Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2020/Candidates/SMcCandlish

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SMcCandlish[edit]

This is the talk page for discussing a candidate for election to the Arbitration Committee.


"Last minute"[edit]

I'll pre-answer a probable question: "Why did you throw your hat in right near the deadline?" I've considered running for ArbCom again every year, and was seriously considering it again for next year, but was going to sit this one out. I had assumed that the pandemic would result in various editors having a lot more time on their hands, and thus expected a large number of candidates, but when I thought to check I found very few (fewer than available seats). I've observed ArbCom becomes "non-optimally functional" when short of active and non-recused Arbs, so it seemed pertinent to volunteer this year instead of waiting.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:48, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

PS: As I've also noted in my replies to some questions that another motivation for going in this year instead of waiting is the unusual number of Arbs and candidates who agree with me that WP:AC/DS is broken and that it at very least needs serious revision. I see an unusual opportunity for an interested caucus of Arbs to make real progress on this for a change.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:28, 21 November 2020 (UTC); rev'd 19:46, 21 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

PPS: On the main 2020 election talk page, Thryduulf asked basically whether late-appearing candidates had some kind of strategic rationale. I can only speak for myself, but the answer is no. Indeed, I'm aware from similar earlier discussions that being a late-arriving candidate actually prejudices some editors to vote negatively for one reason or another. If I had looked in at the candidate page earlier and seen even fewer candidates, I would have stepped up much sooner.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:46, 21 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I, for example, was planning on running for re-election in order primarily to continue work on this issue, but at the last minute decided to not submit my nomination because there were already sufficient good potential admins who, like SMc, understood the problem. I'm glad that the problem I and others have called to attention has finally received this attention, and there are others we can depend on to find at least a partial solution--I've spent quite enough time on arb com. DGG ( talk ) 05:42, 23 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Addendum to reply to Calidum's Q1 (on Anti-harassment RFC, Q7: "unblockables")[edit]

 – This is essentially followup material, which per new rule this year should be moved to talk.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:43, 26 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
(This is also of some relevance to Kudpung's Q2, on "Wikipedia's drama board at WP:ANI".)

If I may brainstorm a little on potential ways to actually implement "Admonishments and/or final warnings should be much more frequent, and actually enforced" – it may require a combo approach like:

  1. Not having a distinction between admonishments and actionable warnings. Or some variant of this, like leaning more toward actional warnings, and requiring an actionable warning if a non-actionable admonishment has already been made to that editor in that topic, whether that was by ArbCom (including RFARB/ARCA/WP:AE) or by community noticeboards. That is, eliminate most of the wiggle room, and definitely bring an end to perpetual wiggle room.
  2. Creating a standard statement of principle (by ArbCom motion), an ArbCom policy rule (by community proposal), or some other lasting decision, that ArbCom itself must actively avoid making exceptions based on an editor's number of supporters, years editing, quality or quantity of productive work, topical or type-of-work focus, or advanced permission bits. But this must not affect ArbCom's ability to shape specific remedies that take account of the party's contributions. "Net negative/positive" is a valid meritocratic analysis, though only for what the remedies will be and what impact they may have on the project, not for whether there should be any at all.
  3. Directly instructing AE (which is ArbCom's animal) to henceforth interpret these ArbCom warnings (or roughly equivalent community-imposed ones) without regard to an editor's admin status, editorial timespan, contribution level, or community "fandom" level. While "It's appropriate to consider an editor's overall contributions to the project when determining remedies", as someone put it, it is not appropriate to do so when considering whether some remedy is needed and will actually be imposed, and that is the crux of the "unblockables" problem.
  4. Issuing to the community a recommendation (in a spirit closely related to the above points) that it adopt a principle that noticeboards (and randomly intervening admins) should take an RFARB/ARCA/AE warning or restriction as more actionable (by dint of investigative rigor) than community warnings arrived at by noticeboard closers (who are not always even admins and are wading often through piles of poorly examined, diffless, ranty chaff), and than "roving admin"-issued warnings. (Devils can always hide in details; we might need to include clarification about warnings from a long time ago, sanctions that have expired or were vacated, etc.).
  5. Maybe obviously, given that these were conclusions reached in the RfC Q7 closure: having a low threshold for accepting RFARB cases about editors who keep narrowly dodging effective or even all sanctions at community noticeboards; and, being more willing to accept ADMINCOND examinations.

Those are just a few off-the-cuff ideas.

How to tackle the "unblockables" problem in earnest will require more detailed community and internal-to-ArbCom discussion, especially since the root of this problem, the "manufacture" of it, is not a fault in ArbCom rules or interpretation, but within community behavior and human nature: cult of personality, admin "brotherhood" factionalism, wikiproject factionalism like "gang" protection of in-group members, WP's aggregate userbase biases making it "okay" to grossly violate policies in pursuit of a popular socio-political viewpoint, etc. It varies by the type of "unblockable" at issue, and there are at least three varieties discussed in the RfC thread. I would say there are five, based specificially on: high-trust permissions (admin/crat), personality (wiki-social popularity), time/quantity of constructive contribution, quality of constructive contribution, and focus of constructive contribution. Plus there's a subclass, the "unbannable" who has been blocked many times but is always back; this is actually much more common that the truly "unblockable". Another subclass the "un-desysopppable".

I'll integrate something I said in my response to Kudpung's Q2: Community noticeboards would benefit from imposition of more posting rules, perhaps adapted from AE which is kind of half-way between RFARB/ARCA rigidity and ANI free-for-all. The generating of several kinds of "unblockables" would likely be short-circuited by community noticeboards no longer permitting endless evidence-free and usually consequence-free ranting. There is already precedent for this; e.g., ANEW already has long had a variety of stringent rules about evidence and what a proper report is and how to format it, and like AE has a history of BOOMERANG being easy to trigger there, while even AN leans much further this direction than ANI or various more specific noticeboards like NORN and NPOVN. A strong structural change to ANI and other "too open" noticeboards would also help solve the "dramaboarding as a spectator and team sport" problem, of abusing these venues as a form of addictive entertainment instead of dispute resolution. This is a long-standing NOTSOCIAL / NOTGAME / NOTFORUM / NOTBATTLEGROUND issue that the community doesn't know how to tackle.

PS: There's also an inverse problem not really addressed by that mega-RfC at all: "too-blockables". Certain sorts of editors are clearly more likely to be blocked or otherwise sanctioned based on what topics they edit, what viewpoints they express, even what kind of work they focus on, as well as for being newish and without much of a track record, among other "criteria". That's a whole different can of worms, though (and A7V2 has already asked a separate question about this). Another obvious-not-obvious point: we should not take this RfC as a mandate to accept "finally getting to going after" supposed unblockables simply because they've been seen that way. Any case brought must raise an ongoing problem/recent incident, not attempt to just relitigate old news. This is also a double-jeopardy matter; the fact that the community declined to sanction, or effectively-enough sanction, in reaction to an old incident is already a done deal. Cf. the principle that remedies must be preventative not just punitive.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:40, 19 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

SMC, " the principle that remedies must be preventative not just punitive" shouldn't it be "remedies must be preventative not punitive"? A punitive aspect (at least as perceived by the individual affected) may sometimes be inevitable, but it should never be part of the purpose. DGG ( talk ) 20:45, 23 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@DGG: Yes. I was using "just" in the dismissive sense ("Watch where you're going, don't just blunder around like a drunk!"), rather than the additive sense. :-)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:31, 23 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Unlike any other venue on the Internet, every Wikipedia user has the scope to be a 'governance obsessive' - and it's an activity some of them relish as seen by the speed in which some newbies post the 'I wanna be an admin someday' userbox to their user pages. ANI, the corps of a sysops, and the Arbitration Committtee are peppered with amateur litigators (fortunately there are sometimes some professional lawyers on the Committees) who like to feel important and will gladly issue a purely punitive remedy that has little to do with prevention. For some strata of users this is even without a course of appeal to the Arbcom or a body of even higher instance - a true Supreme Court which would rule not only on the relevant policies, but also fully (re)examine the evidence and facts of a case. Indeed, one of the problems of Arbcom is that any number of members are able to recuse themselves or be on a leave of absence where the remaining active arbitrators are barely a serious quorum.

SMcCandlish has some excellent ideas how all these issues could be addressed but this is not the venue to do so. Not being an admin may well unfortunately prevent a successful bid for a seat on the Committee, but I would heartily encourage him to take the incentive to initiate formal discussion towards the badly needed reforms. None of it will bother me personally, but Wikipedia isn't going to close down any time soon. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:39, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Kudpung: Interesting observations. The only one I would quibble with is that I don't think real-life lawyers are necessarily a good addition to the ArbCom/AE mix (which I say as a non-lawyer who worked daily with a legal team for over a decade), though it may matter a lot whether they are steeped in a common law or civil law system. In particular, I'm thinking of a civil-law-jurisdiction attorney who was rather problematic as an AE "enforcer" throughout much of the early-to-mid-2010s (and at least three Arbs said so, though did not directly demand that he depart AE). I think that admin's approach has relaxed some since then, but it was still several years too many of excessive proceduralism (often union-rep-style dodging of responsibility for own actions if not technically against the letter of a rule), grossly punitive approaches (e.g. defaulting to one-year blocks/bans as minimums), and an everyone-involved-is-partly-at-fault pattern (which leads to victim blaming and that corrosive "a pox on all your houses" attitude, which past ArbComs have also been sharply criticized for). ArbCom does not need that, nor did AE. But ArbCom also doesn't need certain aspects of a common-law approach, like excessive resistance to departing from prior decisions even if the facts are different and the result will not be equitable without a new approach. The fact that ArbCom isn't literally bound by precedent seems to have only moderate effect on some Arbs' perception that it should be, that it should behave as if it is (not necessarily Arbs this year, but in general).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:50, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
SMcCandlish, I won't be disappointed if you get a seat on Committee - your detailed analyses of situations are impeccable. However, it would be easier to reform the Committee from outside rather than from within. I would love to help you but I won't be around, when this ACE is over I'm going to dive back under my blanket. I like lawyers because if they are good, they are usually pragmatic - generally far more so than the average governance obsessive or careerists who possibly take care to tell the world about their importance on the Committee on their blogs, Facebook & Instagram pages, and personal web sites - no modesty, some people. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 12:48, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Kudpung: Well, I have tried reform from without. A couple of years ago, for example, I opened (at WP:VPPOL) an "advisory-to-ArbCom" RfC to either A) do away with the counterproductive "notice and awareness" stuff involved in WP:AC/DS and thus obviate any need for the universally alarming and hostile-seeming {{Ds/alert}}; or B) have that template (with correct topical parameter) automatically delivered by bot to any editor who non-trivially edits in a DS-covered topic area, so that awareness is ensured and the template cannot be mistaken for a threat from another editor trying to get the upper-hand, or an allegation of wrongdoing by an admin without any actual evidence. The RfC concluded with over 50% support, and the vast majority of opposition (probably over 90% of it) was based simply in the assumption that the community cannot tell ArbCom what to do with its own templates, which both missed the point and is not actually true (the community sets ArbCom policy). The community could force ArbCom to change this stuff but won't, due to FUD about ArbCom's bureaucracy. ArbCom, though, can itself make such changes, so it appears more practical to get ArbCom to change it from within.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:01, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Question from Gerda[edit]

 – Unfortunately, because a new rule this year (see WP:ACERFC2020#CandidateQs3a), the Electoral Commission is removing analysis of candidate answers and similar discussion away from the questions pages themselves. Mz7 (talk) 19:36, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I thank you for a detailed explanation of your point of view in the matter, which is all I wanted, by an admittedly a little provocative wording, and better not by (involved) me. My wish for arbitration is to look at things closely and without prejudice, no more, and you convinced me - above and before - that you will. So just musing: I believe that not all infobox discussions are created equal, and no factual discussion is bad. Someone simply asking "why no infobox?" should not be treated as an infobox warrior (and wasn't for a TFA a few days ago, which I take as a good sign). - A discussion whether to include a certain parameter is different from requesting that an infobox needs to go completely (or just silently remove one while improving an article, which often annoyed me in the past, but happened less this year, another good sign). The discussion which made three editors leave wasn't about infobox yes or no, but collapsed or uncollapsed. Really, I mean leave the project because a bad compromise is ended? I miss them. - Back to Voceditenore: in 2013, "17.000 words" of discussion needed to be archived about a very specific topic: the new {{infobox opera}} vs. a side navbox (pictured: this or that), - it looks like that comes to an end. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:07, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Re "not all infobox discussions are created equal": Yes, that was always the point being made by ArbCom (and WP:INFOBOX, and various i-box RfCs over the years). It was unfortunate that our general Wikipedian principle to work on articles as articles, on their own merits, was all but forgotten by various parties in those lengthy and overly-categorical infobox disputes, but this mostly seems to have finally settled out.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:57, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Questions from Atsme[edit]

 – Because of the new rules about the format of Q&A pages, the Electoral Commission is moving follow-up discussion containing analysis and general comments about candidate answers to relevant discussion pages. Mz7 (talk) 01:23, 24 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • SMcCandlish, just so you'll have a bit more clarity about the questions I asked, I've provided a few diffs for you to ponder: DGG stated in this diff: As a separate issue, anything that relies on DS will fail. The only way forward is for arb com to directly regulate conduct by removing prejudiced editors and admins, either from an area or from WP, not trying to adopt rules about just how disruptive they can be. DGG also expressed concern over "admin involvement" in this diff, and further explains in this diff. And to credit of Awilley for recognizing potential involvement, there is this diff. Atsme 💬 📧 00:29, 23 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Atsme: I think this whole set of follow-up stuff will get refactored to the talk page, but my quickie analysis of these specific diffs, in order: 1) DGG is expressing his skepticism of DS's effectiveness and even its ARBPOL legitimacy (issues he feels are compounded when "broadly construed" is applied to a DS topic area). I agree, though am amenable to reform of DS not just its outright abolition. 2) Taking that entire paragraph, I agree with DGG's concerns and observations, to the extent I can see the context just from that page (I didn't wade into a lot of ARBAP2 enforcement analysis). That talk page raised multiple concerns (including WP:DIRTLIST), and other admins than DGG (e.g. SPECIFICO) raised them. I'm not particularly concerned about the user page it belongs to (which I would guess is your "modification of DS by a single administrator", above). Since DS is left to admin discretion, it's reasonable for admins to write up reusable DS for community consideration and admin-corps application, and the page even shows clear evidence of negative feedback resulting in the "deprecation" of several of these ideas. The more novel they are, though, the less likely to be used and thus to be useful. I buy Awilley's take in no. 4 on DGG's view in 3 (and don't have issues with 3 that were not raised in 4). In short, Awilley appears to have taken the principles and criticism in 2 and 3 in stride, and a potential logical over-reach by DGG in 3 was correctly refuted in 4.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:48, 23 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Addendum to reply to Stifle's Q1 (on non-admin candidates for ArbCom)[edit]

 – Refactoring part of a response to talk page, since it speculatively tries to answer possible meanings of an unclear question. It's in keeping with rule to move followup/extraneous material to talk.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:39, 26 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I can't mind-read the full intent of the question, of course. Maybe it includes a notion like "How can you assess a desysopping case if you've never been in admin shoes?" I already have and use most of the advanced permissions that have been "unbundled" from admin, including the high-risk (of badly breaking things) template-editor and (in potential community drama) page-mover. The effective fact is that INVOLVED, ADMINCOND, and related policies apply "and then some" to their use, because of their admin origin and community expectations about their use, and because the threshold for having these bits taken away is much lower (anything that smacks of abuse can be cause for WP:AN to revoke such a permission without much of a hearing). Admins are not, as a matter of procedure and rules, treated differently by ArbCom than other parties (though this RfC seems to have reached the conclusion that they have sometimes received subjective favoritism in whether a case would be accepted or a remedy applied). ArbCom is already notoriously difficult to persuade to even consider a potential desysopping, so there is no need for it to be more protective of admins. Indeed, there's a fairly common everday-editor view that ArbCom is basically a board of admins mainly there to shield other admins and help them sanction everyone else. I don't believe that's a correct assessment, but it's an "optics" and community-faith problem nonetheless, with the really obvious (and easily-fixed) cause, of ArbCom usually being only admins.

If anything, the fact that most Arbs are admins, and most admins reduce their content focus and just-an-editor interaction with others, as they get increasingly involved in administrative roles (and a few Arbs have further become like "career politicians", doing ArbCom over and over and over despite it consuming most of their available wiki-time), suggests that the Committee needs more non-admins for balance. Cf. frequent RfA opposition on the basis that a candidate doesn't do enough content work and spends too much time in dramaboards; it's the exact same concern applied to a different role candidacy. Maybe the better question for the community is, "How do we feel that ArbCom can properly discharge its project-protective roles when most of its members have less and less connection over time to the work of and issues faced by everyday editors achieving the project's actual encyclopedia-building mission?" See also WMF's eventual decision (years ago under community pressure) that it needed community-selected board members (and see recent outrage from editors that a draft revision of that bylaw would no longer require the community-selected ones to be the majority). It's essentially the same representativeness concern, just shifted upward a meta-level. ArbCom is in fact really weird for usually not containing any non-admins, and I hope to help crack the artificial ceiling open a bit more, to the community's and project's benefit.

Another possible meaning in your question is "If you're not an admin, why should we think you understand policy well?". My previous answers to questions above have gotten into my policy analysis, shepherding, and interpretation work in some detail.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:11, 19 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Addendum to reply to Newslinger's Q1 (on conduct vs. content disputes)[edit]

 – Refactoring part of a response to talk page, since it speculatively tries to answer potential but uncertain meanings of a question. It's in keeping with rule to move followup/extraneous material to talk.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:48, 26 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

A latent sub-question in this is: When does a conduct dispute become a conduct dispute for ArbCom? That's generally only after community DR mechanisms have already been exhausted (or cannot apply, e.g. because the conduct disruption is transgressing ArbCom-imposed restrictions, because it involves a desysop request, etc.). Another embedded query of sorts is: When is an RS-related dispute in particular not a conduct dispute despite conduct issues being raised? In short, when the dispute is primarily about content (source reliability, source existence, whether the source actually verifies the claim, etc.), and the behavioral complaints are incidental. (Or confused/specious, e.g. "won't stop citing sources I consider unreliable" is not a behavior dispute). However, it is often the case that protracted conflicts will result in content and conduct issues both arising sufficiently that they're independently disruptive and must be addressed. This requires they be handled separately, e.g. the one at RSN or NORN and the other at ANI or ultimately an ArbCom venue. Sometimes back-to-back or even concurrently. E.g., I'm strongly reminded of various "your ethnicity/religion/country/etc. versus mine" ugliness, the sordid "e-cigs" saga, modern American politics edit-and-flame wars, etc., which have all involved numerous content noticeboards and multiple behavioral noticeboardings and ArbCom, often involving the same parties. It can be a slow and even frustrating process, but it is one of our separation-of-powers safeguards against things like an institutional "viewpoint cabal" and so on.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:46, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Poached question from Epiphyllumlover[edit]

Some candidates got this question, and I didn't. But I found it fascinating, so I'm stealing it. >;-)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:02, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  2. If Abby and Brittany Hensel or any other set of similar twins were found to be editing with a "team" rather than individual account, would you block or ban them?--Epiphyllumlover (talk) 00:14, 26 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    @Epiphyllumlover: This speaks to our WP:NOT#BUREAUCRACY and related principles; our policies are written to address practical operation of the project, rather than to handle every possible imagined scenario. So, I do not believe an admin should unilaterally impose a WP:ACCOUNT-based block in such a case, since the policy never imagined this arising. However, "human-interest story" journalism and TV fodder is notoriously toward the low end of newswriting rigor, so claims made in such material about cognition would not be sufficient. This would almost certainly have to be an ArbCom case, with considerable private-evidence consideration, for personal privacy reasons.

    Conjoined twins (CTs) come in all sorts. I believe those of the Chang and Eng Bunker type, who are near-totally independent, would have to be considered separate editors, with a need to take turns at different accounts while editing (or use separate laptops simultaneously, or something to that effect). However, there are also CTs who directly share brain matter, fused at the head, and who do not always have entirely separate consciousness (often one is overwhelmingly dominant). We would often likely conclude to treat them as a single editor. In this specific hypothetical case, there's evidence of both independent and coordinated cognition, so I think it would come down to a specific determination about that case, with consideration given to the impact of various possible outcomes on the editor[s].

    If their normal operation mode while writing really were an indistinct "commingled-I", then they could probably be permitted to retain a single account, but be barred from using it to present Abby-says-versus-Brittany-says dual input, which would definitely be two people using the same account, and confusing to other editors, to WP:CLOSE consensus assessments, etc. I.e., to keep a single account, they would need to privately come to a personal consensus on what to say before posting it, or remain silent on the matter, any time their commingled-I were to separate more clearly producing dissonance between them.

    If their normal mode while writing were in a two-distinct-minds vein, they should use different accounts, but also be instructed not to use them to vote-stack by twice presenting one of their occasional commingled-I viewpoints as if it were two individuals separately coming to the same conclusion (whichever one first posted the commingled-I stance would be the only one to say it). It would be fine for both accounts to !vote in an RfC or whatever, whether they agreed or not, as long as they where independently reasoned (though probably mutually well-discussed) decisions.

    There would of course be no way to absolutely enforce either of these, or even be 100% certain their self-reported descriptions of their mental separateness/coordination were accurate. But either version of these approaches would be a way to adapt policy to suit their unusual circumstance and keep them as editors/an editor in good standing. They would be the community taking in good faith how their mind[s] work, and them in turn agreeing in good faith not to game the system. Since the Hensels do have separate brains and spinal columns, and their coordination is thus a learned (albeit ingrained from infancy, developmentally-shaping) adaptation, I would expect that the second approach (separate accounts) would be the result, even if I think the opposite would likely result in many cases of CTs with fused skulls and direct brain/cognition overlap. PS: This is all assuming the community did not just update the policy to say something about this; I'm presuming ArbCom has been left to interpret and try to apply existing policy. PPS: I would normally have had some misgivings about discussing the Hensels in this way, but they have made public speculation about and understanding of their CT experience central to their actual lives, though various TV shows, etc., that they have long participated in.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:02, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

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