User talk:Jimbo Wales

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Comments on Disruptive Editing

(restoring thread that was archived by bot error).

In two threads today (4 September 2014), Jimbo Wales has said: "In the old days some people would have been banned by now for that kind of behavior. It is a shame that we tolerate disruption - it costs us a lot of good editors." and "I'm hoping we can move to an understanding that we don't have to put up with people who have nothing useful to offer other than rancor." Does Jimbo have any suggestions as to what individual editors, the English Wikipedia community, or the WMF can or should do about his concerns? Robert McClenon (talk) 18:08, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

See terms of use linked at the bottom of the page. Section 12 says: In certain (hopefully unlikely) circumstances it may be necessary for either ourselves or the Wikimedia community or its members (as described in Section 10) to terminate part or all of our services, terminate these Terms of Use, block your account or access, or ban you as a user. I didn't realize the Foundation itself could do so, and I assume even if "community" objected. I guess at some point they have to do a profit and loss calculations - dropping how many proudly and chronically uncivil editors who do a lot of editing will loose what, as opposed to enforcing civility for actively and hopefully keeping and bringing in how many editors who may potentially will do how much editing? Carolmooredc (Talkie-Talkie) 21:50, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

As I have said elsewhere, disruption is in the eye of the beholder. One should be careful about what they wish for, because they might get it... Carrite (talk) 16:29, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

1. I think the WMF can do little directly. It would be pretty difficult for them to get directly involved in banning uncivil users, and hard for them to do a good job of it. One reason for this is that extreme cases are quite easy and the community does a good job of bans. The difficult cases are people who go around causing disruption and abusing people but who have some kind of support network and produce good content. In these cases, community opinion often ends up divided. It would be hard for the Foundation to know what to do.

2. The Foundation could help us by doing more studies on what causes people to leave the community. I think what is often lacking is the empirical evidence needed to convince some fence-sitters how much damage some people are doing. If you write 3 featured articles but chase away through your incivility 10 potentially great editors who would have written 30 featured articles, then you are a net loss to the project. I think that's often the case with some of these characters, but we have no way at the moment to empirically demonstrate it.

3. The English Wikipedia community can beef up policies in various ways to make it clearer that "producing good content" does not give one a free pass to abuse, insult, or harass others through uncivil behavior.

4. I recommend that people who care about this issue work hard to think about how we might improve our ArbCom processes so that more cases can be handled and in a quicker fashion. Barring that, I would say being careful to elect "civility hawks" to the ArbCom would be useful. When a user who has a long history of uncivil interactions with others comes before ArbCom, it should often be a simple open and shut case. For a variety of reasons (including that policy isn't strong enough in some areas so ArbCom can feel constrained) that sometimes doesn't happen, and this has follow-on repercussions with behavior across the site as uncivil people feel safe to carry on.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 10:19, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for replying.

1a. I agree that the community does a reasonably good job on "extreme cases", such as trolls, flamers, and completely clueless editors. If you (Jimbo) are saying that the community is systemically unable to deal with editors who have a support network but are a net minus because they drive away editors, I agree.

1b. The combination of the principle that blocks are preventive rather than punitive, and the ability of any admin to reverse a block by any other admin, contributes to the problem of "free pass" editors. Some editors are habitually uncivil, and get blocked for that incivility, but then the block is lifted. Since the re-imposition of a block would be punitive, such editors continue to get a free pass from the community.

2. I agree that it would be very useful for the WMF to study what causes editors to leave the community, in particular for empirical evidence of what many editors think, which is that the culture of incivility is a real problem.

3. I partly agree and partly disagree that the English Wikipedia community "can beef up" policies to make it clear that "producing good content" does not give a free pass to abuse other contributors. I think that you (Jimbo) have used an incorrect auxiliary verb. The English Wikipedia should strengthen those policies. Unfortunately, the current English Wikipedia community has demonstrated that it cannot do that. As long as civility enforcement is handled by "consensus", which is something of a will-o-the-wisp, "the community" can't govern itself effectively. Only the ArbCom can deal with editors who are content creators but net minuses.

4. I agree that the ArbCom needs to be strengthened in at least two ways. First, the community should, as you say, elect arbitrators who are "civility hawks", intolerant of persistent incivility. Second, the WMF needs to look into why the ArbCom only handles a fraction of the number of cases that it did in 2006 and 2007, and what can be done to enable the ArbCom to control disruption better. Does the ArbCom have too many assigned tasks that take away resources from its primary job of enforcement? If so, reassign those other tasks? What has changed that reduces the ArbCom's ability to handle cases?

5. The English Wikipedia community is an interesting laboratory experiment in governance by consensus, and illustrates the limits of governance by consensus. However, the purpose of the English Wikipedia is not to be an experiment, but to maintain an encyclopedia. Due to the size and diversity of the community, it is almost impossible for the community to change or evolve its own policies and guidelines. The ArbCom was not implemented by community consensus, but was given to the English Wikipedia.

Robert McClenon (talk) 03:45, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

A couple of comments. 1. Historically, disruptive editing has been distinguished from incivility. One could argue that incivility is a form of disruption, but disruptive editing goes beyond incivility. 2. The sticking point for stronger civility enforcement has always been the lack of agreement on what constitutes incivility. Just giving my own view, I don't mind swear words directed toward me but am far more offended by someone who is unabashedly two-faced or persists in unctuous and superficially polite dissimulation. Others take the opposite view. Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 03:57, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

I would say that there are at least three types of offenses, disruptive editing, personal attacks, and incivility. I would say that disruptive editing is the most inclusive, and includes personal attacks and incivility. However, as Boris says, there is no agreement as to what is incivility. Unfortunately, the majority opinion appears to be, first, that civility means (only) the avoidance of profanity, and, second, that profanity, in itself, is not usually worth enforcing. Also, recently, there have been cases where comments that previously would have been viewed as personal attacks requiring blocks (e.g., the brainlessness comment) have been seen as mere incivility. I agree that there is consensus that disruptive editing should be sanctioned, but there is no consensus as to what degree of incivility is disruptive and should be sanctioned, and recently, there is not even consensus that low-level personal attacks should be sanctioned. Robert McClenon (talk) 15:38, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

A form of disruptive editing that is not covered by civility is Wikipedia:Ownership of articles. The examples at Wikipedia:Ownership of articles#Statements are mainly civil, but clearly disruptive. I believe that this is a major source of discouragement to new editors, many of whom may be fooled into believing that this is in fact how Wikipedia is supposed to work. Deltahedron (talk) 15:49, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Robert McClenon: I think you are correct that incivility can be a form of disruptive editing. However, note that consensus on incivility (and its form, personal attack) and the proper consequences therefrom occurs in large part after-the-fact and therefore can be unpredictable, so the incivil run a risk (therefore, logically they should avoid the personal comment) -- that's not no-consensus, that's situation dependent consensus, and part of the system. Alanscottwalker (talk) 16:09, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Unfortunately there is a widely held perception that the consequences you refer to do not follow on the incivility in a systematic way. Deltahedron (talk) 16:23, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Well, it's not systematic, depending on what you mean, it is situational. There is a written standard, there is an written act, then there is application of the standard to the act and decision on the consequences. Since, the only court like process is arbcom, the rest is left to somewhat ad hoc procedure. Alanscottwalker (talk) 16:36, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

The situation, then, rather than the system, is that behaviour will be tolerated from certain editors which would not be tolerated from others. To avoid drama, I should say that my personal experiences refer to a long-standing and prolific editor who was is now banned for harassment of a third party, but who had previously been allowed to behave to me in a way which, I venture to say, I would not have been permitted to behave to him; and a member of WMF staff whose behaviour to me would have certainly led to an instant block if I had made the same remarks to him. This is hardly what I would call a "system", although it is undeniably a "situation". Deltahedron (talk) 16:43, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

True. On the other hand, your first interlocutor appears to have repeatedly run the risk and ultimately it did not work in their favor. Your second, if they continue to run the risk, may ultimately end up on the short end too. Alanscottwalker (talk) 16:48, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Indeed, but they can do a lot of damage before that happens. Deltahedron (talk) 18:44, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Right. I don't argue that it's a great system. My point was that when people talk about "no consensus" in this area, they should unpack that more. There are at least three consensus questions: 1) was that instance uncivil; 2) what is the consequence; and the more meta question of 3) is there a better way to determine the first two. The first two are amenable to present consensus finding process. The third, there has, as far as I am aware, never been a consensus on. There should also be the recognition that the ad hoc process does usually exact some toll on the regular offender, in the form of criticism of their conduct regularly voiced by others. Alanscottwalker (talk) 19:07, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

I appreciate this statement: "Producing good content" does not give one a free pass to abuse, insult, or harass others through uncivil behavior. Simple enforcement of that principle, which falls under WP:5, would do much to improve the editing climate.

It is not true that "uncivil" is hard to define; it means rude, or, as the OED defines it, Discourteous; impolite. WP:5 succinctly describes the kind of behavior that should be required of all editors:

Editors should treat each other with respect and civility: Respect your fellow Wikipedians, even when you disagree. Apply Wikipedia etiquette, and don't engage in personal attacks. Seek consensus, avoid edit wars, and never disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point. Act in good faith, and assume good faith on the part of others. Be open and welcoming to newcomers. If a conflict arises, discuss it calmly on the nearest talk pages, follow dispute resolution, and remember that there are 4,598,302 articles on the English Wikipedia to work on and discuss.

Unfortunately, as Deltahedron points out, "behaviour will be tolerated from certain editors which would not be tolerated from others." That would be remedied if the basic principles of Wikipedia were evenly applied. Yopienso (talk) 21:15, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Even if it were hard to define every act that everyone might consider uncivil, it is EASY to identify some. In fact, we already do, though a couple need to be made policy, and they must be be enforced. For example, under Help:Edit summary#How to summarize:

Avoid inappropriate summaries. Editors should explain their edits, but not be overly critical or harsh when editing or reverting others' work. This may be perceived as uncivil, and cause tension or bad feelings, making collaboration more difficult. Explain what you changed, and cite the relevant policies, guidelines or principles of good writing, but try not to target or to single out others in a way that may come across as an attack or an insult.

Also, WP:REVTALK, which says, "Avoid using edit summaries to carry on debates or negotiation over the content or to express opinions of the other users involved."

Both of those link to NPA, which has a succinct section, Avoiding personal attacks (WP:AVOIDYOU), that points out the importance of simply not personalizing edit summaries. Incivility is common in Wikipedia edit summaries, completely uncalled for, and easily identified when you consider the three elements just identified:

1. Avoid inappropriate edit summaries. (Make policy: No inappropriate edit summaries.)
2. Avoid REVTALK. (Make policy: No inappropriate REVTALK.)
3. AVOIDYOU. (Already part of NPA policy.)

These should be enforced as aggressively as 3RR. Lightbreather (talk) 22:07, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

As a follow-up, upon reviewing the above links for the umpteenth time, "Avoid inappropriate edit summaries" is part of the civility policy, so I tweaked that section[1] of the Edit summary help page to make that clearer, using the exact language from the "Edit summary don'ts" on the civility policy page. Lightbreather (talk) 22:35, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Irrelevant material
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Do you believe that editors who engage in dishonesty are inherently engaging in uncivil behavior, or is that a different problem? - 2001:558:1400:10:3182:DB3:5D8E:D2A5 (talk) 15:47, 5 September 2014 (UTC) Your continued ban evasion and trolling is dishonest. It is uncivil and disruptive. When will you stop? JoeSperrazza (talk) 16:53, 5 September 2014 (UTC) To whom are you speaking? I don't know if 2001:558:1400:10:3182:DB3:5D8E:D2A5 is Greg Kohs, and you don't know if 2001:558:1400:10:3182:DB3:5D8E:D2A5 is Greg Kohs. But here is a little quote from WPO that was written by the dreaded Greg Kohs that might provide food for thought: "I believe the first 4 digits do identify the service provider, so if you see 2601, you know it's someone on a Comcast router. That narrows the sockpuppet investigation to perhaps 20 million households and businesses. Oh, wait... public Xfinity WiFi hotspots will also use that 2601 address, and those are open to non-customers of Comcast for two 1-hour sessions per month, so you're probably looking at more like 50 million possible households and businesses who could be "guilty" of editing from a 2601 IPv6. Good luck, Wikipedia!" We have an unworkable system of banning at Wikipedia and it is a product of the decision to allow IP editing and instant establishment of accounts without provision of a verified email address. It's a choice of either rationalizing the registration process and kicking out IP editing or living with unidentifiable socks. It seems a simple call, but I'm in the minority... Carrite (talk) 22:18, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

A Seeming Contradiction and a Tension

For background, I will explain one of the reasons why I chose to ask Jimbo Wales to explain his two comments on disruptive editing. There is an apparent contradiction between the tone of his comment and his role in Wikipedia. He said: "In the old days some people would have been banned by now for that kind of behavior. It is a shame that we tolerate disruption...." From any other editor, that comment would have simply been an opinion, that behavior is now being tolerated that previously would not have been tolerated and should not be tolerated. However, Jimbo is not any other editor. He is the founder of Wikipedia. He says that some people would have been banned in the past for disruptive behavior that is currently seen. I agree, but would add that Jimbo Wales still has the reserved power to ban users. He chooses not to use it. The fact that he chooses not to use that reserved power implies that he has other reasons, such as the desire for the English Wikipedia community to be self-governing.

Jimbo, and probably the WMF, appear to have objectives that, unfortunately, at least for the time being, work against each other. They have editing workplace objectives, such as civility, an electronic workplace that is welcoming rather than intimidating to new editors, and the minimization of systemic bias in the makeup of the editor community. They have content objectives, such as the minimization of systemic bias in article coverage. They also have procedural objectives, including allowing the English Wikipedia to be self-governing, which is currently done by consensus, especially at the noticeboards. Consensus at the noticeboards is noisy, and represents those members of the community who can tolerate the noise at the noticeboards. The procedural objective of governing by consensus at the noticeboards does not appear to be supporting the workplace and content objectives. Jimbo and the WMF have a seeming contradiction that is actually a tension between objectives. How can they achieve their workplace and content objectives if those objectives are not the objectives of the loudest members of "the community"? Which objectives prevail, and how? Robert McClenon (talk) 15:29, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

This is a problem in all human interaction that is less than totally authoritarian. As a believer in consensus-oriented democracy within a certain agreed upon "terms of service" (i.e., contract), this is an issue of great interest to me. (And one of these days I'll work on the relevant article.) And the answer is that the "quiet ones", the ones who have opinions but choose not to speak, those who sort of care but can't be bothered, the decent "silent supermajority" have to speak up or the loud mouthed and the bullying will trample over what they might consider sensible ways of doing things, and before they know it they'll be in an unpleasant environment they will choose to leave. At least one can leave Wikipedia, as opposed to many states where those types take over and one finds one self stuck and defacto (if not actually) imprisoned. Carolmooredc (Talkie-Talkie) 18:42, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

I don't think these things are necessarily in tension but at the same time, there is no question that Robert is right that they frequently are in tension. And there are no easy answers, although I think there are some clear paths to take (carefully). The Foundation could, for example, in what would be a really bad idea, simply hire a bunch of well-trained community management people (say 100) to be like super-admins and enforce the rules and they would get lots of things wrong, upset a large part of the very best in the community, and probably succeed about as well as that sort of thing has succeeded at places like youtube - i.e. not really at all. So some simple answers just don't seem likely to work.

But there are paths to take (carefully). One is what the Foundation is doing under Lila's direction - invest more in the relationship between the community and the software developers so that real needs (including community management needs) are met, and new ideas are tested and rolled out (and rolled back) in a functional way. I'd like personally to see the Foundation investing as well in helping the community work towards consensus on some important issues - just investing the time to help us manage processes so that we actually have a greater capacity to run through proposals in a way that gives that "silent majority" of drama-free good content editors (who are easy to find but hard to get to know for those of us involved in policy because they are just minding their own business writing the encyclopedia!).--Jimbo Wales (talk) 18:49, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Better than hiring admins who of course would be resisted, would be to hire 10 good mediators (who also would train volunteer mediators). Mediation still being voluntary but encouraged more; refusal to mediate an obviously legitimate issue would be frowned on more. Carolmooredc (Talkie-Talkie) 19:08, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

I mostly agree both with Carol that the conflict of objectives can be a problem in all organizations that are not authoritarian, and with Jimbo both that the tension can be at least partially addressed, and as to his suggestions. He is right that hiring well-trained community management people (let alone inadequately trained community management people) as super-admins would be a really bad idea. However, the tension is exaggerated because the English Wikipedia has a strange form of self-government, in which it manages itself by "community consensus", which is in effect the consensus of those who are the loudest at the noticeboards. In some cases, including those of habitually rude editors, the "community consensus" appears to differ markedly from that of the WMF. The WMF is in favor of greater enforcement of civility, but the "community consensus" does not enforce civility. What we do not know is where the disconnect is. It may be, as some editors have said, that the larger community of editors does support more civility, but is shouted down by noisy editors (some of whom are civil but do not favor reform) who like things the way that they are. On the other hand, it may be that the majority of editors of the English Wikipedia disagree with the idea of the WMF that civility should be enforced more strongly. What the WMF can do is to survey editors more thoroughly than has done, using tools that will allow registered editors to remain anonymous if they wish to remain anonymous, but will actually better determine what the views of editors are on how to improve the electronic workplace (whether by better civility enforcement or by ignoring civility enforcement). If the editorial community as a whole thinks that the current civility situation is all right, then maybe the WMF is fighting the wrong battle. If the larger, more quiet editorial community really does have concerns about noisy editors who bias "community consensus", then the action plan should address that problem. That is one substantial step that the WMF can take. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:39, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

I mostly agree with Carol when she says (agreeing with a previous suggestion by Jimbo) that the hiring of professional mediators, who would also train volunteer mediators, would be helpful. However, I will restate my concern that mediation should be used wisely, and that there are certain situations that should not be mediated, because of the risk of the argument to moderation. For instance, if a habitually uncivil editor uses profane language and engages in personal attacks, mediation to agree to reduce the number of personal attacks by half is the wrong solution. In fact, it then gives official approval to continue the reduced-by-half number of personal attacks. Mediation as to the length of the block would be a better use of the mediation resource. Also, sometimes a difficult situation is the result of poorly stated underlying views, and mediation could, as a preliminary step, identify those differences. The hiring of mediators by the WMF would be extremely useful, but only if mediation is used wisely so that it does not have the unintended consequence of partially undermining policy. Robert McClenon (talk) 14:54, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Another relatively non-controversial thing the Wikimedia Foundation could do would be to advertise or encourage more civil relations through it's ability to advertise at the top of pages. If wikiprojects like taking photos can be advertised, why not the fact that civility is a terms of use and civility is a good thing in it's own right. Do it in a lighthanded way, maybe with some fun GIFs. Carolmooredc (Talkie-Talkie) 14:56, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Per Robert McClenon, I think that community-service type cartoons would only strengthen the dominance of those who are least civil and would trivialize the issue. SPECIFICO talk 15:05, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

You don't see any civility/offensiveness problems on Meta-filter. They have hired tech-savvy community management people to act as moderators--I have been able to identify about three. —Neotarf (talk) 03:54, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Disruptive editing revisited

I just wanted to highlight and respond to a comment that has already been archived:

1. I think the WMF can do little directly. It would be pretty difficult for them to get directly involved in banning uncivil users, and hard for them to do a good job of it. One reason for this is that extreme cases are quite easy and the community does a good job of bans. The difficult cases are people who go around causing disruption and abusing people but who have some kind of support network and produce good content. In these cases, community opinion often ends up divided. It would be hard for the Foundation to know what to do.

2. The Foundation could help us by doing more studies on what causes people to leave the community. I think what is often lacking is the empirical evidence needed to convince some fence-sitters how much damage some people are doing. If you write 3 featured articles but chase away through your incivility 10 potentially great editors who would have written 30 featured articles, then you are a net loss to the project. I think that's often the case with some of these characters, but we have no way at the moment to empirically demonstrate it.

3. The English Wikipedia community can beef up policies in various ways to make it clearer that "producing good content" does not give one a free pass to abuse, insult, or harass others through uncivil behavior.

4. I recommend that people who care about this issue work hard to think about how we might improve our ArbCom processes so that more cases can be handled and in a quicker fashion. Barring that, I would say being careful to elect "civility hawks" to the ArbCom would be useful. When a user who has a long history of uncivil interactions with others comes before ArbCom, it should often be a simple open and shut case. For a variety of reasons (including that policy isn't strong enough in some areas so ArbCom can feel constrained) that sometimes doesn't happen, and this has follow-on repercussions with behavior across the site as uncivil people feel safe to carry on.--Jimbo Wales 10:19, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

• The WMF could do plenty if they wanted to. If they can create a superprotect to enforce software choices, they can enforce their terms of service. Taking a lesson from American history, what happened when Al Capone's bootlegging empire was protected by local neighborhood politicians? The federal government stepped in, and found some problems with his federal tax returns. And what happened in the sixties, when individual states failed to protect individuals from discrimination and safeguard their voting rights? Yup, the federal government stepped in again; the result was the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

• Instead of focusing on what makes people leave (think WP:DIVA essay for how that is likely to end), the foundation might focus on how to create new relationships with institutions--museums, universities, student groups. I had a conversation with someone over breakfast the other day, and in the course of asking why they didn't edit Wikipedia, found out they were prohibited from doing so by their university department. They did have edit-a-thons, but the material was submitted to the department head, and put on Wikipedia by one person, in order not to expose any faculty members or the institution to any potentially embarrassing and career-damaging actions. Not a bad idea--can you imagine a salary review that looked like an RFA? Wikipedia is going through a gentrification process. The new professionals are moving in, and the smelly old street corner lurkers will be marginalized. But are the streets safe yet? Everyone wants safe streets.

• The policies we have already are not being enforced, more policies will just produce more of the same.

• There is no point in asking more of ArbCom. They are elected and must respond to the will of the community. But more care can be taken in framing questions. For example, the civility RFAR that was recently declined was spun as being about "swearing". Too late people realized it was about more--the real issue was bigotry and the use of race- and culture-group based slurs. I tried to start a discussion about it on one of the arbitrator's talk pages, but every time I tried to post, I was either reverted or found myself in endless edit conflicts. This is the new tactic against gentrification--suppression of discussion.

• One thing that traffic courts do that Arbcom doesn't do is try to educate people. What if someone who violated the civility policy was required to go to the equivalent of traffic school before they could edit again. There are plenty of HR-type anti-harassment training programs for new employees out there--how hard would it be to modify one for WP?

• Another case in point was the latest round of C-gate on ANI today. There is a group of individuals who have publicly stated their opposition to the gender group, roughly the same group that usually shows up whenever the c-bomb rears its head. But instead of avoiding the gender group, they have chosen to participate in the group, with the result being ongoing disruption that eventually ended up at ANI. The more experienced users are probably ahead of me at this point, but the end result was that as long as the anti-gender people were trying to get the gender group of people thrown to the wolves, the discussion was allowed to proceed. But as soon as the discussion turned to page bans for the anti-gender users, the thread was abruptly closed, twice, by the same admin. [2] Ironically, the final word in the thread, before it closed, was "All this commotion would've been avoided, if all editors had chosen to hide ther RL genders from Wikipedia." There you have it. Wikipedia is not ready for female editors. The streets are not safe. —Neotarf (talk) 05:16, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

Like I said before, you should take this case to ArbCom. It's something that's surely within their remit. Repeatedly posting long memoranda here isn't going to solve it (anymore than ANI did). JMP EAX (talk) 23:07, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

I agree. There are a small number of editors who feel that there are egregious and damaging violations at various gender-related pages. A well-formed request should be posted at Arbcom and we can move forward on these important issues. SPECIFICO talk 23:30, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

I don't agree that talk is pointless. The biggest problem I have with the premature closure of the ANI discussion is that it did not allow community consensus process to play out.

What would be the point in bringing this to ArbCom? They always throw the issue back to the community, as they did at the recently have already declined "Civility" case request. In a closing statement there, the OP belatedly recognized that the case should have been framed in terms of "offensive" speech, since "offensive speech is at the more objectionable end of the incivil spectrum" and is easier to define, although in all fairness, in a recent clarification request, the Arbcom has started to come closer to addressing this issue. —Neotarf (talk) 17:02, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

My argument for the requester closing it or ArbCom declining it: Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case#Statement_by_Carolmooredc. Carolmooredc (Talkie-Talkie) 22:22, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Arbitration

I have opened an arbitration request at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case#Gender Gap Task Force Issues. Robert McClenon (talk) 16:52, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Take care what you post here. I have now been named as a party to this case, and I have no idea who named me or why. A message from a clerk on my talk page tells me it was an anonymous arbitrator. Does anyone else feel a chill? —Neotarf (talk) 02:23, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

I suspect the anonymous arbitrator as it were, read the talk page of the project and found your commentary enlightening and/or problematic. Yes I feel a chill in my part of this planet, as Autumn is in the air. You need not fear the arbitration, as it is most certainly going to be declined.Two kinds of pork (talk) 03:59, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

The arbitrator has now responded on my talk page, but I still have no idea what is being said about me on the secret arbitrator mailing list. —Neotarf (talk) 13:12, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Notice of discussion re: edit-summary incivility

I have started a discussion on the "No personal attacks" policy page. Since this is an issue of civility, the subject of much debate here and elsewhere on the project, watchers of this page are invited to weigh in. Proposed addition to "Avoiding personal attacks". Lightbreather (talk) 00:15, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

Not sure how ClueBot III works, but it archived this after one day,[3] and considering how much civility is being discussed in this and other forums recently/now, I'd like the notice to stay at least a week. That seems reasonable. Thanks. Lightbreather (talk) 18:56, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

I have it set to aggressively archive threads where no one is commenting. This is normally the right thing but for a notice of a discussion elsewhere it obviously fails. I don't know a good solution but anyone is welcome to add this back regularly for the week requested.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 20:26, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

I figured it was something like that, but I wanted to explain why I restored the notice. Thanks. Lightbreather (talk) 00:05, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Gender gap task force and RfA proposal

I have made a proposal that I would think would help close the gender gap in WP's administrative corps. I think this is necessary because, speaking from observation and personal experience, WP's RfA process has a lot of serious issues. Cla68 (talk) 06:18, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Now renamed Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_adminship#Proposal_from_Cla68_regarding_women_candidates. Closed and premature. But actions to bring in more women or proposals for things to increase numbers that will be more widely accepted certainly are needed. Carolmooredc (Talkie-Talkie) 12:37, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Webreflinks

For those of you who don't know, webreflinks is a tool that automatically fixes up all citations within an article. All you have to do is past the title in a box and click Enter, and when the program completes, copy the output to the article. Simple as.

Since this tool has been blocked, or whatever happened to it, I have seen the level of citations decrease rapidly everywhere on Wikipedia. We desperately need either this tool or another one that does a similar thing.

P.S. Oh and once we do we need to make sure all newbies know what it is and how to use it. I'm working at WP:AFC atm and I can't take the horribly formatted references anymore.--Coin945 (talk) 12:45, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

September 3rd traffic spike

Jimbo, if you check the article traffic stats for just about any article in the English Wikipedia, it appears that September 3rd there was approximately an 80% to 100% spike in page views. The spike only persisted for that one day. Do you (or any of your loyal JimboTalk followers) have any idea if this spike was real, or was it just a quirk of the measurement tool? - 2001:558:1400:10:8165:67BB:738F:E52B (talk) 13:11, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Pardon my ignorance, but where can this data be viewed? Tarc (talk) 13:29, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Click on "View history" tab. Then in External tools (about the third line of text down), to the right, click "Page view statistics". The tool is notoriously buggy, but we seem to depend on it as our best source of information about Wikipedia page views. - 2001:558:1400:10:8165:67BB:738F:E52B (talk) 14:06, 10 September 2014 (UTC)