 2022 (UTC)

   Originally, it scratched an itch, so to speak: I've previously done a fair amount of volunteering for open-source development projects, but stopped because I wasn't using the software anymore, and contributing to Wikipedia filled that same open-source contributing-to-the-greater-good niche but didn't require me to run special software and was easy to pick up and put down. Now? It's become my community. I've made a lot of acquaintances and some genuine friends during my time here (some through on-wiki contact, some off-wiki on places like IRC and Discord) and I genuinely enjoy hanging out here and being part of the community. I've come to like article writing when I have the time, and I get the satisfaction of crossing things off of a to-do list as I work backlogs in the areas where I normally contribute.

Question from Anythingyouwant

2. Have you read both WP:MANDY and WP:NOTMANDY, and if so which is a more correct interpretation of Wikipedia policy? Anythingyouwant (talk) 04:48, 30 November 2022 (UTC)

   I'd read MANDY before you asked this and have previously been pro-MANDY, but had only heard of NOTMANDY in passing (hadn't actually read it until you asked this question). Having read NOTMANDY and re-read MANDY, I'd say that these days, I'm more in agreement with NOTMANDY, particularly the concern at the end of the lead that [t]he most common inference from the absence of a denial is that the accusation is true. Including a brief snippet to the effect of "so-and-so denies the allegations" or "so-and-so maintains that they are innocent of all charges" is not, in my opinion, compromising our neutrality or indicating that we believe them. This does require reliable sources in support, of course, and does not require that we give the person a platform beyond "so-and-so denies the allegations".