Wikipedia talk:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Portals

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Case clerk: TBD Drafting arbitrator: TBD

Behaviour on this page: Arbitration case pages exist to assist the Arbitration Committee in arriving at a fair, well-informed decision. You are required to act with appropriate decorum during this case. While grievances must often be aired during a case, you are expected to air them without being rude or hostile, and to respond calmly to allegations against you. Accusations of misbehaviour posted in this case must be proven with clear evidence (and otherwise not made at all). Editors who conduct themselves inappropriately during a case may be sanctioned by an arbitrator, clerk, or functionary, without further warning, by being banned from further participation in the case, or being blocked altogether. Personal attacks against other users, including arbitrators or the clerks, will be met with sanctions. Behavior during a case may also be considered by the committee in arriving at a final decision.

RfC: Will the 2019 or 2020 committee vote on this case?

This case is odd, due to occurring at the same time as an election. So, will the 2019 committee or the 2020 committee vote on this case? Invalid^OS (talk) 14:13, 27 November 2019 (UTC)

@InvalidOS: the precedent is very clear that for any arbitration business that spans the change of committee the following happens:

• Arbitrators who are continuing (i.e. those elected to a 2-year term in 2018, or those who are reelected in 2019) will all continue on the case/other business as normal (unless they are inactive or recused of course).
• Arbitrators whose terms expire at the end of the year who are not reelected who are active on any business that is unresolved at the end of the year may continue to participate as an arbitrator until it is resolved or may leave it. The choice is theirs and can be different for different business (e.g. someone may choose to remain active on an amendment request that is nearing completion but step away from a young case).
• Arbitrators who are newly elected may join in any business that is ongoing as of 1 January, or they may choose to be inactive on it. If I am elected I will be recusing from this case. Thryduulf (talk) 14:31, 27 November 2019 (UTC)

InvalidOS fixing the ping. Thryduulf (talk) 14:32, 27 November 2019 (UTC)

A Rfc on the talkpage of an Arbcom case? Not sure I've ever seen that before. GoodDay (talk) 15:03, 27 November 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, this seems like a bad idea. I'll boldly remove the RFC tag... --Izno (talk) 15:19, 27 November 2019 (UTC)

Something to consider

This entire case may not have been necessary, if portals had been given their own 'pedia. We've got Wikinews & Wiktionary, for examples. Anyways, something to think about. GoodDay (talk) 14:52, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

I'm not sure. Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Professional wrestling was about a portal which, despite the existence of Wikinews, had a subpage acting as its own Wikinews subdomain. Nemo 09:47, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

I always thought that most portals would be more appropriate as topic introductions on Wikiversity, but then I looked at Wikiversity. EllenCT (talk) 22:31, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

Preliminary Injunction

It appears that the ArbCom has, earlier today, enacted a preliminary injunction that restrains BHG and NA1k, but that the clerks have not yet updated it in the case proper. Will the clerks (or arbitrators) please copy the injunction to the case itself? Since some editors who are following the case do not read WP:AN, and most editors who are following the case do not read the Arbitration Committee noticeboards, some editors may not see it (and this may result in incorrect statements about what it says). Robert McClenon (talk) 15:25, 1 December 2019 (UTC)

Robert McClenon, thanks for the heads up. The injunction was enacted at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Portals/Proposed decision#BrownHairedGirl and Northamerica1000 prohibited, and I have copied it to the case page. – bradv🍁 15:34, 1 December 2019 (UTC)

Misplaced hat?

The Statement by ToThAc section is split in half by a {{hat}}, it is not obvious if by accident or intentionally, so I didn't fix it, just in case it isn't broken... - Nabla (talk) 18:38, 8 December 2019 (UTC)

Nabla, good eye. I have fixed that, and added an extra heading for clarity. – bradv🍁 18:51, 8 December 2019 (UTC

Bradv, thank you - Nabla (talk) 18:57, 8 December 2019 (UTC)

Request to Add Party

I intend to ask that a temporary ban on the creation of new portals by User:The Transhumanist be extended to a permanent topic-ban. For that reason I ask that User:The Transhumanist, whose creation of thousands of portals in the third and fourth quarters of 2018 and first quarter of 2019, be added as a party to this case. Robert McClenon (talk) 04:30, 19 December 2019 (UTC)

Robert McClenon, do you have a link to the temporary ban discussion? And won't adding TTH make this case a much more complicated mess? What TTH did to portals was almost entirely undone, and I don't expect that they would try one-click portals again even if the topic ban was lifted. Adding TTH and covering the entire early history of the dispute would also probably need a three week (or so, thanks to the holidays) extension of the evidence phase, and I'm not really sure that's worth it. —Kusma (t·c) 17:16, 19 December 2019 (UTC)

It was at WP:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive307#Proposal 1: Interim Topic-Ban on New Portals. Thincat (talk) 17:27, 19 December 2019 (UTC)

... and here is TTH's record for creating portals (but I suppose that omits any since deleted). Thincat (talk) 18:03, 19 December 2019 (UTC)

@Certes, in total, TTH created well over 3,000 of his automated pseudo-portals. 2,555 were deleted in two mass nominations (one and two); some were deleted in smaller group nominations, and some in individual nominations. Early in the year I did some detailed calculations of how many portals were involved, but from memory, I think that in total TTH created about 4,000 of the 4,200 automated spam portals. Most of them were cloned from a single navbox, some from two or more navboxes, and a few dozen were built by other techniques such as copying the contents of a list page or indiscriminately scooping the contents of category (e.g. Portal:Painting). --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:39, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

Excluding deleted pages, nine portals were created in 2019, including one by TTH (before the topic ban). The tools which eased the process have been deleted. There is already a ban on mass creation. New portals no longer seem to be a major problem. Certes (talk) 20:05, 19 December 2019 (UTC)

Deadlines extended

Effective immediately, the timetable for this case is extended for all users to:

• Evidence closes 5 Jan 2020
• Workshop closes 12 Jan 2020
• PD expected 23 Jan 2020

For the Arbitration Committee, Kevin (aka L235 · t · c) 23:51, 22 December 2019 (UTC)

Suggestion for sanctions

I'm very late to the party, but should the Committee decide on whether or not to desysop BrownHairedGirl and/or Northamerica1000? ミラP 21:03, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

@Miraclepine: The Workshop phase is still open. You can add your own proposal for sanctions at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Portals/Workshop as detailed on this page. The Committee will review all proposals when drafting its proposed decision. Regards SoWhy 21:07, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

@SoWhy: Thanks. I've added it here. ミラP 21:33, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

Guise, guise

This was not everyone's finest hour, but do we really need a drains-up? Can't this be water under the bridge? All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 04:18, 12 January 2020 (UTC).

I think this is a matter that if left will continue to cause problems in the long run, and is more likely to get worse than better if left unanalysed.. We have an increasingly polarised community on the issue of acceptable behaviour. We have highly skilled, valued, and trusted members of the community facing censure for doing what they appear to think is the right thing. One does not accumulate edit counts like the involved parties, or remain putting in the hours to build the encyclopedia without a certain level of dedication. To me this looks like people who believe they are doing the right thing clashing because their convictions of what the right thing is, differ, and their understanding of what constitutes acceptable behaviour also differs. This problem is unlikely to go away until some clarity is reached on where the lines of acceptable behaviour have been crossed, and everyone will probably draw them in a different place, even when uninvolved in the specific disagreement. If the involved parties are censured but do not understand why, we cannot expect long term improvement, and the rest of the community also miss out on an opportunity to learn. We need arbcom to identify the lines that were crossed in a way that we can understand, accept, and apply. If we then decide that the lines are in the wrong place, we can look into fixing that as a related problem. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 11:51, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

I dispute Peter Southwood's assertion that this is about highly skilled, valued, and trusted members of the community. I agree that NA1K is dedicated and prolific editor, but as I have shown in evidence, NA1K has repeatedly displayed very low skill in multiple ways, including:

• Low skill in creating lists of articles for inclusion in a portal
• Low skill in describing the selection criteria they used
• Low skill in upholding WP:NPOV
• Low skill in understanding basic statistics
• Low skill in avoiding WP:RECKLESS editing outside their competence, by charging into big changes in areas in which they demonstrate low competence
• Low skill in avoiding WP:FAITACCOMPLI, by making huge changes with inadequate notification

I note again that observations of NA1K's poor judgement are long-standing, and go back years, to their two RFAs. I note that even in the MFDs where I analysed the abysmal quality of NA1K's article selection, NA1K repeatedly failed to acknowledge their errors, and instead switched to passive voice to describe their contested edits. NA1K's long-term failure to recognise, acknowledge and learn from their many errors is classic Dunning–Kruger effect.

The one area where NA1K does display high skill is manufacturing barrages of bogus allegations, as seen in their massive and exquisitely-formatted posts at ANI expressing outraged indignation that their poor-quality attempt at WP:FAITACCOMPLI was reverted, or that anyone challenged their devious attempt to cite as guidance a guideline which they had succeeded in deprecating. This continued even at this Arcom case, where the opening section of NA1K's evidence contains numerous false claims, some of which I contested in my evidence, and opens with a false claim that I violated Arbcom's temporary injunction regarding portals. (The edit which NA1K cited as evidence[1] is a comment on Arbcom's injunction, not a discussion of portals). This tactic of throwing out false allegations at high volume is a very effective form of Wikipolitics just as it is effective electoral politics (because it ties down the other editor in lengthy rebuttal, per Karl Rove's axiom that "when you're explaining your losing") ... but this swiftboating strategy is deeply destructive. The civil wording which NA1K uses in this mudslinging should not distract from the substantively corrosive effect of this conduct.

I hold to my view that if the community and/or ArbCom chooses to regard as valuable NA1K's unique combination of low competence in substantive editing with high skill in the black arts of Wikipolitics, then Wikipedia's mission of creating an encyclopedia is undermined even more severely than is set out in WP:Randy in Boise. Even Randy's gameplan doesn't include the NA1K tactic of turning on a mucksprayer.

The neglected backwater of portalspace seems to have reached a tipping point where there are too few skilled editors in that namespace to outweigh the vocal crowd who don't see a problem in NA1K's consistent combination of technical skill in portal layout with very low analytical and collaborative skills. As the editor base shrinks, this problem is likely to be replicated in other areas, and the future of Wikipedia depends on whether those low standards are normalised or deprecated. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 04:16, 18 January 2020 (UTC)