User:SMcCandlish/Arbitration Committee Elections 2020

I won't be doing a candidate guide this year, since I'm actually running for ArbCom.

Instead, I'll expand a bit on my candidate statement, and explain some of my experience, and pre-address some predicable concerns.

Background summary

Professionally, I have extensive relevant experience in policy analysis and technical writing, primarily in the "tech nonprofit" sector. My educational background is in cultural anthropology and linguistics. For more details, see User:SMcCandlish#Bio.

Most relevant on-site experience

I've been intermittently involved for most of my 15 years here in the hard work of policy management (especially toward stability and clarity, and against WP:CREEP), in addition to my content work, which ranges from WP:GAs like William A. Spinks, and WP:AFD "saves" like my total overhaul of Girls Under Glass, to tens of thousands of WP:GNOME edits, and all kinds of WP:Template Editor work.

Like several of my co-candidates, I have a thick skin and am not afraid to "call it as I see it" on the facts, policies, and principles that are involved in a dispute or decision, even if it makes some people unhappy or puts my voice in the minority in some instances.

I am also already steeped in time-consuming, thankless work that cannot please everyone but which nevertheless results in stable compromises the community doesn't just live with but depends on. My long-term work as one of the main shepherds of WP:MOS has inevitably displeased some editors (after all, who doesn't have a style peccadillo they would love to get their way on?) Yet it's a role some of us have to fill, one that involves a great deal of detail as well as sensitivity to socio-cultural differences, requires keen awareness of the interplay between numerous policies and guidelines and other community decisions, is devoted to resolution of recurrent "more heat than light" disputes, and is focused on project stability, resisting willy-nilly decisions and demands (because substantive alterations to that guideline can affect many thousands of articles often for no objective gain).

I consider that unusually good training for ArbCom. It dovetails well with my real-world professional experience as a policy analyst, technologist, and technical writer. The kind of precision required is very similar to that needed in interpreting and applying policy to disputes, and crafting remedies that are both appropriate and WP:WIKILAWYER-proof.

As just one example of experience moderating intense disputes in which I had no vested interest, I long tried to keep stable and policy-compliant the highly controversial article Nithyananda, which was being editwarred very frequently to swing back and forth between a shameless puff-piece by adherents of that swami, and a blatant attack piece by his enemies. This was quite time-consuming and sometimes stressful, but necessary (and not something others seemed willing to volunteer for).

I have authored many RfCs over the years, produced some important successful proposals, and regularly engaged WP:PROCESS to resolve disputes and unanswered questions, so we can get the work done. A very partial and mostly pretty recent summary can be found at User:SMcCandlish/Proposals.

Also of potential interest may be User:SMcCandlish/Essays, an index of most of the essay, information page, help, and supplement material I've worked extensively on.

I am not a former Arb or admin

I am not presently an Arbitrator or a former one. I ran at the end of 2017, and missed election by less than 3%, despite having more support votes than over 50% of those who were elected. The ArbCom elections make use of a weird double-voting system, in which you can both vote for those you support and against those you do not, which is how such a numeric result is even possible.

I have sought to have this broken system reformed – not because of my personal result, but because the system is gameable by groups of editors colluding in e-mail, to vote-stack for PoV-pushing reasons. Most editors will vote honestly, thereby effectively doubling the skew that the system-gamers cause. The RfC to change to another voting system did not meet with success this year, in part because of the difficulty in laying out the statistical anomalies this system causes, and in part because the proposal simply suggested switching to a flat, traditional voting system, without taking account of proportional-voting alternatives. So, I (or someone else) will try this again in the next pre-election round of RfCs.

I am not an admin, and have not had any interest in being one in a very long time; it's not a toolset I wouldn't normally need, and I'm wary of the tendency of those who get that bit to move away from content work and into drama and other internal tedium. (Of course ArbCom involves both drama and tedium, but it is not a lifetime appointment.)

Update: On re-examining the details of these permissions levels, I'm unaware of any relevant ability that the sysop (admin) bit has that CU/OS do not. I would not need sysop to be able to see deleted revisions, which seems to be the primary concern of editors skeptical of voting for a non-admin candidate.

Criticism

I do have my critics (aside from editors simply irritated that they do not get to impose their personal style peccadilloes on everyone). I have rightly been criticized for sometimes being wordy. Despite this tendency in free-range discussions, I certainly know how to "write short". Much of my mainspace gnoming activity, along with my WP:P&G editing, has consisted of compressing out redundancy, and replacing tumid, ponderous blather with concise, plain-English material. I'm entirely capable of keeping e-mail short (and ArbCom depends heavily on e-mail), as well as in producing concise summaries of things (which is much of what ArbCom does: compact findings of fact, statements of principle, and remedies.)

Early in my WP career (fresh from years of work as a professional activist), I got a reputation as unnecessarily combative, and had not properly absorbed WP:CIVIL in all its nuances. It took a while to shake that off; WP:HOTHEADS (of which I'm the principle author) was among the results of that process. Another has been cultivation of a habit of forgiving perceived transgressions, addressing the views and positions and evidence presented without regard to which editor is presenting them, and making peace and re-entering constructive collaboration after any longer-term disagreements.

Strange allegations: I've also been wildly and unreasonably accused of nonsense like being transphobic, simply because I resist politicized "change the English language" shenanigans and other forms of WP:GREATWRONGS and WP:ADVOCACY various people attempt to impose on our content and our internal policy. In reality, I'm all for the use of singular they as a generic gender-neutral pronoun, and for using the actual pronouns that bio subjects prefer; I simply oppose non-encyclopedic language like invented neo-pronouns ("zie", "hirm" etc.) in Wikipedia's own voice. [For detailed background on this, see User:SMcCandlish/TG-NB.] Similarly, I was accused of being misogynist (at least twice), simply for taking to WP:AFD some very inappropriate attempts at articles, which happened to have women as topics. Fortunately, I don't think I've been wrongly accused of racism on such a basis (nor that I will be; I'm the primary author of Wikipedia:Race and ethnicity). I'm not any of those things; I'm a progressive on the social-issues political axis. But I'm also an anti-authoritarian, so "illiberal" far-leftists of the cancel culture stripe rouse my WP:NPOV defenses of our content and our community not much less than far-right fascist b.s. does. This necessarily will not make every single person happy, but I'm here to work on an encyclopedia; WP is not a social network and not a platform for promoting socio-political causes. Just for political-axes completeness: I'm a moderate/centrist on the economics axis, and much more dove than hawk.

Alternative accounts

As mentioned in my candidate statement, I have an alt user ID that I created for privacy and security reasons, and which has been disclosed to ArbCom. I edit under my real name, and have used that alt occasionally for editing controversial topics, to avoid data-mining (e.g. by potential employers Googling me). I've sometimes also used it while traveling and using WiFi I did not control. This alt has actually been disclosed on-wiki several times (in talk page discussions, just not on my user page). After an editor expressed concern that the disclosures were not clear enough, and that others might thus be confused into thinking it was two different editors, I simply stopped using the account (and expressed some consternation at a not-very-WP:AGF implication of socking). Any registered editor can ask me to identify that account specifically, via e-mail. It's not a secret; it would simply defeat the purpose the account served if I spelled it out here or on my user page.

My disused "doppelganger" accounts are: User:McCandlish, User:Smccandlish, User:SMcClandish, User:SMcCandish, User:SMcClandlish (created and redirected to my real user page after some impersonation attempts). An old temporary alt that I used a long time ago was User:Temp4590.

Privacy & security account followup

On 23 November 2020, at Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2020/Coordination#Private Alt-Accounts:

• ArbCom posted (without any evidence, and against my request for evidence and clear explanation per WP:ADMINACCT and WP:ARBPOL) a strange (and, I'm told, not unanimous) opinion that "it is not clear whether SMcCandlish's alternate account is in fact a privacy account, since he has indicated that it has been disclosed on-wiki previously, and that he is willing to identify it to editors that ask, and there has been some overlap in editing with his main account.
• The Election Commission wisely overrode them: "We have reviewed the information [ArbCom] gave us, and we have decided that in the interest of privacy we will allow his candidacy to proceed as it currently is, without the account's public disclosure."

While I have some ongoing, more detailed discussion with ArbCom about this, including detailed analysis of user-account policy, the salient points from that discussion, for ACE2020 voters, is this:

Privacy concerns come in different levels, and I have been very clear, many times, that the only privacy purpose of the account is thwarting low-level data-scraping and casual nosiness by offsite parties (not editors, but random people on the Internet). Disclosure on my own talk page or in non-controversial article talk pages or in private e-mail, does not in any way undermine that privacy argument. The kind of "investigation" involved ("This guy edits on WP a lot, let's go see what articles he's spent a lot of time on") would not plausibly involve someone poring over 15 years of archived talk page stuff, much less mega-scraping for everything I've ever said on-site anywhere. It's just a very thin security-by-obscurity film. That doesn't make it invalid or non-existent, just thin.

This account is not secret in any way from Wikipedia editors, and has not been used in a deceptive or evasive manner. Nor it is against the policy to use an alt. as both a privacy account and a security account (though I've learned, as a practical matter, this is a poor idea, and have thus retired the account).

The only practical-effect difference between the above ArbCom and ElectCom takes is just whether random looky-loos on the Internet can connect my real name to some work on some controversial topics. The account has already been disclosed, less obviously than here or on my userpage, many times on-wiki to editors, and any registered user is free to get the account name from me via e-mail.

I'm disappointed that the current ArbCom has chosen to prejudice ACE2020 against a particular candidate on the basis of no or "secret" evidence, coupled with an abject refusal (so far) to justify its actions, beyond bureaucratic non-answer handwaving. I would feel that way regardless who that candidate is. It's as if nothing at all was learned from the WP:ARBFRAM fiasco and the strong negative community reaction to attempts to make decisions behind closed doors and then refuse to explain ArbCom actions in any meaningful way (see questions 1 and 8 in this monster-sized RfC, among others). In fairness, it is possible that WMF's own rule-making about inter-functionary communications is so restrictive that it makes it difficult for ArbCom to behave otherwise sometimes, but this is not all that I'm seeing; it cannot all be explained away by that.

 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:36, 17 November 2020 (UTC); last substantively edited: 00:45, 27 November 2020 (UTC)