User:Kevin Gorman/statement

Statement by Kevin Gorman

I will not be regularly available from the 20th of December until the 10th of January, This means as the timeline on my case currently stands I'll be unable to participate in the workshop or proposed decision phases unless the case is postponed significantly. I am also not going to be able to adequately respond to WTT in anything approaching the normal word limit. I'm honestly a bit confused why the word limit is 1000 words and 100 diffs for named parties; no one can possibly adequately respond to 100 diffs (or anything near it) in 1000 words - and that's ignoring anything other than directly responding to the first parties' statement. if I split half my response betwen responding to WTT and half making an actual statement, I'd manage to get a 500 word statement and approximately 12 words per diff. A 1000 word statement may have been adequate when dealing with the initial five actions WTT had a problem with, but is not at all adequate for the problems he's expanded the case to include. Since I don't feel like spending hours pruning my statement, it's pretty damn long. It's still only about 70 words for every diff WTT cites.

This is a long message. If you want pruned down short version, poke me in the second part of January. I don't think it was a good idea to accept a case on such weak grounds in the middle of the holidays to begin with (an evidence phase that ended three days after christmas initially? seriously?) and I've decided that I don't want to spend hours more crafting a perfect - and short statement for the case. I'm going to email and post this and then forget about Wikipedia during the rest of the holidays.

WTT stated at the beginning of the RFAR that I was not up for recall. If he had read my ACE Q&A, he would know that this was incorrect. Of course, since his ACE guide also claimed for more than 24 hours that I had used my poor health as an excuse to avoid an outright *ban*, it's pretty obvious that he doesn't pay much attention when writing his ACE guides, even though it received more than 1800 views in that time period. He apparently confused me with someone else who had done so at some point in the indiscriminate past; of course he never specifies who, or when. In my view, his failure to uphold even a basic standard of care/BLP standards is responsible for more harm than every one of my actions he cites combined, and if one of the two of us comes out of this arbcom case with sanctions, it should probably be him. That was not the only mistake or attack he included in his ACE2015 guide, and they certainly caused more BLP issues than my actions did, combined.

I recently linked a gallery on commons that happened to share the same name as a prominent Wikipedian that was not said-Wikipedian. The link was up for 15-20 minutes at most, and I don't think it could've damaged the reputation of the Wikipedian or the other figure involved in that timeframe. Again, I made an obvious error in not explicitly confirming the linked gallery was in fact that of the Wikipedian - but this was the same week I had been dealing with a number of privacy isues related to WikiConf USA on Commons, so although unfortunate I think it falls under the 'non-malicious' standard of WP:OUTING.

I think that anyone who has watched my actions change and develop over the last few years would agree that I've become more deliberative, and less trigger happy. As recent examples, I'd point to the AN section about what to do with JtV's work, as well as seeking Wikiproject Med feedback before moving immunoglobulin therapy live. Several of my recent actions violate a number of our policies, but none of them have actually cause harm to the encyclopedia, and I will actively seek to avoid making such mistakes in the future. My most recent serious error (failing to ping a CU before undoing a CU block) was unfortunate, but didn't result in harm to the encyclopedia. As time has progressed, I think it's pretty clear that I've acted with more caution and deliberation than I did when I was first sysopped, a trend I expect to continue.

I absolutely take responsibility for my own tool use. I fucked up in several rather dumb ways. I relied on the comments of others to take action in situations where instead I really should have simply refreshed myself on the policies. I should've reread policy regarding SPI CU blocks to ensure Vanja's statement was correct before taking action, but failed to do so, and assumed an SPI clerk would be more up to date on policy than I was. Similarly, I should have reread the RD criteria instead of riffing off of SBJ's suggestion that the thread was RDable. Since both of them have more expertise with SPI/RD than I do, it didn't seem unreasonable to assume they were correct at the time. I certainly should have pinged the blocking admin even if he wasn't a CU as a matter of best practice. I'll certainly be more careful in reversing blocks in the future, both in terms of ensuring the blocking admin is aware of unblock discussions, and ensuring I don't undo CU blocks without CU consent. There's a huge difference between denying that I did anything wrong, and admitting that I accidentally and non-maliciously violated several policies, stating that it won't happen again, and explaining how it happened in the first place. This warrants a wagging finger, not a case. I don't think that this collection of actions (one of which is two years stale) warrants a desysop or anything more than the admonishment that the RFAR itself represents.

I readily admit to, in the distant past, being involved in helping bring the Wiki-PR issue public. I believe such action was necessary to preserve the integrity of the encyclopedia, and this is preserved intact in a number of places across the encyclopedia and beyond, including a C&D WMF had Cooley send Wiki-PR. My role in bringing the issue public also had the support of the community, as demonstrated by the strength of consensus in favor of the community ban I suggested which in its text outed the founder's of Wiki-PR. This also led to a major changes in the term of the use and had broad general support. I believe that undisclosed paid editing poses a major threat to the encyclopedia, so I have a hard time doing saying mea culpa regarding this. Since the founders of Wiki-PR had given media interiews to outlets as large as the WSJ and had been broadly reported on by the time I ever mentioned their names on-wiki, on further thought, I actually have a hard time thinking I outed them. When you give an interview to mainstream media outets about your unethical pinata-store destroying joke of a PR firm, you become at a bare minimum a public figure at least in the context of Wikipedia and PR - so naming them is not outing them. At the time I hadn't thought it through completely, and assumed it was outing and was prepared to bare whatever consequences the community deemed fit - but this was two years ago and was outing to begin with. If a similar situation arose today, I'd try to handle it through internal channels first - which would be much more likely to be successful now that we have a large CA department - but if handling it internally wasn't working, especially if we were losing good bureaucrats like WilliamH (who completely left the project over the functionaries' unwillingness at the time to take significant action about it,) and burning out good SPI clerks (there's a reason you don't see Dennis at SPI very often anymore,) I'd certainly consider taking the issue public - especially if other outlets were already starting to report on it. I've never intentionally claimed that the arbitration committee as a whole supported me bringing Wiki-PR more public than it had been, but I know that multiple arbitrators supported it. Since the commmunity ban I wrote was included in a C&D sent by WMF's law firm and the ToU received a major revision, I think it's safe to say that WMF supported me bringing Wiki-PR further public as well.

WTT accuses me of conducting inappropriate "opposition research" in suport of a two week block and topic ban I made under the GG sanctions. The "opposition research" consisted of looking at old, unredacted versions of a user's talkpage, and realizing that he had linked to vicious screeds targeted at many of the women targeted by GamerGate. I'm deeply disappointed that a former arbitrator both doesn't realize that using unredacted information posted by a user in this fashion is an explcit exception written in to WP:OUTING, and that WTT apparently values the privacy of an editor who publicly disclosed their pseudonym and viciously attacked the targets of GamerGate both on and off-wiki. We have BLP policies for a reason; our artcle subjects are real people with real feelings and real reputations.

WTT accuses me of bypassinng functionaries' judgement routinely. He cites as an example me restoring on two occasions content from JacktheVicar, a user who is still currently flagged as a sock of Colonel Henry. This has several problems: first, G5 is an optional criterion, not a mandatory one. If an arbitrator had G5'ed all of JtV's work and I had restored it *then* I would be interfering with the judgement of a functionary, That's not what happened. The first batch of articles from JtV that I restored were three articles that had been deleted by someone wh was not a functionary that achieved good article status, including an article that had had it's GAR done by Drmies, an article that had had a close review by someone other than the original reviewer, and Christ Church, an article I closely scrutinized for hoaxed sources. In reviewing JtV's worrk I went as far as to request three rare sources that I did not have access to through an interlibrary loan. No one has found hoaxed content in any of JtV's sources. Look at this artice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_Church,_Newton - it has some very minor factual inaccuracies (from memory, Uzal Ogden Jr. was ordained by the Bishop of London after Richard Terrick,) but it's a good article (as Drmies agreed, and listed it.) WP:BANREVERT suggests against G5ing articles that others have made significant contributions to, but in any case, after looking at both Drmies' review of the article and tracking down most of the listed sources in the article myself, I restored it (as well as the other two GA's JtV wrote.) This could still be me bypassing a functionary's judgement if a functionary had deleted the article.... but Sphilbrick deleted the article, not a functionary. I have reason to believe JtV isn't CH in the first place, but even if that article were written by the lovechild of JtV and Wiki-PR I would still restore it. It's a good article and not one that we would have had JtV not written it.

The second set of JtV restorations I made were of his non-GA articles. This included a couple dozen mostly stubbish articles that were not articles anyone was likely to write if I did not restore them. I checked the vast majority of sources in the articles and again, although they were mostly stubbish articles, they were articles that we would not have had I not restored them. In restoring them I went as far as to retrieve a newspaper article from 1976 from a database most Wikipedian's don't have access to to verify that the article was not fudging its sources. It wasn't. More important in this context: none of these articles were G5ed by functionaries, and I have not been told by a single functionary that it is inappropriate to restore articles written by JacktheVicar - whoever he in fact is - if I have verified their facts. I realized that restoring JtV's non-GA articles could be controversial, so I reflexed my decision to WP:AN for review. The section was closed as a perfectly appropriate restoration of adequately source articles. More importatly, again these were not articles that were G5'ed by functionaries. WTT cites my restorations of JtV's artcles (which again involved three interlibrary loans to verify) as evidence that I regularly override the judgement of functionaries. However, JacktheVicar is still blocked and as far as I am aware no functionary has indicated his articles should be G5'ed - just that JtV should stay blocked, as he is. WTT manages to twist the restoration of a couple of dozen articles including three GA's in to a bad thing. He goes as far as to say I didn't have consensus to do so, when in fact the AN thread I started about restoring JtV's content reached consensus that doing so was appropriate.

He goes over my last five deletions: the most recent one was a deletion of my own DYK nomination after an arbcom case was opened against me. When the case was opened, I made the decision to avoid editing in mainspace, to minimize the amount of crap that people would pile on to my arbcom case. I don't particularly know was WTT describes G7ing my own DYK nom as not good practice; we do have G7 for a reason. He also doesn't note that the DYK nom I deleted was for a major medical article that we had previously been lacking. If WTT hadn't decided to open a useless case, I'd now be happily improving that article, since TWL has finally granted me access to a majority of immunology journals. The next deletion is a restoration of JtV's non-GA articles; see above. It reached consensus at AN as an acceptable action.

The next deletion he lists was a mistake on my part (although I don't know why he lists it as occurring over two days.) Jehochman had deleted a large conversation from my talk page in a creative exercise of WP:DENY. WTT didn't get the hint that I didn't want the conversation reopened, so he reopened it. Some time later, SB_Johnny came by and offered to revdel it. He ended up only normally deleting it; I was going out of town for the weekend and didn't want anyone to resur,rect it while I was gone, so I RD'ed it. Almost every previous RD I've ever conducted was under RD1 or RD4, so it didn't occur to me that RD5 did not apply to usertalk. Since SB_Johnny had offered to RD it I assumed it was RDable, and RD'ed it withut rereading the policy. WTT emailed me a short time later scolding me for not realizing that RD5 did not apply to usertalk and threatening to take me to arbcom. As soon as I reread RD policy and realized WTT was correct, I restore the conversation and just added a note to my talkpage asking WTT specifically not to post on it. Since I was going out of town for several days, this seeme like a perfectly reasonable response. As soon as I got back in to town, I exchanged a few emails with WTT and removed the note on my talk page that had asked him not to post on it. Failing to review revdel policy after almost a year of inactivity was a mistake on my part, but I sincerely doubt that anyone missed anything too crucial in the short period of time a snippy conversation that involved me, WTT, and Greg Kohs was inaccessble to non-admins.

The next two deletions he looks at are both relatively minor: one was when I used special:nuke during the Neelix mess, and the other were JtV's GA restorations. I know that the argument that it was better to nuke everything and selectively restore Neelix's good content was never fully accepted, but I still fully believe that 150 deletions with 50 selective restorations (some of which I did myself, and some of which should not be done) was a much better idea than 150 XfDs.

Reviewing the last five blocks in reverse order: the earliest two blocks were normal blocks of disruptive accounts; one of them had a sockmaster hence the block summary. The next block was of someone who had edited my ACE answer that talked about inquisitorial vs adversarial systems to imply that I was supporting turning arbcom in to the Spanish Inquisition.  While I suppose no one would expect the Spanish Inquisition, I'm not sure why WTT considered a 48  hour block on a static IP particularly heavy handed.  The next set of blocks was playing whack-a-mole with Kohs.  Several people have tried to keep Kohs name out of it, but I don't think Kohs is like Bloody Mary.  If we say his name three times he won't magically appear (actually I bet he might, he probably googles himself a lot.)  The next two blocks I made were fairly long blocks of people who had been disruptive for long periods of time at the article about Allie X.  WTT suggests I blocked them based off one discussion; this is not true, I had been following the issue for a fairly long time.

The next set of unblocks are the ones that WTT decided to make an issue out of. I stumbled across a class that had been blocked from LIUC, a university near Milan. I left a discussion open overnight on the instructor's userpage about the possibility of unblocking them, although unfortunately I forgot to ping Mike, the blocking checkuser. After I verified that LIUC was in fact currently running a class that advertised the fact that they edited ENWP, and after receiving express permission from Vanjagenije, the SPI clerk and person who had tagged all of the accounts as socks to unblock them, with Vanja saying that although checkuser data was involved they were not checkuser blocks and I should feel free to undo them, I undid them. It seemed vaguely unusual but the last time I was near SPI was during the Wiki-PR case, so with an SPI admin saying "feel free to undo them," I assumed there had been an ateration in how SPI was handled, and I undid them. Mike pretty promptly asked me why I undid them; I pointed him to Vanja's statement that unblocking them was fine. He pretty much warned me to be more careful in the future but accepted it was a good faith mistake, and agreed that even if the process was wrong the result was probably correct. He gave Vanjagenije a couple of sentences of guidance. Vanjagenije is a quite new admin (though I didn't realize that at the time) and should be thanked for volunteering in an area where we need more admin support, not disciplined in any way. Everyone fucks up, and not realizing that is futile.

Unless WTT speaks a different dialect of English than I do, disingenuous implies being deceitful or lying. It would be stupid as hell for me to lie about who blocked what accounts when literally anyone in the world with an internet connection can look it up. Occam's razor: I wasn't being duplicitous, I was just fucking tired. Similarly it makes no sense for me to lie to WTT about when he was an arbitrator. Of course WTT knows when he was an arbitrator, and of course anyone can look that up. I misread the tranche graph; is that really harder to believe than the idea that I'm trying to trick an arb in to believing he wasn't an arb during a period of time when he knows he was an arb? Similarly, I had no idea that recused arbs were not routinely taken off the list that the cases they are recused from are discussed. This runs directly contrary to best practices, and unless it's mentioned in some small corner of the public arb policies, I have no idea why anyone who has never been an arb would know this - let alone why a non-arb who didn't know that the -b and -c lists were barely ever used would be accused of lying about it.

I've significantly increased the voter turnout in arbcom electios (with apparently good results,) done extensive in-class education program work that requires the toolset, saved 3 GA's in the recent past from unjustified g5 deletions, blocked users where necessary but more importantly mediated disputes that I would not have been able to successfullly navigate without the backup of the toolset in a way that means multiple editors are editing today who would have otherwise been indeffed, taken on significant GLAM and other outreach, etc. I would understand this arb case more if Mike, *the actual blocking checkuser*, in my most serious policy mistake had had a serious problem with my actions, but Worm is not Mike, and the fact that Worm was threatening me beforehand with an arb case for two two year old correct actions, and a series of recent mistakes (two of which, including the most serious, were at the advice of other admins) makes me take this case less seriously, especially with WTT's own recent BLP violations. Kevin Gorman (talk) 08:51, 17 December 2015 (UTC)