 | This is part of a voter guide I am making, feel free to keep adding relevant questions to it, particularly with regard to older arbcom cases. If you are running in the 2008 Arbcom Elections, feel free to begin filling out the survey whenever you wish. Just fill out the box below and create a subpage for your answers. Thanks. MBisanz talk 17:17, 15 October 2008 (UTC) |
Hello, below are some optional questions to help the voters at the 2008 Arbitration Committee elections get to know you, the candidate, better.
- 1. How long have you been an editor of Wikipedia?
- A.Almost five years now.
- 2. How many total edits do you have on Wikipedia? What is your % of edits to the article space?
- A. 6332, 54.1%
- 3. Are you an administrator? If so, how long have you been one?
- A. No.
- 4. Do you hold any other userrights or positions at the English Wikipedia? (crat, medcom, WPPJ, etc)
- A. I am the greatest thing that has ever happened to Wikipedia. That's enough.
- 5. Do you hold any userrights or other positions of trust at other WMF projects? Which ones?
- A. No.
- 6. Have you ever been named as a participant of a Request for Arbitration? If so, please link case(s).
- A. No.
- 7. Have you ever been blocked or subject to restrictions such as WP:RESTRICT, WP:BLPLOG, WP:AER, or WP:SANCTION? If so, please link to the relevant issue.
- A. None that I consider myself bound by or legitimate.
- 8. Have you ever been blocked or formally sanctioned at another WMF project? If so, please describe.
- A. No.
- 9. What is your best work at Wikipedia? (an article, list, image or content template)
- 10. If elected, would you request the Checkuser and/or Oversight userrights?
- A. No. They need to be abolished.
- 11. Please list any disclosed or undisclosed alternate or prior accounts you have had.
- A. None that I can recall, other than some IP addresses (which I don't remember) that I used either before I had an account or while not realizing I was logged out. I may have registered other accounts (and used them) some time in the past, but it would have been so long ago and such minor work that I honestly don't remember.
- 12. What methods of off-wiki communication do you use to discuss Wikipedia related matters? (IRC, Skype, WR, Mailing Lists, blogs, etc) Please link to any publicly available forums you use.
- A. IRC, e-mail, WR. Do I really need to link to WR?
- 13. Do you have OTRS access? If so, which queues?
- A. No.
- 14. How do you resolve the apparent inconsistency between RFAR/MONGO and RFAR/Jim62sch as to off-site activities by users?
- A. Eliminate the Arbitrary Committee.
- 15. What is your opinion on the new closed motions process?
- A. Eliminate the Arbitrary Committee.
- 16. Besides compromised accounts, under what circumstances would you support or initiate an emergency request for desysopping?
- A. Not even in the case of compromised accounts. The community giveth, and ONLY the community taketh away.
- 17. Currently, only Jimbo Wales and the Arbitration Committee are authorized to perform/request involuntarily desysop an administrator whose account has not been compromised. What is your view of community-based desysopping decisions?
- A. The only legitimate way. All other desysoppings are illegitimate and we are not obligated to heed them; I urge all bureaucrats to immediately undo any such desysopping that has occurred in the past, as well as any that may occur in the future. Mr. Wales and the Arbitrary Committee do not get to make these decisions.
- 18. If you owned Wikipedia as the WMF currently does, what would you do to fix the BLP problem?
- A. It's not a problem.
- 19. In 2004, the Arbitration Committee referred issues to the Mediation Committee. However, as of recent, the Arbitration Committee has not referred issues to the Mediation Committee. Would you refer more content-based disputes to MedCom or continue the current practice?
- A. I wouldn't "refer" them there, because an illegitimate body has no legitimate authority to refer anything anywhere.
- 20. In the past the Arbitration Committee has taken a checkered view of wheel wars, desysopping in some cases and not desysopping in others. What do you believe constitutes a wheel war which would result in a desysopping?
- A. Whatever the community has a problem with.
- 21. How involved must an administrator be to be unable to enforce policy on a user? Given that it is expected that all admins understand policy when they pass RFA, under what circumstances would you not desysop an administrator who was clearly involved with a user they blocked or an article they deleted/protected?
- A. Guess what my answer to this is.
- 22. Besides the technical capabilities administrators have, the Arbitration Committee has granted administrators the rights to enforce certain general sanctions with regards to specific editors and articles. What is your view on these new non-technical privileges being considered part of the "administrative" function for purposes such as RfC, Recall, and RfAR?
- A. Only the community has the legitimate authority to grant these abilities, if it so desires.
- 23. Current checkuser policy at the English Wikipedia prohibits checkusers from fulfilling "fishing" requests. However, global privacy policy does not prohibit such requests from being fulfilled, so long as personal information is not disclosed. Would you support the alteration of the en.wp policy to permit fishing requests?
- A. I would support altering it to eliminate checkuser altogether.
- 24. In 2006 the Arbitration Committee asked the community to address the issue of protecting children's privacy on Wikipedia. To this day there is still no policy on how to handle children's privacy on Wikipedia. What steps would you take to ensure children's privacy is protected under policy?
- A. Not something the AC, as an illegitimate body, has any business involving itself in.
- 25. How do you resolve the apparent inconsistency between RFAR/LevelCheck and RFAR/Durova as to what may be considered justification for blocks of educated new users?
- A. Eliminate the Arbitrary Committee.
- 26. Originally RfARs were named in the style of Party X v. Party Y in line with the idea of two groups in opposition to each other (eg. User:Guanaco versus User:Lir). Later it was changed to naming an individual user (eg. Husnock). Now cases get random names like Highways 2. What naming convention do you believe is the appropriate one for ArbCom to use in designating case names? under what circumstances should a case name be changed after opening, such as in RFAR/Zeraeph?
- A. Does it matter?
- 27. A case is presented between two administrators who have repeatedly undone each other's administrative actions with regard to the deletion of an article. The basis for the deleting administrator's action was an OTRS ticket showing the article to be a copyright violation. In performing the deletion, the administrator clearly referenced the OTRS ticket number. Assuming the undeleting administrator did not have OTRS access, do you penalize him more or less for wheel warring? Do you penalize the deleting administrator for wheel warring?
- A. Not for an illegitimate body to decide.
- 28. To what extent do you believe policy on Wikipedia is or should be binding?
- A. Not at all.
- 29. Do you believe that former arbitrators should be on the Arb Comm mailing list? Why or why not?
- A: Neither entity should exist.