User talk:Timotheus Canens

My admin policy: If you believe that an admin action of mine is clearly and obviously wrong, such that no reasonable admin, fully aware of all the relevant circumstances, would have done it, you may revert it without discussing it with me in advance, as long as you notify me afterwards. In all other cases, please discuss with me first before reverting it.

“

Abiit, excessit, evasit, erupit.

”

Please click here to leave me a new message.

AfC submissions

Severe backlog

207 pending submissions to update

The Signpost: 06 February 2012

• News and notes: The Foundation visits Tunisia, analyzes donors

• In the news: Leading scholar hails Wikipedia, historians urged to contribute while PR pros remain shunned

• Discussion report: Discussion swarms around Templates for deletion and returning editors of colourful pasts

• WikiProject report: The Eye of the Storm: WikiProject Tropical Cyclones

• Featured content: Talking architecture with MrPanyGoff

• Arbitration report: Four open cases, final decision in Muhammad images, Betacommand 3 near closure

• Technology report: October's coding challenge: results now in; progress on 1.19 steady; and why for a while interwiki links were no more

• Read this Signpost in full
• Single-page
• Unsubscribe
• EdwardsBot (talk) 00:41, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

Topic ban of Tom harrison

It actually pains me to bring this issue here since I have no beef with User:The Devils Advocate...but in light of your comment here...how does his request for arbitration enforcement against User:Tom harrison stack up. The Devils Advocate was topic banned for 30 days until recently over the same topic...Tom harrison commented at that particular request against The Devils Advocate...The Devils Advocate has been blocked twice in 3 months over this topic...Tom harrison hasn't been blocked once in 8 years of editing.--MONGO 04:03, 10 February 2012 (UTC)

The request has merit. It is therefore by definition not sanctionable misconduct. Trying to infer "retaliation" from a comment months ago is also rather farfetched. And even if the report were somehow established to be retaliatory, that won't affect TH's topic ban but only lead to a topic ban for TDA. T. Canens (talk) 00:46, 11 February 2012 (UTC)

Okay...well, none of that explains how Harrison's edits were problematic...less than perfect, perhaps, but the guy has dedicated 7 years to such difficult areas and has many thousands of edits that were perfect. The Devils Advocate immediately restarted where he had left off after his 30 day ban so it's not like he moved on to new horizons and then came to arbcom enforcement...there's plenty of talk around the wiki about how were losing good editors...much of it in regards to GA and FA level writers...while they are important of course, you also have the gatekeepers like Harrison that keep those difficult articles from turning into a mishmash of misinformation and conspiracy theories....yes, we may very well be losing valubale seasoned contributors...no doubt due at least partly to the chilling effects of telling our best that if you're not perfect, then they can get lost. As a side effect of all this, I see you paid homage to Mkativerata who has handed in his admin tools over this issue under a self proclaimed "cloud"...but Tom Harrison still gets a get lost...and this arbcom enforcement action also cost the website User:A Quest For Knowledge...who has told me that the place has become intolerable...I am tending to agree. For the record, I didn't want Mkativerata to do anything other than admit that this might have been overzealous and at the least, reduce the ban to a set term, say 30 days (even though no topic ban was ever justifiable to begin with...you guys could have simply protected the page)...but Tom Harrison doesn't even get that much.--MONGO 06:31, 11 February 2012 (UTC)

Tom harrison's edits cited in the request are plainly NPOV violations. As Mkativerata explained in his comment at AE, it doesn't take a genius to recognize "the tone of non-neutral advocacy" apparent in those edits. Now perhaps there are some extenuating circumstances about those particular edits we are not aware of (were they provoked by some sort of baiting, for example?), but if there were any, none was apparent from the thread or the edits. Page protection is for legitimate content disputes. An obvious NPOV violation is by definition not a legitimate content dispute. Occasionally editors can get burned out and carried away from long-term working in a difficult area, and this might be one of such cases, and Mkativerata's ban, as he intended it, is basically saying "OK, you need to take a break from this area, and come back when you can show that you are ready to edit it again". This has been the approach taken in a number of recent AE cases, as we shift gradually from a fixed-duration model to a return-when-you-can-show-you-are-ready model of sanctions in a number of areas.

You know what really strikes me as ironic? If the goal was to reduce Tom harrison's ban, driving Mkativerata away was a really counterproductive way of doing it. By driving him away, all that's been accomplished is that no single admin can reduce the ban, and any reduction must go through a full fledged AE appeal (with a high bar requiring "a clear, substantial, and active consensus of uninvolved editors") or ArbCom, so what Mkativerata intended to be an easily-lifted "indef" ban that may well just last a couple of weeks (if Tom harrison's work is as good as you say it is) has become instead a real indefinite ban that will probably take something like a week just to go through the lifting process. This is particularly ridiculous since the entirety of his so-called "involvement" consisted of two !votes in an I-P related naming RFC a few years ago, and he only declared himself "involved" out of an abundance of caution. And what did that caution lead to? Groundless accusations of COI and "bias on Jewish-Palestinian issues". Also, for that matter, the 9/11 attacks are not within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict topic area either, so the COI/INVOLVED accusations are doubly groundless. (WP:ARB911 postdates WP:ARBPIA by more than 3 months, and were the 9/11 attacks in the I-P area Arbcom would not have passed a separate discretionary sanctions for 9/11.) Terrific work indeed. T. Canens (talk) 07:51, 11 February 2012 (UTC)

@T. Canens: None of this had to happen.

There was no need to impose an indefinite, broad-ranging topic ban for a first-time offense against an editor with 8 years of service and a clean record. There was a multitude of other options available. Did you consider any alternatives? Unfortunately, the quick rush to judgement prevented any real discussion of how to help this editor to return to productivity.

And I have to say, I'm extremely dissappointed that you would say something like "if Tom harrison's work is as good as you say it is". Are you honestly trying to tell us that you didn't bother researching this editor's history before topic banning him?

If the admins at AE can't be bothered to do some basic research, then they shouldn't be at AE. Plain and simple.

And if you lement Mkativerata's departure, then don't overlook your role in this matter. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 14:35, 11 February 2012 (UTC)

The record is clean, to be sure, but the offense is about the most blatant one I've seen at AE in a long time. Rarely do we get an NPOV violation as clear-cut as this. I think this is probably true of the other admins who commented in that thread as well, and pushed us toward the more severe end of the spectrum of available sanctions.

As to the breadth of the topic ban, that's a necessary consequence of the NPOV violation. If you can't, for whatever reason, adhere to NPOV on page X, then there's some pretty good reason to doubt that you can adhere to NPOV on a page Y related to X as well.

You know what? I've seen TH's work before when I was looking into previous 9/11-related AE requests, and I actually had a favorable impression of him. So I was actually quite astonished that he would make those edits and actually defend them at AE, and I had to go back and double check that this is the same TH I was thinking about. Out of necessity, however, we cannot examine all his 42000+ edits in detail before we settle on a sanction. The parenthetical is there because I try to avoid expressing my personal opinion on the quality of someone's edits at AE, as a general matter - but of course, it's now taken as evidence of laziness. So we are biased if we express an opinion, and lazy if we don't? Good to know.

As to your question on the other page, if the misconduct is directly connected to the edits at issue in the request, feel free to raise them directly, otherwise, a new thread is preferred. I don't think we've ever sanctioned someone for "retaliatory filing by proxy", and I doubt that we ever will have such a case unless there's pretty strong evidence that (1) the request is meritless and (2) the subject of the previous thread directly caused the new request to be filed. Evidence of (2) is unlikely to be ever seen by us. T. Canens (talk) 15:48, 11 February 2012 (UTC)

I have written elsewhere that indeed many of the conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11, espcially in the first few years after the event did have strong anti-Israel overtones...this has abated some and the conspiracy theorists learned soon that their efforts to go off on their tangent would gain little footing if it had any anti-Semitic overtones. Tom harrison's general thesis on this issue may have been somewhat off on a tangent now a decade after the event. I don't know what the usual offenses reported to AE look like since I don't generally dwelve into that realm, so I'll have to take your word on it these were the most blatant you've seen in some time (seems preposterous). As far as Mkativerata, I doubt anyone including myself and most certainly Tom Harrison wanted to see them retire, but since I think there were several different ways to go on this matter, I think the overzealousness of all the involved admins in this case indicates they all need to reconsider their adminship. I used to be an admin and I blocked plenty of trolls, plenty of troublemakers and obvious vandals...but I never once topic banned a long term almost perfect track record fellow administrator (Harrison had stepped away from editing for awhile and gave his tools back but can get them back upon asking) or editor from an area where they have been so helpful...why not a final warning, page protection (there was a minor edit war going on), or at the least, a 30 day topic ban? I guess the best way for me to have avoided a deadminning would have been what?...tell our best to screw off? Nevermind...we'll have to agree to completely disagree on this matter, so you can surely have the final word.--MONGO 16:44, 11 February 2012 (UTC)