User:Theleekycauldron/Essays/More opinionated arbs 2023

Hi! This is really only half a voter guide for WP:ACE2023, if that's why you're reading this. It's probably not the best decision to base all of your votes on what I'll say here, in case such a thought crossed your mind. This page is also an essay on a quality that I think many arbs lack, to the detriment of trust in ArbCom and the quality of ArbCom decisions. That quality is, to put it bluntly, gumption. Experience making tough and controversial decisions and being transparent as to why they were made. With that in mind, I asked a question to every candidate who would be a new face on ArbCom; this page goes through why I asked the question and my thoughts on the answers of each candidate.

Oh, one last thing, actually: I applaud everyone who chose to stand this cycle. I hold every candidate, as individuals, in high regard. Thank you for offering your service, all :)

The question and its philosophy

1. Thank you for standing :) ArbCom makes a lot of tough decisions in user conduct cases, often with potential for community blowback. What's the toughest (or, one of the toughest) decisions you've made with the admin tools? Preferably a situation related to user-conduct, although anything'll do. Talk about the way you approached the situation, the weighed factors, how you came to a decision, any fallout that came as a result, and if you would have done anything differently. theleekycauldron (talk • she/her) 00:12, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

The reason I asked that is because, well, I don't think we have enough ArbCom candidates who are transparent about their thoughts and have an established record in approaching user-conduct cases. ArbCom spends a lot of time dealing with complex and high-profile cases where there is significant potential for community blowback, and yet we don't elect admins with experience in complex and high-profile cases where there is significant potential for community blowback; those admins are too "opinionated" and "controversial" to be on ArbCom, the conventional wisdom goes. As a result, we elect arbitrators who play their cards close to the vest, not knowing how they'll approach a user-conduct case until they're actually on the Committee. If you care about having an ArbCom that maintains overall institutional legitimacy by doing the right thing even when it loses votes, you should want arbitrators who are willing to disagree with the community where it counts because they have a strong, pre-existing philosophy towards the kind of cases ArbCom deals with, and are willing to be transparent about that difference.

Responses

Aoidh

Answer

I don't think I've made any administrative actions that came with any real fallout or were tough calls to make, but I think the toughest administrative decision I made was when I decided it was best to not use administrative tools in a situation, as I did here. Given that the editor came to me specifically to try to get another editor blocked, it felt inappropriate to be the one to act in that situation, given that up to that point I had been the only administrator to have blocked either of them, and I had blocked the editor in question twice already at that point. With that in mind I felt it was best to let a different administrator review the relevant ANI and ANEW reports to avoid even the appearance of any sort of bias or impropriety, but I say that's the toughest because I sat on that for a while trying to decide what the best course of action was. - Aoidh (talk) 05:43, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

I think that this is okay, if a little lacking. Aoidh pretty freely admits to not having the experience I'm looking for, but I'm not going to disqualify a candidate because they don't work in user-conduct. (I do think that not every candidate should be a policy admin, but a content-review admin such as DYK is fine for me.) I'll also applaud their ability to keep a cool head under pressure, per the discussion they linked to in that thread, and the willingness to let other admins take the lead. Aoidh is a fine admin, and they would make a fine arbitrator, but they're not the kind of candidate that I think ArbCom is running a deficiency of. They're the kind of arbitrator ArbCom already has.

firefly

Answer

These situations (taking tricky user-conduct decisions) come up reasonably frequently at SPI and in the wider work of a Checkuser. These cases involve making a determination as to whether a user is a sockpuppet of a blocked editor, ranging from simple "playground nonsense" socking to mess about, through to complex long-term abuse involving organised disinformation operations aiming to sway our coverage of political matters. When weighing the evidence in such cases, the stakes are reasonably high - SPI blocks are given a reasonably high deference by convention, and Checkuser blocks are given an extremely high deference by policy. When blocking, I need to be as confident as I can be that I am making the right call, to a higher threshold than when making a block under a different policy (e.g. for vandalism). I need to ensure that if questioned on the reasoning (which may involve a fairly complex logic chain) I can explain it to a fellow admin or CU. The consequences of not blocking and being wrong, while lower, are still potentially significant - I could allow abusive accounts to continue to disrupt the project (although this is an easier case to remedy at a later date than blocking incorrectly).

In terms of how I make those decisions, it is all about the probative value of evidence - does the evidence we have pass my confidence threshold for "these accounts are related and being used abusively". We can almost never reach certainty, we can only look to become "sure enough". A similar logic can be applied to the types of user conduct cases that come before ArbCom. We need to ensure that the problem has reached the threshold for a case (i.e. the issue cannot be handled by the community); we then need to assess the evidence, and draw conclusions as to the least amount of action that will solve the problem and prevent (further) disruption to the project or harm to contributors. We are never going to be able to make everybody happy, in some cases nobody will be 100% pleased with the outcome - that is the unfortunate reality of dispute resolution - but we can ensure that we find the best outcome for the community as a whole. firefly ( t · c ) 13:43, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

This is also okay, but not exactly what I'm looking for. The community almost always has high confidence in decisions made by the CU/SPI team, because they don't have the evidence (and, often, experience) necessary to question it. SPI cases also tend to lack the policy-ethical complexity that other kinds of user-conduct cases have: the gray area is usually a question of innocence, not of severity. So I'm not sure that firefly is demonstrating experience with making potentially controversial decisions with advanced permissions, but I'm glad that they've shared some kind of thought process on how they make decisions in complex cases, and speak to some experience in that.

HJ Mitchell

Answer

These decisions are always difficult. Sanctioning good-faith editors is not something anyone should take any pleasure from and severe sanctions should be a last resort (ie after other options have been tried or look unlikely to be effective). I've done a lot of work at arbitration enforcement and some of the decisions that have to be made there can be unpopular. One of the most recent is actually a block you made. That editor is subject to a topic ban from the Arab-Israeli conflict and although the topic ban was imposed (by me, for full disclosure) a long time ago, it was imposed because the editor couldn't (or wouldn't) edit the topic area neutrally to the point that it was considered tendentious. While that editor does a lot of good work elsewhere, they had repeatedly violated their topic ban and had been sanctioned multiple times for doing so, including several months-long blocks. In the subsequent discussion and appeal, I endorsed your decision to block indefinitely because the editor had a long history of failing or refusing to abide by restrictions and the disruption caused by allowing them to continue to push the limits would have outweighed the benefits of their other contributions to the encyclopaedia. It was a painful decision and reasonable minds can differ and editors I hold in high esteem, including some you would expect to be opponents, felt that the block was unjust or that indef was excessive but that's where I came down on it as an uninvolved admin.
Back in April, I closed an AE request and enacted a one-year siteban on a long-term editor for their conduct at the intersection of at least three designated contentious topics. They were very polite in their response though some of their friends (I assume they were watching their talk page) were upset by the decision and the blocked editor was confused about which of the three CTOPs I decided to log it under. I wouldn't call that significant blowback, but the decision was obviously not going to curry favour with editors who were friendly with the blocked editor. I don't begrudge their loyalty for a moment but the role of an uninvolved admin (or an arb) is to take a wider, impartial view. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 18:00, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

HJ Mitchell does a pretty good job with this answer (and not just because he flatters me!). They pointed to experience in AE, a venue that is maybe one of the toughest places for an admin to make their bones and involves making decisions with high potential for community controversy. I don't think that enacting consensus for a siteban is exactly the same as imposing one unilaterally, but HJ sells the case short: it was an experienced user with a not-insignificant rap sheet, and the it wasn't clear-cut at a glance that a siteban was the necessary response. HJ brings the experience and temperament I definitely think ArbCom could use more of – they're not scared of the block button, but they don't leap to it either, and they're always happy to go into the specifics.

Sdrqaz

Answer

A recent tough conduct-related decision is last month's block of Jay Sanvictores. Jay had been making many edits in the mainspace and talkspace that looked like test edits, but none of the edits seemed malicious or in bad faith. As I've noted before, it's a lot harder to shut the door on a good-faith disruptor and this is what the Committee sometimes has to do, for the greater good of the project. Jay had received a welcome message about test edits and a notice that they should not have been creating blank articles. At that point, I think that a block for disruption or not being here build an encyclopaedia would have been within administrative discretion – not that I would have done so myself, but certainly within policy.

However, to give them a second chance, I left a handwritten message explaining why their behaviour was disruptive and nudged them to projects in other languages, since they were perhaps unable to communicate effectively in English. I watched the page that I had deleted and their talk page to see if there was any response or any further disruption. They unfortunately did the same thing again and I blocked them, leaving a handwritten note again. Given that their first language probably wasn't English, I tried to keep the messages as simple possible, while balancing the need for friendliness and the need to communicate the risks of a block.

I didn't receive any fallout for it, but Jay has not responded to my messages, nor have they edited any other projects. I think that there's not much I would've done differently, though I could've simplified my messages further or made the block time-limited instead of indefinite, but there would've been the risk of Jay causing more disruption after the block's expiry. Ultimately, I think that I did what I could to give them a "way out" from being blocked, but wasn't successful and had to block them to reduce disruption to the project.

All right, credit where credit is due, there's an attempt here. Jay Sanvictores had amassed all of 19 edits at the time of the block, so this might've been "tough" in that it was a head-scratcher for Sdrqaz (and more power, that's good), but it wasn't tough in the sense that the community was going to complain mightily about it. The philosophy Sdrqaz lays out here is clear: slow to block, work with contributors to try and pull them in-bounds. I'll give points for transparency, although I don't know that such a philosophy is great for ArbCom, the place where everyone has dug in their heels so far in that they can't breathe.

ToBeFree

Answer

Unilaterally taking controversial action with the tools wouldn't just be tough – it would often be a mistake too. For example, the criteria for speedy deletion are meant for uncontroversial cases; speedy deletion is not meant to be knowingly applied "with potential for community blowback". Same applies to actions taken in response to WP:AIV reports. Whenever there's a tough decision to be made, it should be the result of a consensus – which is why ArbCom is a committee and not a collection of people who individually authoritatively define the results of cases.

I tried to avoid making this mistake as far as I could, and I've been successful so far. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 01:50, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

I find this answer disappointing verging on disingenuous, with all due respect to an admin who's made over 15,000 blocks in their tenure. Most of those blocks are AIV-cleaning, but some of them are against experienced users where there really was potential for significant community disagreement. They have the experience I'm looking for, and the fact that they're not willing to be transparent about how they make the decisions they do is not the answer I'm looking for. Whenever there's a tough decision to be made, it should be the result of a consensus makes me think that should they be elected, they will avoid making or pushing for decisions that might earn them criticism, which is something ArbCom already does far too often at the expense of actually being right. ArbCom is supposed to gain social capital by making the clearly right decisions and then spend that social capital to make the tough ones, not gain social capital by shying away from the decisions that are made scary by the social politics.

Z1720

Answer

Thank you for your question @Theleekycauldron: I think my work at AE has produced tough decisions, so I will expand upon that below. I will talk in generalities because other editors cannot respond to what I say, but while writing this response I did have specific cases in mind and I invite editors to look at my AE work. If I am selected as an arbitrator, I will publicly post my reasoning with my votes whenever appropriate.

When evaluating an AE case, I first ensure that immediate action is not necessary (like plagiarism or outing). If it is not, I give editors a couple of days to post their submissions to get a more complete picture before making determinations. When evaluating evidence, I read the submitted diffs and discussion threads that surround the diffs; this allows me to understand the diffs' context and consider the behaviour from a more neutral perspective. I will then read the analysis from the submissions to see how the diffs were interpreted by the people involved. I also develop timelines while looking at evidence to help understand the dispute.

When writing recommendations, my first thought is "How will my suggestion stop or prevent the largest amount of disruption for as many editors as possible?" Having a case continue to return to AE takes up admin time and frustrates editors involved, but being heavy-handed on sanctions can enflame the situation, causing editors to lash out or leave Wikipedia. Some recommendations I give are interaction bans for editors who struggle with discussing issues with each other; topic bans, broadly construed, for editors who cannot neutrally edit about a topic; and a block for editors causing continuous disruption on a large variety of articles. I post my reasoning with my recommendations so editors and admin can evaluate my decision and reference it when responding. If selected for ArbCom, I will continue evaluating cases from the perspective of reducing disruption and posting my reasoning publicly when appropriate.

In terms of fallout, admin have disagreed with my recommendations at AE; I read all of their responses and tried to come to a consensus with them. Editors have also reacted in various ways to my recommendations; in my responses, I focus on the content of the evidence presented and give my reasoning in detail. Patience is helpful in stressful situations, and I will bring that patience as I discuss my reasoning with others. If selected for ArbCom, I will continue to read the community's response to all posts and incorporate feedback into my perspective. Z1720 (talk) 16:13, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

This is pretty decent! I'm a fan of the commitment to transparency about their decision-making, and they show a pretty clear understanding of what goes into AE. Their philosophy seems to be "investigate carefully, think about the greater good", which is decent as answers go, if not the most informative: I think everyone wants to do good and avoid evil, really. Their answer comes off as a little gun-shy, but they do clearly have the experience, so all in all, it's not so bad.