User:NuclearWarfare/ACE2010

My thoughts on the 2010 ArbCom elections. Format of the page adapted from User:Lar/ACE2010.

Hi all. I'm NuclearWarfare. I have been editing Wikipedia since late 2007, and I have brought one and a half articles through the featured articles process, and have also created other content as well. I was elected as an administrator in August 2009. I currently serve as an Arbitration Committee clerk and OTRS volunteer. As part of the latter, a good portion of my work focuses on replying to subjects of biographies of living persons. By my own request, I do not serve as an administrator for the time being. What does that mean for you? Nothing. I just want alert you to my own background, which shall undoubtedly affect my decision to vote the way I do.

I continue to believe that the problem with biographies of living persons constitutes one of the three greatest issues that our project must address. While ArbCom of course does not set policy directly, the actions it takes, or as we saw in January 2010, chooses not to take, directly affect the project's trajectory. I personally have very strong views about the BLP problem. I do not expect the candidates to agree with me on every aspect of my views. I do however wish to see evidence that they have thought hard about the scope of the problem and perhaps even how to address it. (A hint for now: Arguing that a limited use of pending changes on a couple thousand articles with a history of problems might be enough to solve the BLP problem will earn yourself a strong oppose from me. Think about the issues and defend your position strongly.)

Candidates and community members, please feel free to leave feedback at User talk:NuclearWarfare/ACE2010.

Quotes by Wikipedians
I like these quotes. I don't agree with them entirely, but they do represent my philosophy on how some things with Wikipedia are really wrong and need to change. They will be guiding my voting to some extent.

"JzG was actually a role model for me when I started here, because he had a real knack for seeing through bullshit and grasping the essence of a dispute...I can think of a number of other admins who used to work that way - that is, WP:CIV doesn't mean you have to endlessly tolerate obvious bullshit. Those people are all completely burnt out, if they're still here at all. And they've been replaced by people who are equally high-handed, but without the saving grace of underlying clue - the worst of both worlds. At some point, "the community" made a decision that rudeness was a greater threat to the project than blatantly partisan, agenda-driven, or batshit-crazy editors. Honestly, if you're capable of staying superficially civil (emphasis on "superficially"), avoiding edit-warring, and avoiding sockpuppetry, you can basically stay here indefinitely pushing whatever nonsensical, pernicious crap you choose. The end result is that we constantly hemorrhage good editors when they burn out, but the real bad apples stay with us forever."
 * On Administration

"My primary criticism of the committee is that it is generally so focused on our conduct policies that it ends up leaving the actual encyclopedia behind. This is a direct consequence of the committee's refusal to adjudicate content disputes combined with the lack of any other available form of binding content dispute resolution. The model in use seems to be that if we keep editors in line with our conduct policies, the content will fall into place. This is absolutely not the case. The idea seems to be based on the entirely false notion that editors with conduct issues and those who advocate inappropriate content on Wikipedia are the same people. Absolutely not so. Wikipedia has many editors highly devoted to neutrality and verifiability who, alas, are also prone to behavioural lapses (often during the course of their attempts to improve or maintain the encyclopedia's neutrality or verifiability), and many highly civil POV pushers.

The effect of this conduct-only focus of arbitration is to sanction editors advocating neutrality as harshly, nearly as harshly, or even more harshly than POV-pushers. As an example: two editors enter a long-term edit war over a matter. The one seeking push a POV is exceedingly civil, while the other, who seeks to enforce neutrality and verifiability, lashes out with four-letter words from time to time. In an arbitration case, who will be sanctioned more harshly? That's right: the second, because he violated our conduct policies more. That this is completely wrong and that an editor who compromises the integrity of our articles should always receive more severe sanctions than one who violates conduct policies while seeking to uphold content policies is abundantly clear for both practical and principled reasons, but this is not how our ArbCom is set up. Even in the case that both editors in the dispute are about equally civil and both receive similar sanctions, we have still sanctioned an editor trying to enforce our content policies. Such a person is likely to be discouraged from advocating neutrality in contentious areas in the future when they see that POV-pushers and neutrality advocates are treated exactly the same by the committee (indeed, they're likely to say "screw this" and leave the project completely)."

"Wikipedia is singularly ill-adapted to deal with nationalist troublemaking. Overmuch of the mentality of the Arbitration Committee, who will not rule on content, has filtered down to the administrative corps. Living-persons issues apart, most admins are too scared to block for POV pushing, even though neutrality is supposed to be our most important principle. Nor are such blocks readily endorsed, no matter how justified, largely because the majority of those expressing an opinion are not familiar with the subject matter, and either cannot or will not properly check the issues concerned. As a result, admins are unable to deal with pure POV-pushing, and can only address the other symptoms of the nationalist disease. Typically the nationalist troll does, in fact, infringe user conduct rules, but this cannot be universally relied upon. Even if he does, the nationalist cannot be relied upon to violate the user conduct regulations to the extent that he can be removed permanently. It is also worth noting that most nationalist editing focuses on humanities-related subjects, where Wikipedia does not possess the same volume of expert editors that we do when it comes to science-related topics. As a result, the number of those able to refute nationalist crankpottery head-on is smaller."


 * For this one, I have to disagree on the last two sentences.

"I've always believed that the WMF need to grow a pair and enforce a governance model on Wikipedia. If the American Revolution had been conducted by RFC, the Continental Congress would still be bickering over what color the flag should be and Thomas Jefferson would have been blocked for incivility to King George."
 * On Governance

"Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the living people about whom we write. There is a deadline for them: it is the moment that Google puts our article about them in their top-5 results. That is something that was never contemplated at the time that Wikipedia was created. We must be responsive to changes in circumstances; this is about as big a change as can be. This is part of Wikipedia maturing and becoming a responsible citizen of the information world; when we were small and unnoticed, we had almost no impact on the life of an article subject. Now, what is published in our pages can (and sometimes does) cause long-lasting harm. Why do you think Google now crawls our articles incessantly to ensure it reflects the most current version of a page? We are no longer a little upstart in a distant corner of the Internet: we are now a top-10 website whose words, whether they should be or not, are taken as relatively accurate if not entirely authoritative. Not a day goes by that someone being interviewed on radio or television isn't confronted with a question that starts "I looked up your Wikipedia entry and it says..." The failure of individuals to recognise this collective responsibility to get things right about real people does more to harm the reputation and credibility of this project than any other error that is made."
 * On Biographies of Living Persons

"Clearly could have been handled with less dramah, but the deletions did have a sound basis in policy. Let's not get so carried away with "procedure" that we miss the big picture here - the community needs to have a way to deal with articles of this type that doesn't involve deciding its Somebody Else's Problem."

Withdrawn
This was the way my comments stood at the time the candidate withdrew.

Factoids about the candidates

 * Please post on User talk:NuclearWarfare/ACE2010 if any of this is incorrect
 * All information here is based on easily available self-declared information, and is therefore likely incomplete.


 * Five of the 23 candidates edit under their real names—Casliber, David Fuchs, Georgewilliamherbert, John Vandenberg, PhilKnight, Stephen Bain. Five others' real names are fairly well-known or seem to be derivatives of their full names—Harej, HJ Mitchell, Jclemens, Newyorkbrad, Shell Kinney.
 * Casliber seems to be the only a professional scientist—he is a psychiatrist and therefore must have a MBBS or equivalent. Jclemens has done some graduate work as well; see the talk page for details.
 * Newyorkbrad and Sandstein are the only two lawyers running (Stephen Bain has an undergraduate degree in law and may have practiced it before joining his graduate program).
 * The only academic is Stephen Bain (although John Vandenberg also works at a university).