Wikipedia talk:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Kudpung/Proposed decision

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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.

SMcCandlish's section

I've been studiously avoiding ArbCom and other dramaboards for some time (or I would have presented a bunch of evidence in support of a recent desysop). In this case, I feel compelled to come back out of the woodwork. I haven't participated in the previous phases, and am not sure whether it's even permissible to add to the proposed decision page (I forget all the ArbCom bureaucracy as soon as I'm away from it for a while), so the talk page seems like a good bet.

It's my perception that this entire case is a "death of the thousand cuts" exercise, a selective cherry-picking of comments and incidents that aren't perfect, to paint a falsely demonizing picture. I'm not going to pore over every claim, but just look at two that stuck out while scanning through all this:

• Commenting that FAC would be a lot better if its current participants behaved more like one who fairly recently died is hardly any kind of besmirching of the deceased (rather, the opposite), nor a personal attack against those other editors. It's a common sort of sentiment about the departed and about the good ol' days of their presence. Perhaps more to the point, the behavioral criticism at the base of this is in fact spot-on. FAC has run off the rails (probably around 2016 if not earlier), and has become the worst sort of good-ol'-boy's-club, walled-garden clique that wikiprojects should never be allowed to become. In late 2019 to early 2019, the FACTION in control of that venue hounded away the no. 2 most active FAC reviewer, simply because they didn't care for his personality and because he insisted on FA candidate articles being compliant with MoS (which is actually one of the FA requirements, and GA requirements before that). Only about a year before that, FAC erupted in a shitstorm of drama over a similar attempt to get a candidate page to comply with a simple MoS line item; there was not a valid IAR/LOCALCONSENSUS reason to do something different, it was simply an OWN/VESTED matter of the principal page author's preferences, with FAC regulars leaping to defend their buddy's ILIKEIT pseudo-reason and to pretend that CONLEVEL policy doesn't exist (and wasn't written specifically to thwart this sort of nonsense). That festival of melodrama culminated in at least two FAC regulars proposing variants of an "anti-MoS" for FAC only. People tire of style disputes and tend to sympathize with an "aw, fuck it" attitude, but imagine any other wikiproject on the system declaring an intent to draft their own counter-guideline or counter-policy, against any WP:P&G page. It's just unconscionable.

  Kudpung is entirely right to criticise the collective "culture" at FAC; it is getting increasinly un-wiki. And do so was not an admin action, nor did it have implications for ADMINCOND more generally.

• As the real world, dealing with "Trumpism" and related movements on the one hand, and downright aggressive socio-political reform agendas from special interests on the other, features a lot of heated debates, and some of them spill over onto Wikipedia, we can expect people here to have concerns about the neutrality of and ADVOCACY/BATTLEGROUND/TRUTH/GREATWRONGS/CIVILPOV motivations of particular editors involved in those disputes here. In an age where TERF is a thing and cis-women identifying with it say things like "a trans-woman who claims to be a lesbian is a sneaky rapist man", etc. (here's some real gems I hadn't seen before; the pool of them grows all the time: [1][2][3][4]), there is in fact some palpable misandry in the air. It may not have been very politic to wonder out loud whether an editor self-identifying publicly as a cis-lesbian is in agreement with general/average cis-lesbian socio-political advocacy viewpoints. There is clearly something of a doctrinaire mindset in that community, in the sense of it being organized as an activism force. And that doctrine does sometimes lean misandrist (e.g. "every man is a potential rapist", and other such inflammatory statements). But airing such a concern about what politics someone might be bringing – even if perhaps it would've been better kept to oneself – isn't a personal attack. It's natural human politics. And in this environment, such concerns are elevated because we know for a fact that organized groups of PoV pushers of every kind – religious, philosopho-economic, nationalist, commercial, governmental, and every other sort – are always trying to skew our coverage.

Kudpung is being a normal bias-alert Wikipedian, and by now has almost certainly learned a bit about when to silently look for clear bias and when to hypothesize openly. Even the person who was queried as to any connection between their group self-identification and their views on-site does not believe that the comment was misogynist. In short, it is not an anti-X sentiment to wonder whether someone identifying as X is bringing an anti-Y viewpoint that is demonstrably common among those identifying as X. Frankly, we deal with this all the time at all those "my ethnicity/religion/country/whatever versus yours" disputes that are on WP:AC/DS lockdown. If, e.g., someone self-identifying as an Armenian starts editing a bunch of material about Turks and Kurds and Azerbaijanis and Greeks – or vice versa from any of these culture-conflict directions – we should be alert (though perhaps quiet about our alertness). There's just presently a whole lot of hyper-sensitivity when it comes to gender-related anything being involved. I've been bitten in the ass by this myself, e.g. being attacked as "transphobic" for resisting attempts by TG/NB language-reform activists to force Wikipedia to use protologistic neo-pronouns like hirs, zie, etc, in Wikipedia's own voice (when singular-they will do just fine and actually has consensus support).

Notably, anyone subject to such actual personal attacks (like being called "transphobic") will find no support whatsoever at ANI or any other venue, if false accusations seem to align emotionally with the average socio-political concerns of the WP community in the aggregate (no matter how off-base the accusation is). It's exactly like it being fine call someone a Nazi, without evidence, just because Nazis are bad and we don't like them. The current overly emotionalized issues are too fresh for some to see through the fallacy yet, and this has a corrosive and very lopsided effect on the community and its self-regulation. Thus Kudpung can again and again be mislabeled "misogynist" in these proceedings with impunity despite lack of anything like sufficient evidence for such accusations. If you flipped the gender role and brought a female admin to RFARB and started calling them "misandrist" you'd be dogpiled in a heartbeat if your evidence wasn't unbelievably good. And you'd probably be dogpiled anyway, just for daring to perturb the Zeitgeist/orthodoxy of the majority of editors, for too many of whom any criticism (including zero-evidence falsehoods) by someone claiming to be or represent a minority is permissible but any criticism of such an activist is apt be taken as one -ist attack or another and not justifiable for any reason, regardless of proof. False equivalence has turned auto-cannibalistic on this site, and is eating its own tail like Ouroboros. How one can behave on this site (within bounds of and with an eye to facilitating collegial collaboration and encyclopedia work) is not in a one-to-one relationship with off-site behavior in relation to sociological forces and experiences (e.g. women being nervous about male strangers in ways that men usually are not about women, or black Americans reasonably if a bit fallaciously making generalized criticisms of "all those white people" that would be comments of a very different and more actually racist nature going the other direction due to social power imbalances). But too many of our editors want to pretend otherwise.

Anyway, I think Kudpung is being railroaded for a variety of PoV-laden reasons that mostly come down to ill-liberal "must be bad because doesn't think and talk like me" judgmentalism. In closing, I have to observe that Arbcom is not some Personality Examination and Normalization Bureau. We're all different, and Kudpung is not failing ADMINCOND just because some gaggle of individuals communicate differently from him and don't share his exact worldview.

PS: Not directly related to any of this, I want to support the idea I saw on the workshop page of a finding of fact that a habit of "banning" people from one's talk page in response to criticism is not actually permissible. The fact that a not-quite-guideline supplement page says so is irrelevant; ArbCom can say so without citing it, as a WP:Common sense matter, as a behavioral not content matter, and because of the central principle of interpreting all the WP:P&G material in the spirit in which it was intended. The ability under the userpage guidelines to ask that someone stop posting on your user talk page (and the expectation that this should usually be honored) exists for the sole purpose of short-circuiting interpersonal disputes that are not constructive or going to improve any time soon, and which are disrupting the ENC work of the user whose user-talk page it is. The rule, if you can even call it one, is not a license to avoid scrutiny, skirt discussion, or thwart the ability of other editors to raise concerns. It's an exception not a default.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:30, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

SandyGeorgia's section

@SmcCandlish: Regardless of the truth of what you write about the current environment at FAC, respectful and decent people (in real life) usually respect the dead and avoid dragging their name through discussions unrelated to them. Criticizing certain FAC participants, who display behaviors that had no relationship to the deceased editor's behavior, is and was disgusting, even if it didn't involve tools. It is a character issue, and apparently a continuation of previous problematic behaviors at The Signpost. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:37, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

GorillaWarfare's section

@SMcCandlish: [citation needed] around misandry being a "demonstrably common" mindset among queer people, or a "general/average" viewpoint among cisgender lesbians. TERFs are certainly vocal, but their viewpoints are by no means the mainstream views among LGBTQ people. I will also note that I am not a lesbian (as you have claimed), and I am certainly not a TERF (which I don't believe you are claiming). GorillaWarfare (talk) 04:12, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

@CodeLyoko and Miniapolis: Although I have already replied to SmMcCandlish, I would echo Leaky caldron's call for clerk (or arb) attention on this page. I would argue the statement should be removed entirely rather than moved, or at least heavily redacted—it is completely unacceptable to claim that lesbians are commonly man-haters, and that trans hate is an average view among lesbians. GorillaWarfare (talk) 22:39, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

@GorillaWarfare: While I'm technically out due to medical reasons I'll take a stab at asking for guidance from the committee on this. --Cameron₁₁₅₉₈ ^(Talk) 01:36, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Amorymeltzer's section

SMcCandlish I'd like an answer to GW's comment as well; if your goal is to defend Kudpung, neither of you are done any favors by incorrectly generalizing for an entire group. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 12:26, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

Chris.sherlock's section

I apologise for responding to SMcCandlish as it wasn’t a discussion about a proposed decision (none was even given at the time!) and for not responding in my own section. I missed the top box. I have removed my comment entirely as it wasn’t productive and not related to any decision made by ArbCom. Once again, I apologise for not following process. - Chris.sherlock (talk) 17:36, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

GoodDay it reads up the top: “This page is for statements regarding the proposed decision, not discussion. Therefore, with the exception of arbitrators and clerks, all editors must create a section for their statement and comment only in their own section.”

Buffs is quite correct. The original comment was out of order, but then so were our responses. This should have been on the workshop page. - Chris.sherlock (talk) 18:07, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

Lourdes' section

SMcCandlish, this is an absolutely spot-on analysis. With no disrespect to any editor here (alive or deceased; and I write this with all due regard), I would add that there has to a good-faith attempt by certain editors here to see the issue from a positive point of view, and not just to somehow reach their desired result. It seems tad unfair that some of the editors are circling repeatedly around one side of the issue. It's a belaboured exercise. I'll see how the proposed decisions pan up and then comment further. Lourdes 13:54, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

Buffs's Section

This page is for statements regarding the proposed decision, not discussion. I'm not entirely certain what everyone is talking about here. There is no proposed decision at this time. IMHO, this discussion belongs on the Workshop talk page. Buffs (talk) 16:42, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

For once Buffs I entirely agree with you. Leaky caldron (talk) 17:08, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

Indeed & why have they been arranged into Editor's Section sections? GoodDay (talk) 17:41, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

GoodDay because the directions state "all editors must create a section for their statement and comment only in their own section." What perplexes me is why this rule has been followed, but not the first.

To be clear, I have no problem with people responding to remarks in my section if it makes the flow of information clearer. Clerks, please adjust as needed if you feel it's in error. Buffs (talk) 18:27, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

SMcCandlish might I request that you take this to the Workshop talk page? That's a MUCH more appropriate venue, IMHO. This page is for the discussion of the proposed decision. As no one has yet edited the page, discussion here is quite moot. There is no proposed decision to discuss. Buffs (talk) 18:30, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

@GW, I didn't read it that way. I submit that you seem to be spring-loaded to find offense at such criticism (I'm not saying such a statement applies to everyone in a such group either). I disagree with some of his conclusions and the extremes of his conclusions too, but it is an arguable position even if both you and I don't agree with it ("common" and "average" are both nebulous terms in this context). Redacting his entire statement because "I'm offended" makes little sense. I completely concur it doesn't belong on this page. I advocate moving it to Wikipedia talk:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Kudpung/Workshop; there is no closure date there. The Workshop and Evidence pages are closed and it should not be added there. I would also welcome corrections, clarifications, etc. We cannot expect talk pages to be 100% accurate on the first go 100% of the time. We need to allow people to clarify and make necessary corrections. Buffs (talk) 23:24, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

Clerks please...

Miniapolis Joe Roe Casliber & SoWhy. In the previous phase you declined my request to add some further links as evidence (although suggested by another participant). Here, we have an editor wishing to introduce evidence and comment as if the workshop were still open, resulting in a partial re-litigating of the case. As pointed out by others, this page is for discussion on the proposed decision, due tomorrow. Fresh content is also being added to Workshop, despite the phase being closed days ago. Can you please clerk as appropriate? Leaky caldron (talk) 19:15, 10 February 2020 (UTC)