Andrew Whitworth wrote:
Consider a parallel with you involved. If Panic loses
this round of
arbitration, he is going to start a fight with you as well. Is somebody
going to jump in and say "Let's overturn Rob's decision, because he was
engaged in a personal fight with Panic"? You may not care about your
membership at wikibooks, but I for one would feel the loss if you stopped
contributing all together (blocked or pushed out).
I'm not going to let that happen. First of all, what decision have I
made so far? All of this complaining about the choices I've made and
the dictitorial inquisition that I've started seems (at least to me) to
be much ado about nothing. The only action I've done is to unblock
Panic, but after a strong assurance that he would try to stay away from
editing in the C++ Programming Wikibook. With the sole exception of
posting a reply on a talk page there (and no other page moves or
reformatting), he has done exactly that. I'm watching his user
contributions page closely, but so far I havn't seen anything in the
past couple of weeks that really seems out of place.
And the only editorial actions I did on the C++ Programming Wikibook
myself was to post a general notice about the location of the
arbitration discussion. I neither froze any pages, nor have I actually
even read for that matter much of what is written in this Wikibook. I'm
trying to let this play out and try to investigate what actually
happened here, and to clarify what exactly did happen here to cause this
to get out of control. And the editorial control over the C++ book does
indeed seem to be a central issue to this whole arbitration.
The main thing
I wanted to do here is to
avoid the same sort of mistakes that Johnny made, particularly as I
don't think doing a user block is necessarily the best course of action
when dealing with an edit war, except perhaps to cool things down a bit
and make people pause to think for a moment.
The edit war wasn't the main rationale for the block anyway. Panic has a
long history of biting newbies, being uncivil, and starting fights.
Somewhere you have to draw the line and realize that wikibooks is about
collaboratively authoring textbooks, not about dealing with Panic's
particular brand of bullshit on a daily basis. We are all just volunteers
trying to write textbooks, and people who can't follow the rules shouldnt be
here in the first place.
From the tone of this, it seems you have already tried
and convicted
Panic as being irredemable and a menace to Wikibooks and not worth
having around.
I am also very, very confused by this comment, and what "rules" need to
be followed here that you are refering to. There are certainly
unwritten rules of social discourse that would imply giving deference in
many situations that perhaps Panic isn't doing, but that isn't
necessarily a project policy here. Some people simply have a much more
abrasive personality. That is also something hardly new to Wikibooks
either, nor something held exclusively by Panic. I know Wikibooks
admins with as abrasive if not more so personality than even Panic.
And this does indeed seem like a content fight, particularly when the
"charges" are being discussed, as everybody involved seems to have an
axe to grind about how Panic was moving content (including apparently
talk pages) and "reverting" changes in various ways. And in this
situation, many of these same individuals who are complaining also
"fought back" and encouraged even more of this behavior by extending the
fight where Panic would do one thing and they would go back and do
something else that would go around and around again.
To me, that sounds exactly like an edit war. As far as "who started
it", that is in many cases irrelevant and won't solve the problem at
hand anyway.
As far as
appealing up the food chain, so to say, that has always been
an option.
My point was that it's a bad option. In general, I would prefer for
wikibook's problems to be solved by wikibookians. Look at what happens when
people from outside wikibooks try to "help" us: The portal is moved to meta
where it's broken and unfixable, the logo is changed to something we dont
need or want, etc. Look also at what has happened in the past when Jimbo has
come in to mandate something or another: I would hardly say his ruling on
the videogame guides was "absolute". If panic raises a big enough stink to
these people, they will come in and take action (not likely in panic's
benefit), but that can't be a good thing for our project in any way.
Ideally, I would have to agree that Wikibookians should try to solve the
problems within Wikibooks, rather than getting outside authority to
force the issue to a conclusion.
I can think of three major instances last year that outside authority on
Wikibooks caused a huge amount of trouble: The deletion of the "three
books" by Jimbo, the removal of Video Game books, and the whole mess
with the Wikimania proceedings. The last one actually resulted in wheel
warring going on with the same pages being deleted and undeleted by
multiple individuals. All three of these issues resulted in huge
defections from Wikibooks and a general halting to the growth of the
project. Perhaps these were needed, and that can be debated, in terms
of focusing Wikibooks on some fundimental core philosophies, but it
wasn't an easy process or well liked.
BTW, in regards to the Wikibooks logo, it is Wikibookians who initiated
the idea for a change. That they may not be en.wikibookians is
irrelevant, and to think that English Wikibooks is the only Wikibooks
project that matters here is really missing the larger picture. I
wasn't too happy with the methodology to select the new logo, and I
expressed some grave concerns about how it was handled. And the fact
that for the most part many Wikibookians weren't really aware that the
new logo was in the final stages of being selected is IMHO unfortunate
as well. We do, however, need to come to a concensus if the logo that
has been selected on Meta will actually be used on en.wikibooks... and I
hope that this issue won't be declared by executive fiat either. It
would be unfortunate if the other language Wikibooks projects use a logo
that en.wikibooks is not using because we are stuck on this issue.
As far as moving the portal page to Meta, I expressed a very pointed
concern about that issue, and it seemed as though my thoughts and
concerns fell completely on deaf ears, as though my opinion on the
subject was completely irrelevant. I'm not even really sure who agreed
to the idea, as I don't recall any sort of general concensus occuring
about the topic. It was a "bold move" to try and conform to be like the
other Wikimedia projects, I guess, or something the developers came up
with on their own. Or was that admins on Meta trying to dictate
Wikibooks policies? I certainly didn't see any major cry from the other
language Wikibooks projects complaining about this issue or any
substantial technical merits to the current approach that justified such
a change.
BTW, no, I
don't think that my being involved here is going to have my
adminship challenged if I recommend that Panic's account be reblocked,
or set up some other sort of set of "probationary" conditions for him.
Not what Johnny thought either, and look at him now. This whole situation is
poison in the water, and we risk losing some genuinely helpful people. What
I dont want to see is Wikibooks get hurt any more then it needs to. Helpful
and friendly contributors are the only thing that we have, and the numbers
are preciously small.
--Andrew Whitworth (Whiteknight)
I also don't want to set up a situation where we are spawning
Wikibooks-specific vandals that are already familiar with editorial
philosophies and vunerabilities for this project.
Yes, this is a tough moral tightrope to walk, but I also don't think it
is completely impossible to come to a concensus here.
I also want to point out that I am trying to seek some sort of general
concensus among all of those involved here about what course to take,
and to try and avoid forcing an arbitrary decision, such as unilaterally
blocking another user from editing or deadmining somebody. That is the
last thing I really want to do here and I would like to avoid that if at
all possible.
--
Robert Scott Horning