User talk:The Wordsmith/Community sanctions

Involvement criteria
Item (ii) of "involvement" is a concern. It's saying that an administrator may not act if they have ever had significant personal interaction with the editor or anyone with whom he is in dispute. Seems extremely broad. I've tried to reword it to focus on the key point here, namely "interaction at a personal level".

I also added a fourth item that is often a point of contention. This is the case where an administrator shows by their edits and actions, a strong personal view on the underlying content issue or the action that is to become sanctionable. (This is separate from a strong view on the conduct issue - most administrators will have strong views on disruptive or inappropriate behavior.) For example an administrator who consistently states a pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian view might not be seen as sufficiently neutral by an Israel-Palestine topic area editor, and this could lead to drama. It may be better that editors whose edits show a strong content-related view (but have not been in a dispute) also are not the ones to impose sanctions. If needed other administrators will exist.

Comments on these two? Please re-edit (or remove) if they would not help. FT2 (Talk 11:42, 12 October 2010 (UTC)


 * I agree with FT2 on this. I've seen a lot of different criteria proposed for "Involvement", not least when reading the talk pages of the CC Arbcom case. For me, one of the acid tests is to ask myself, "If I was an editor in the topic area that wanted to eliminate an administrator by making him/her involved, how would I use these criteria to do it?" The criteria currently proposed in this draft (especially number 4) would make it exceptionally easy to make an admin involved against his/her intent. CIreland (talk) 17:55, 12 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Okay, so how do you propose to fix that? There are currently a lot of proposals floating around the wiki, perhaps one of them will be better than what we already have. The Wordsmith Communicate 18:13, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

Whose sanctions?
What's the point in repeating this bullshit over and over? "The community" does not "sanction" anyone. This is all done by a tiny bunch of sysops. You might ban whomever you want and delete whatever you want, what's the point of calling "community" in your private wargames? East of Borschov 09:40, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

Clarification requested on procedure
As written right now, the actual procedure for imposing sanctions on an editor are a little unclear. Specifically, the wording under "Requesting Enforcement" seems to imply that admins can't take action against a user until another editor first reports that user to (PLACEHOLDER). But I don't think that's actually correct--I'm assuming an (uninvolved) admin can step in, warn the user in question, then declare sanctions even if no third party has reported the problem. Perhaps the first sentence of that paragraph could be changed to read: "If an editor fails to uphold reasonable standards of conduct, non-administrators or involved administrators may request that discretionary sanctions be applied to that editor by posting at WP:PLACEHOLDER." Qwyrxian (talk) 01:22, 15 October 2010 (UTC)
 * The idea of it is very similar to Arbitration discretionary sanctions. Any uninvolved admin may place a sanction, but if no admin notices a sanction, that placeholder is intended to be a board where users can go to get administrator attention. Sort of like any admin can block a vandal, but WP:AIV is a place where users can report vandals for admin attention. If you have a better way to word this, I would be open to that. The Wordsmith Communicate 02:30, 15 October 2010 (UTC)

Warning about WP:BOOMERANG
I think it may also be helpful to the following paragraph to "Requesting Enforcement":
 * Please note that any accusations of misconduct that are found to be frivolous or pointy may be considered to themselves be a violation of the general sanctions. Thus, editors should carefully consider the other person's actions before reporting, and only report those that clearly violate the sanctions.

Another way to say that would be something to the effect of,


 * Please note that (the reporting board) may itself be considered a part of the "broadly construed" pages covered by the general sanctions, and so editors acting disruptively there may themselves be subject to discretionary sanctions if their reports are found to be frivolous or pointy.

I'm not really happy with either of these wordings, but I recall this having come up before on ANI (with reference to BISE, I think), where users were sanctioned not because of their work on the articles or the article talk pages, but because of their method of handling the dispute in the official arbitration or adjudication forum. Qwyrxian (talk) 01:22, 15 October 2010 (UTC)
 * That seems like a good idea. I'll try to think of a good way to word it. The Wordsmith Communicate 02:32, 15 October 2010 (UTC)