8 ms·

Wikipedia community reacts to an editor being temporarily banned

71 points by ddlatham 7y ago

ggm 7y ago
Headline doesn't match story: toxic but productive editor get ban, community in uproar
- dang 7y ago
  OK, we've taken a crack at a more accurate headline. If anyone can find representative language from the article that would make for a suitable title, let us know. We prefer that, but somewhat unusually I couldn't find any candidates in this one.
  - austincheney 7y ago
    "Wikipedia institutes first ever temporary user/admin ban"
    - JdeBP 7y ago
      Except that it was the Wikimedia Foundation, not Wikipedia.
- austincheney 7y ago
  What indications are there of toxic behavior? Rude, as in a lack of kindness, is not necessarily an indicator of toxic behavior. Toxic implies harm. I completely understand that some people have big tears and when water spout engages at maximum velocity the world has temporarily ended in a dark pit of epic oblivion, but in the real world disagreements are a natural thing that can result in beneficial outcomes.
- PavlovsCat 7y ago
  How do you get from "a reputation for almost always being right on the underlying merits in a dispute, but going about it in a fairly obnoxious way" and "arguably the best admin in Wikipedia's history" to "toxic"? "WP editor gets unprecedented temp ban, community taken aback" would be rather factual IMO.
  - Joe-Z 7y ago
    Maybe he got that from combining it with the following statements: "he had received two previous “conduct warnings” from the foundation’s Trust and Safety Council for his incivil style toward other Wikipedians" "In 2017, a fledgling Wikipedian accused Fram of monitoring her activity on the site to such an extent that felt like harassment" and "It culminated in an ugly claim by Fram that he would not be misracing a black person by calling them the n-word, only being racist"
    - PavlovsCat 7y ago
      "Incivil style" can mean anything. To be snarky, this is coming from people who just give out an unprecedented temp ban and say they can't talk about what it's for, and probably consider that civil, too. So who knows, I'd rather see the comments in question than a description of them. As for that description of an accusation, anyone who naively created stub articles ("this is what I know, hopefully others will add to it", I've been there) might know how quickly having stuff deleted and being berated on your talk page can go. That can "feel" like all sorts of things, but if there was really something undue going on, I would like to hear it from more than one person, because this is more about patterns in the data of WP in contrast to other data on WP (e.g. how admins normally behave), not how it feels for a WP newbie. from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_response_to_the_Wikimedia_Foundation%27s_ban_of_Fram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_response_t... > Endorse with an additional request: if and when an editor with an instance of problematic editing such as WP:CopyVio is identified, en-WP admins and editors – including Fram – may scrutinize other edits of that editor. WMFOffice accepts that this is neither stalking nor evidence of hostility or harassment, rather such efforts are in good faith and necessary to maintain or improve the "Quality and Reliability" of the en-WP. > he would not be misracing a black person by calling them the n-word, only being racist How is that not true, technically? I mean, without the context of the actual dispute, this is the weirdest form of gossip. from the same WP page: > I came here after reading some quotes which show a surreal level of straw men and evidence fabrication against Fram: a post where he said writing the n-word is unacceptable was labeled a racial slur! (I hope I dreamed that.) so I clicked on the link there, and finally found the orginal: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:No_personal_attacks&diff=896140838#Harassment,_mocking_or_otherwise_disrespecting_someone_on_the_basis_of_gender_identification_and_pronoun_preference https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:No... Reading comment and the discussion before it... to say this was "an ugly claim" is silly to me, and it only "culminated" in that because the other party didn't respond. Too much spooky language, no meat. Merriam-Webster defines toxic as "extremely harsh, malicious, or harmful", and I think the disconnect is that in my mind, I associate "toxic" with malicious and harmful, not with "extremely harsh". I mean, was George Carlin a toxic comedian? He certainly was extremely harsh, but he meant well, he actually had a point, and so on. Of course, he wasn't always harsh. I simply don't know if it's true for said admin, but if he was just a dick to everyone, the community would be relieved, not upset, and the charges wouldn't need to get trumped up like this, how it "culminated in an ugly claim", as if that was him being toxic, rather than being treated in a toxic manner, which would be my reading. Right at the beginning of that thread Fram said: > The repeated statements you made that people "misgendered" you, that they "declared that they personally hate" you, and so on, from those discussions, are much worse personal attacks than what you are now trying to raise here. As far as I can see, no one adressed you with "Peh" in those discussions either. While yo may prefer "they" and it would be more courteous if people used this, there is no misgendering happening if they instead use "xe", which is explicitly intended to be gender-neutral. Your constant misrepresentation of what others said and constant playing the gender / minority / prosecution card is rapidly growing stale But it's constant bait and switch from there, and that's not Fram's fault.
joks 7y ago
not sure how this is at all describable as a "culture war" but headlines gonna headline
- luckylion 7y ago
  He appears to not be very progressive - the "culture war" bit being that, if he was, this may have played out differently. Similar things happen on Twitter for example. Doxing is ban-worthy when done by one person, but not when done by others with the difference being the political side these persons are on.
  - DanBC 7y ago
    The culture war bit is about the fact that a small number of white het cis men dominate wikipedia to the disadvantage of the project. They drive away new editors, they fail to take action on clear harassment, and it skews articles in weird directions.
camdenlock 7y ago
Heh, is this related to the sudden push by Wikipedia to Decentralize Everything? Okay then, if we have a fully decentralized info network, which decision-making entities are installed as the prime movers? What contracts exist to operate such a decentralized governed network, facilitating elections and whatnot? (Assuming we want a “fair” and “just” decentralized state). In other words, someone’s always gotta be in charge. Just a matter of who.
kartan 7y ago
He wrote 'Fuck Arbcon' in the entry for the arbitration committee. He had other warnings. He got banned for a year. Makes sense. I do not know from were the 'freedom' argument comes from our relates to this.
- luckylion 7y ago
  > He wrote 'Fuck Arbcon' in the entry for the arbitration committee. He had other warnings. He got banned for a year. Should somebody go to jail for saying "fuck the DOJ"?
  - Barrin92 7y ago
    No, but if you say "fuck the church" while you're staying at the podium people will probably show you the door. Wikipedia is a private organisation and can handle disputes how they see fit. You don't have legal rights to wikipedia editing.
    - luckylion 7y ago
      And this isn't about "legal rights", it's about the internal process of Wikipedia that people are protesting. But I see this is going to be a "it's a private organization, you mustn't critique it" thread.
    - turtlecloud 7y ago
      That doesn’t really apply here. There was no rule before about temp bans prior to this. Of course it was in poor taste, but it should have not have resulted in temp banning since there were no prior rules in place. In your situation what if I now had misspoke and when expecting a temp ban, somehow get perms banned due to new rules? Their was no due process and the wikimedia foundation is no better than an authoritarian government.
      - Barrin92 7y ago
        To my knowledge my chess club has no formal rules about insults either, but I know that if I started to say "fuck you" to the owner, he'd throw me out. If the person in question needs formal rules to not behave anti-social, maybe staying a year off wikipedia is a good opportunity to figure that out. Seriously we're dealing with adults here, not children. Which actually goes to the root of the problem, the type of personality that spends so much time on editing the website seems to have a problem with very basic civility.
nullc 7y ago
Headline aside, this is really well reported. Kudos to the journalist and buzzfeed for putting in an effort to understand the relative dynamics and for linking directly to the underlying discussions. Wikipedia is one of the few very large venues online that I feel really had moderation done right (HN isn't in the running due to not being very large. :))-- sites like reddit, twitter, facebook just get capricious bans handed out essentially at random--- on those sites earnest and serious harassment usually goes unaddressed while petty staff qualms or favors for connected parties are about the only thing that reliably gets addressed. (And I am speaking directly from experience) Having a community that governs itself is really the only thing with a chance of scaling, but for that to work the community has to also own itself: Few will invest the labor required to maintain effective self-governance if they feel they are facing capricious overrides, creating an environment where they're working for someone else (without compensation) rather than for themselves. For a long time Wikipedia was a shining example here, but this incident suggests to me that it may not be anymore.
- blargmaster33 7y ago
  There moderation is pure leftist..
- eecc 7y ago
  I see your point, but the last paragraphs of the article painted a different scenario; one where the self-governing bodies were unable to address the skillfully borderline actions - where each one individually is within rule and custom, but as a whole are an act of harassment- of a malicious yet respected actor. Fascinating... there are several historical examples of “revolutionary” bodies that succumbed to these dynamics. Curious to see if there’s some layman’s literature on the subject
  - PavlovsCat 7y ago
    not quite what you are wondering about, but FWIW this bit from the article > “The community is currently blaming the foundation for their own mess, in my opinion,” he wrote, “which was caused by our abject failure to develop procedures to enforce civility without Foundation intervention.” reminded me of something Gustav Landauer said: > You don’t know what order with freedom means! You only know what revolt against oppression is! You don’t know that the rod, discipline, violence, the state and government can only be sustained because of you and because of your lack of socially creative powers that develop order within liberty!
0815test 7y ago
These Wikipedia admins are reaping what they sowed. The toxicity and ban-happy attitude in Wikipedia as a whole did not come from the Foundation (which is the internet landlord of the site anyway - if you don't like it, start a fork). The Wikimedia Foundation has just upped the ante a little bit.
- nullc 7y ago
  Wikimedia was created by the community, but it seems that some there might be forgetting who was supposed to be serving who.
canttestthis 7y ago
And of course no corporate drama is complete without the CEO shooting themselves in the foot with misguided tweets [1]. There's something about Twitter that inspires people to say really dumb things. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#New_Buzzfeed_News_article_about_the_Fram_drama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#New_Buzz...
markdown 7y ago
> deleting her stubs — short, unfinished articles that are culled when they sit dormant for too long Can someone please explain why they do this? You'd think that with $100M/yr in donations, hosting stubs wouldn't be a problem.
- nullc 7y ago
  Not to get into an extensive debate, but this is a complex issue where intelligent and well informed people can disagree. As you note, obviously the concern has nothing to do with hosting bandwidth or similar. The concern driving the removal of stubs and other undermaintained pages are (1) editorial, relating to the quality of Wikipedia as a resource and (2) the efficient expenditure of maintenance labor. The effort by volunteers to maintain Wikipedia utterly dwarfs monetary donations to the foundation even by the most conservative estimates. Similarly, the amount of potential harm caused to the world (or an individual, or to the public's goodwill towards wikipedia) due to an article which is grievously incorrect or malicious due to being unmaintained also dwarfs petty operating considerations. The concern is that articles that no one cares about are potentially places where damaging content could fester and dealing with them, even inadequately, requires expenditure of editorial resources which could be better applied elsewhere. There are contributors at both extremes of this ideological split, though most people are somewhere in between. The political dynamic has created something of a impasse where contributors more on the extreme end of include-everything oppose the addition of tools that would allow less aggressive handling (such as making those pages accessible only to logged-in users, whom are presumably better informed about the sausage making) because of the justified concern that these measures would also be applied to more borderline cases which are currently included.
  - xref 7y ago
    > The concern is that articles that no one cares about are potentially places where damaging content could fester and dealing with them That could describe the bulk of the millions of articles, why single out stubs for the axe specifically
    - 7y ago
alex_young 7y ago
I don't quite understand what I'm supposed to be upset with here. You've got a guy who stalks users and attacks the administration, and they ban him for a year, which kind of seems like a measured approach to be honest. Some other admins didn't like that treatment and quit. So what? If you see that kind of behavior as something acceptable and the organization doesn't, maybe you shouldn't be there either. Sounds like much ado about nothing.
- kartan 7y ago
  It's about the absolute right to free speech. It has been a far right tactic to attack people that condemns their speeches: https://lithub.com/when-fascists-weaponize-free-speech-absolutism/ https://lithub.com/when-fascists-weaponize-free-speech-absol... USA has started the political campaign and with it there is an increase in manipulation. What should be a matter of politeness - don't insult people - becomes an opportunity to push against moderated discussion. :( Please HN review this thread carefully as this is what comes for the next year.
- nullc 7y ago
  You might want to turn your skimming level down a bit. Wikipedia's community has a long established set of processes for self-governance, but they were bypassed in this case. The administration in question was banned by staff of the Wikimedia foundation, the 501c3 non-profit created by the community for the purpose of the operation of the infrastructure of Wikipedia, and have done so without providing a clear justification both for the circumvention of the project's governance and the specific. This is a highly unusual though not completely unprecedented event. 99% of the people who are up in arms about this would have had no issue had the arbcom banned the user in question, the constitutional issue is what has people so concerned.
  - DanBC 7y ago
    > Wikipedia's community has a long established set of processes for self-governance, but they were bypassed in this case. This is untrue. The processes were used and they failed to work. They failed to protect people from this abusive admin. Read the discussion about fram - there are plenty of people there saying "he's a bit of an arsehole but he edits a lot". Clearly the existing processes were aware that fram was abusive.
zapdrive 7y ago
I think the least highlighted part of the story, and the one being totally ignored on HN, is the alleged secret romantic relationship between a foundation member and the alleged female complainant. That puts a lot in perspective for me. What's even more interesting is that the alleged complainant was mostly active on pages related to women athletes, women's rights, abortion rights etc., so it's not a far stretch to assume she's a feminist. And from her perspective she was being stalked and harassed by a privileged white male, who in fact was just doing his job of correcting her grammar, deleting stubs etc. Also his rude behavior wouldn't have helped. So she went ahead and did what any radical feminist in power would do, abuse her power.
- 0815test 7y ago
  Do you have any source for this (that isn't just rampant speculation)? If these things are going on and actually impacting editorial work within Wikipedia itself, it sounds like we are due for a nice little Wikipediagate...
  - zapdrive 7y ago
    It's right there in the article. Conclusions are mine, but the allegations are right there.
    - Quanttek 7y ago
      There is no factual basis to these allegations though. And besides your first sentence and the first half of the second sentence, the rest is completely unsubstantiated. Your comment on feminism and her perspective has no bearing in reality
      - zapdrive 7y ago
        If the foundation would release the complaint, we wouldn't have to go digging into Fram's history to find the source of this conflict. So don't put this on me. Yes, these allegations could be wrong, but this is as close as we can get to the facts without the foundation releasing the original complaint. Also, what is your take on this? Why do you think the foundation, that usually only steps in when someone is posting something highly illegal like child porn etc., bypassed the orb committee this time? Why is the complaint being shrouded in secrecy? There's definitely something funny going on, and this is the only line of reasoning that makes sense to me. But I'm open to other ideas.
Quanttek 7y ago
It is true that WMF should have communicated the reasons for the ban better and worked more closely with the community. However, I do not understand the extreme upset. From what I understand, he was an extremely toxic element of the community that drove new and old users away due to his repeated harassment, which does more damage than having him off the site and loosing his prolific enforcement of the speedy deletion policy. One of the reasons why they should have communicated better is seen in the following abstract. It also demonstrates how toxic the community is and reminds me a lot of how GamerGate started: The ex-boyfriend of the game developer of "Depression Quest" alleged, in a very long rant, that she was sleeping with a game journalist for a good review in order to profit from it. Of course, that was complete bullshit as, even believing she slept with him, (a) he did not write a review for the game and (b) the game is for free. It is and was never about actual misconduct on the side of the victim of harassment but rather about their identity and how that upsets the community because they're an "Other" in "their" space (here, a woman and a transgender editor) > Those dynamics are central to Fram’s ban. Egged on by Fram’s insistence that the foundation had actually banned him because of a grudge, and stymied by the foundation’s refusal to name the complainant, Wikipedians began to scour his history on the platform, looking for someone to blame. > Much of that blame fell, perhaps predictably, on a woman and a transgender editor. In 2017, a fledgling Wikipedian accused Fram of monitoring her activity on the site to such an extent that felt like harassment. The editor, whose contributions focused on women athletes, lesbian history, and abortion rights, felt that Fram’s pattern of correcting her spelling and deleting her stubs — short, unfinished articles that are culled when they sit dormant for too long — demonstrated a lack of good faith. [...] > More recently, Fram had an acrimonious semantic debate with a high-profile transgender editor over whether referring to them as “xe” constituted misgendering. It culminated in an ugly claim by Fram that he would not be misracing a black person by calling them the n-word, only being racist. "Please, stop being cruel to individuals whose names have come up in the course of this issue" > On Wikipedia and in the forums of Wikipediocracy, a site where Wikipedians gather to discuss and criticize Wikipedia, users speculated about a secret romantic connection between the woman editor and a member of the Wikimedia Foundation board and about whether the trans editor might’ve been pretending to be trans to win a fight with Fram. The vitriol toward those two users grew so intense that Risker chastised some Wikipedians in her critical note about the ban.
verisimilitudes 7y ago
I'm not going to weep for Wikipedia. The most I really use it for is finding links to real resources and I can do that elsewhere. I've tried to contribute before, but would always have my edits reverted. They also ban Tor, which is unacceptable. Anyway, democracy is either good or it isn't. I'm of the opinion that it isn't, but it's queer to me that one could champion democratic ideals and then complain about the demographics. I vehemently disagree with the idea that white men are somehow incapable of cataloguing the world's knowledge, purely because they're not black or Chinese or women or something else, for obvious reasons. It's interesting that this seems to be connected to the usual group of troublemakers, people who are easily offended, but we'll see where this leads.
username90 7y ago
I wonder how long the world will let a small group of privileged Californians police basically all of internet.

71 points by ddlatham 7y ago

ggm 7y ago

Headline doesn't match story: toxic but productive editor get ban, community in uproar

dang 7y ago
OK, we've taken a crack at a more accurate headline. If anyone can find representative language from the article that would make for a suitable title, let us know. We prefer that, but somewhat unusually I couldn't find any candidates in this one.
- austincheney 7y ago
  "Wikipedia institutes first ever temporary user/admin ban"
  - JdeBP 7y ago
    Except that it was the Wikimedia Foundation, not Wikipedia.
austincheney 7y ago
What indications are there of toxic behavior? Rude, as in a lack of kindness, is not necessarily an indicator of toxic behavior. Toxic implies harm. I completely understand that some people have big tears and when water spout engages at maximum velocity the world has temporarily ended in a dark pit of epic oblivion, but in the real world disagreements are a natural thing that can result in beneficial outcomes.
PavlovsCat 7y ago
How do you get from "a reputation for almost always being right on the underlying merits in a dispute, but going about it in a fairly obnoxious way" and "arguably the best admin in Wikipedia's history" to "toxic"? "WP editor gets unprecedented temp ban, community taken aback" would be rather factual IMO.
- Joe-Z 7y ago
  Maybe he got that from combining it with the following statements: "he had received two previous “conduct warnings” from the foundation’s Trust and Safety Council for his incivil style toward other Wikipedians" "In 2017, a fledgling Wikipedian accused Fram of monitoring her activity on the site to such an extent that felt like harassment" and "It culminated in an ugly claim by Fram that he would not be misracing a black person by calling them the n-word, only being racist"
  - PavlovsCat 7y ago
    "Incivil style" can mean anything. To be snarky, this is coming from people who just give out an unprecedented temp ban and say they can't talk about what it's for, and probably consider that civil, too. So who knows, I'd rather see the comments in question than a description of them. As for that description of an accusation, anyone who naively created stub articles ("this is what I know, hopefully others will add to it", I've been there) might know how quickly having stuff deleted and being berated on your talk page can go. That can "feel" like all sorts of things, but if there was really something undue going on, I would like to hear it from more than one person, because this is more about patterns in the data of WP in contrast to other data on WP (e.g. how admins normally behave), not how it feels for a WP newbie. from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_response_to_the_Wikimedia_Foundation%27s_ban_of_Fram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_response_t... > Endorse with an additional request: if and when an editor with an instance of problematic editing such as WP:CopyVio is identified, en-WP admins and editors – including Fram – may scrutinize other edits of that editor. WMFOffice accepts that this is neither stalking nor evidence of hostility or harassment, rather such efforts are in good faith and necessary to maintain or improve the "Quality and Reliability" of the en-WP. > he would not be misracing a black person by calling them the n-word, only being racist How is that not true, technically? I mean, without the context of the actual dispute, this is the weirdest form of gossip. from the same WP page: > I came here after reading some quotes which show a surreal level of straw men and evidence fabrication against Fram: a post where he said writing the n-word is unacceptable was labeled a racial slur! (I hope I dreamed that.) so I clicked on the link there, and finally found the orginal: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:No_personal_attacks&diff=896140838#Harassment,_mocking_or_otherwise_disrespecting_someone_on_the_basis_of_gender_identification_and_pronoun_preference https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:No... Reading comment and the discussion before it... to say this was "an ugly claim" is silly to me, and it only "culminated" in that because the other party didn't respond. Too much spooky language, no meat. Merriam-Webster defines toxic as "extremely harsh, malicious, or harmful", and I think the disconnect is that in my mind, I associate "toxic" with malicious and harmful, not with "extremely harsh". I mean, was George Carlin a toxic comedian? He certainly was extremely harsh, but he meant well, he actually had a point, and so on. Of course, he wasn't always harsh. I simply don't know if it's true for said admin, but if he was just a dick to everyone, the community would be relieved, not upset, and the charges wouldn't need to get trumped up like this, how it "culminated in an ugly claim", as if that was him being toxic, rather than being treated in a toxic manner, which would be my reading. Right at the beginning of that thread Fram said: > The repeated statements you made that people "misgendered" you, that they "declared that they personally hate" you, and so on, from those discussions, are much worse personal attacks than what you are now trying to raise here. As far as I can see, no one adressed you with "Peh" in those discussions either. While yo may prefer "they" and it would be more courteous if people used this, there is no misgendering happening if they instead use "xe", which is explicitly intended to be gender-neutral. Your constant misrepresentation of what others said and constant playing the gender / minority / prosecution card is rapidly growing stale But it's constant bait and switch from there, and that's not Fram's fault.

joks 7y ago

not sure how this is at all describable as a "culture war" but headlines gonna headline

luckylion 7y ago
He appears to not be very progressive - the "culture war" bit being that, if he was, this may have played out differently. Similar things happen on Twitter for example. Doxing is ban-worthy when done by one person, but not when done by others with the difference being the political side these persons are on.
- DanBC 7y ago
  The culture war bit is about the fact that a small number of white het cis men dominate wikipedia to the disadvantage of the project. They drive away new editors, they fail to take action on clear harassment, and it skews articles in weird directions.

camdenlock 7y ago

Heh, is this related to the sudden push by Wikipedia to Decentralize Everything? Okay then, if we have a fully decentralized info network, which decision-making entities are installed as the prime movers? What contracts exist to operate such a decentralized governed network, facilitating elections and whatnot? (Assuming we want a “fair” and “just” decentralized state). In other words, someone’s always gotta be in charge. Just a matter of who.

kartan 7y ago

He wrote 'Fuck Arbcon' in the entry for the arbitration committee. He had other warnings. He got banned for a year. Makes sense. I do not know from were the 'freedom' argument comes from our relates to this.

luckylion 7y ago
> He wrote 'Fuck Arbcon' in the entry for the arbitration committee. He had other warnings. He got banned for a year. Should somebody go to jail for saying "fuck the DOJ"?
- Barrin92 7y ago
  No, but if you say "fuck the church" while you're staying at the podium people will probably show you the door. Wikipedia is a private organisation and can handle disputes how they see fit. You don't have legal rights to wikipedia editing.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    And this isn't about "legal rights", it's about the internal process of Wikipedia that people are protesting. But I see this is going to be a "it's a private organization, you mustn't critique it" thread.
  - turtlecloud 7y ago
    That doesn’t really apply here. There was no rule before about temp bans prior to this. Of course it was in poor taste, but it should have not have resulted in temp banning since there were no prior rules in place. In your situation what if I now had misspoke and when expecting a temp ban, somehow get perms banned due to new rules? Their was no due process and the wikimedia foundation is no better than an authoritarian government.
    - Barrin92 7y ago
      To my knowledge my chess club has no formal rules about insults either, but I know that if I started to say "fuck you" to the owner, he'd throw me out. If the person in question needs formal rules to not behave anti-social, maybe staying a year off wikipedia is a good opportunity to figure that out. Seriously we're dealing with adults here, not children. Which actually goes to the root of the problem, the type of personality that spends so much time on editing the website seems to have a problem with very basic civility.

nullc 7y ago

Headline aside, this is really well reported. Kudos to the journalist and buzzfeed for putting in an effort to understand the relative dynamics and for linking directly to the underlying discussions. Wikipedia is one of the few very large venues online that I feel really had moderation done right (HN isn't in the running due to not being very large. :))-- sites like reddit, twitter, facebook just get capricious bans handed out essentially at random--- on those sites earnest and serious harassment usually goes unaddressed while petty staff qualms or favors for connected parties are about the only thing that reliably gets addressed. (And I am speaking directly from experience) Having a community that governs itself is really the only thing with a chance of scaling, but for that to work the community has to also own itself: Few will invest the labor required to maintain effective self-governance if they feel they are facing capricious overrides, creating an environment where they're working for someone else (without compensation) rather than for themselves. For a long time Wikipedia was a shining example here, but this incident suggests to me that it may not be anymore.

blargmaster33 7y ago
There moderation is pure leftist..
eecc 7y ago
I see your point, but the last paragraphs of the article painted a different scenario; one where the self-governing bodies were unable to address the skillfully borderline actions - where each one individually is within rule and custom, but as a whole are an act of harassment- of a malicious yet respected actor. Fascinating... there are several historical examples of “revolutionary” bodies that succumbed to these dynamics. Curious to see if there’s some layman’s literature on the subject
- PavlovsCat 7y ago
  not quite what you are wondering about, but FWIW this bit from the article > “The community is currently blaming the foundation for their own mess, in my opinion,” he wrote, “which was caused by our abject failure to develop procedures to enforce civility without Foundation intervention.” reminded me of something Gustav Landauer said: > You don’t know what order with freedom means! You only know what revolt against oppression is! You don’t know that the rod, discipline, violence, the state and government can only be sustained because of you and because of your lack of socially creative powers that develop order within liberty!

0815test 7y ago

These Wikipedia admins are reaping what they sowed. The toxicity and ban-happy attitude in Wikipedia as a whole did not come from the Foundation (which is the internet landlord of the site anyway - if you don't like it, start a fork). The Wikimedia Foundation has just upped the ante a little bit.

nullc 7y ago
Wikimedia was created by the community, but it seems that some there might be forgetting who was supposed to be serving who.

canttestthis 7y ago

And of course no corporate drama is complete without the CEO shooting themselves in the foot with misguided tweets [1]. There's something about Twitter that inspires people to say really dumb things. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#New_Buzzfeed_News_article_about_the_Fram_drama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#New_Buzz...

markdown 7y ago

> deleting her stubs — short, unfinished articles that are culled when they sit dormant for too long Can someone please explain why they do this? You'd think that with $100M/yr in donations, hosting stubs wouldn't be a problem.

nullc 7y ago
Not to get into an extensive debate, but this is a complex issue where intelligent and well informed people can disagree. As you note, obviously the concern has nothing to do with hosting bandwidth or similar. The concern driving the removal of stubs and other undermaintained pages are (1) editorial, relating to the quality of Wikipedia as a resource and (2) the efficient expenditure of maintenance labor. The effort by volunteers to maintain Wikipedia utterly dwarfs monetary donations to the foundation even by the most conservative estimates. Similarly, the amount of potential harm caused to the world (or an individual, or to the public's goodwill towards wikipedia) due to an article which is grievously incorrect or malicious due to being unmaintained also dwarfs petty operating considerations. The concern is that articles that no one cares about are potentially places where damaging content could fester and dealing with them, even inadequately, requires expenditure of editorial resources which could be better applied elsewhere. There are contributors at both extremes of this ideological split, though most people are somewhere in between. The political dynamic has created something of a impasse where contributors more on the extreme end of include-everything oppose the addition of tools that would allow less aggressive handling (such as making those pages accessible only to logged-in users, whom are presumably better informed about the sausage making) because of the justified concern that these measures would also be applied to more borderline cases which are currently included.
- xref 7y ago
  > The concern is that articles that no one cares about are potentially places where damaging content could fester and dealing with them That could describe the bulk of the millions of articles, why single out stubs for the axe specifically
  - 7y ago

alex_young 7y ago

I don't quite understand what I'm supposed to be upset with here. You've got a guy who stalks users and attacks the administration, and they ban him for a year, which kind of seems like a measured approach to be honest. Some other admins didn't like that treatment and quit. So what? If you see that kind of behavior as something acceptable and the organization doesn't, maybe you shouldn't be there either. Sounds like much ado about nothing.

kartan 7y ago
It's about the absolute right to free speech. It has been a far right tactic to attack people that condemns their speeches: https://lithub.com/when-fascists-weaponize-free-speech-absolutism/ https://lithub.com/when-fascists-weaponize-free-speech-absol... USA has started the political campaign and with it there is an increase in manipulation. What should be a matter of politeness - don't insult people - becomes an opportunity to push against moderated discussion. :( Please HN review this thread carefully as this is what comes for the next year.
nullc 7y ago
You might want to turn your skimming level down a bit. Wikipedia's community has a long established set of processes for self-governance, but they were bypassed in this case. The administration in question was banned by staff of the Wikimedia foundation, the 501c3 non-profit created by the community for the purpose of the operation of the infrastructure of Wikipedia, and have done so without providing a clear justification both for the circumvention of the project's governance and the specific. This is a highly unusual though not completely unprecedented event. 99% of the people who are up in arms about this would have had no issue had the arbcom banned the user in question, the constitutional issue is what has people so concerned.
- DanBC 7y ago
  > Wikipedia's community has a long established set of processes for self-governance, but they were bypassed in this case. This is untrue. The processes were used and they failed to work. They failed to protect people from this abusive admin. Read the discussion about fram - there are plenty of people there saying "he's a bit of an arsehole but he edits a lot". Clearly the existing processes were aware that fram was abusive.

zapdrive 7y ago

I think the least highlighted part of the story, and the one being totally ignored on HN, is the alleged secret romantic relationship between a foundation member and the alleged female complainant. That puts a lot in perspective for me. What's even more interesting is that the alleged complainant was mostly active on pages related to women athletes, women's rights, abortion rights etc., so it's not a far stretch to assume she's a feminist. And from her perspective she was being stalked and harassed by a privileged white male, who in fact was just doing his job of correcting her grammar, deleting stubs etc. Also his rude behavior wouldn't have helped. So she went ahead and did what any radical feminist in power would do, abuse her power.

0815test 7y ago
Do you have any source for this (that isn't just rampant speculation)? If these things are going on and actually impacting editorial work within Wikipedia itself, it sounds like we are due for a nice little Wikipediagate...
- zapdrive 7y ago
  It's right there in the article. Conclusions are mine, but the allegations are right there.
  - Quanttek 7y ago
    There is no factual basis to these allegations though. And besides your first sentence and the first half of the second sentence, the rest is completely unsubstantiated. Your comment on feminism and her perspective has no bearing in reality
    - zapdrive 7y ago
      If the foundation would release the complaint, we wouldn't have to go digging into Fram's history to find the source of this conflict. So don't put this on me. Yes, these allegations could be wrong, but this is as close as we can get to the facts without the foundation releasing the original complaint. Also, what is your take on this? Why do you think the foundation, that usually only steps in when someone is posting something highly illegal like child porn etc., bypassed the orb committee this time? Why is the complaint being shrouded in secrecy? There's definitely something funny going on, and this is the only line of reasoning that makes sense to me. But I'm open to other ideas.

Quanttek 7y ago

It is true that WMF should have communicated the reasons for the ban better and worked more closely with the community. However, I do not understand the extreme upset. From what I understand, he was an extremely toxic element of the community that drove new and old users away due to his repeated harassment, which does more damage than having him off the site and loosing his prolific enforcement of the speedy deletion policy. One of the reasons why they should have communicated better is seen in the following abstract. It also demonstrates how toxic the community is and reminds me a lot of how GamerGate started: The ex-boyfriend of the game developer of "Depression Quest" alleged, in a very long rant, that she was sleeping with a game journalist for a good review in order to profit from it. Of course, that was complete bullshit as, even believing she slept with him, (a) he did not write a review for the game and (b) the game is for free. It is and was never about actual misconduct on the side of the victim of harassment but rather about their identity and how that upsets the community because they're an "Other" in "their" space (here, a woman and a transgender editor) > Those dynamics are central to Fram’s ban. Egged on by Fram’s insistence that the foundation had actually banned him because of a grudge, and stymied by the foundation’s refusal to name the complainant, Wikipedians began to scour his history on the platform, looking for someone to blame. > Much of that blame fell, perhaps predictably, on a woman and a transgender editor. In 2017, a fledgling Wikipedian accused Fram of monitoring her activity on the site to such an extent that felt like harassment. The editor, whose contributions focused on women athletes, lesbian history, and abortion rights, felt that Fram’s pattern of correcting her spelling and deleting her stubs — short, unfinished articles that are culled when they sit dormant for too long — demonstrated a lack of good faith. [...] > More recently, Fram had an acrimonious semantic debate with a high-profile transgender editor over whether referring to them as “xe” constituted misgendering. It culminated in an ugly claim by Fram that he would not be misracing a black person by calling them the n-word, only being racist. "Please, stop being cruel to individuals whose names have come up in the course of this issue" > On Wikipedia and in the forums of Wikipediocracy, a site where Wikipedians gather to discuss and criticize Wikipedia, users speculated about a secret romantic connection between the woman editor and a member of the Wikimedia Foundation board and about whether the trans editor might’ve been pretending to be trans to win a fight with Fram. The vitriol toward those two users grew so intense that Risker chastised some Wikipedians in her critical note about the ban.

verisimilitudes 7y ago

I'm not going to weep for Wikipedia. The most I really use it for is finding links to real resources and I can do that elsewhere. I've tried to contribute before, but would always have my edits reverted. They also ban Tor, which is unacceptable. Anyway, democracy is either good or it isn't. I'm of the opinion that it isn't, but it's queer to me that one could champion democratic ideals and then complain about the demographics. I vehemently disagree with the idea that white men are somehow incapable of cataloguing the world's knowledge, purely because they're not black or Chinese or women or something else, for obvious reasons. It's interesting that this seems to be connected to the usual group of troublemakers, people who are easily offended, but we'll see where this leads.

username90 7y ago

I wonder how long the world will let a small group of privileged Californians police basically all of internet.