I don't see that anyone here linked to the ongoing discussion of coverage of the Great Wikiconference Controversy of 2014, on
Talk:List of Wikipedia controversies. (T-H-L). I did cover this in the
Sekrit Member Forum here.
There is a "informal RfC" on the talk page. I like to look at how people vote, and weight the votes by some standard. For example, Wikipedia Rule Number One implies that someone who is truly working to improve the project will Ignore All Rules and will therefore have a substantial block log.
So, first raw votes, from
this permanent link.
Ah, first thing I see is that Kevin Gorman
just combined two separate sections. In other words, he recontexted standing votes. Naughty, naughty. He might be right, i.e., the difference between those sections was obscure, but this is tantamount to changing how people have voted. In fact, Gorman chose the forked title instead of the original oppose section title, which was parallel so that the RfC was really a Yes/No question. MONGO had added the third option. Regardless, voters supported a particular position *as stated*. Gorman has an obvious COI on this issue, very involved, it was his revert warring that caused the protection, he's the last person who should be clerking that RfC, aside from Cla68.
Voting so far, and showing blocks (my analysis), last block, pages edited, total edit count, date of first edit, and advanced permissions, if any:
Support (inclusion)
Alf.laylah.wa.laylah (T-C-L), 0, n.a., 7741, 29003, Jul 01 2011
jbmurray (T-C-L) 1, 17 May 2007, 3546, 19685, May 01 2007, sysop
Cla68 (T-C-L) 9, 5 March 2013, 8646, 46232, Jan 20 2006
Wllm (T-C-L), 0, n.a., 73, 267, Jul 18 2006, WMF ED partner (that is a very advanced permission!)
Everyking (T-C-L), 19, 16 October 2007, 55126, 139,820, Feb 13 2004, sysop
Fylbecatulous (T-C-L), 0, n.a., 8,710, 11,559, Dec 10 2011
Carrite (T-C-L),
Wbm1058 (T-C-L), 0, n.a., 16948, 27933, Apr 13 2011
Neutral
EvergreenFir (T-C-L), 0, n.a., 7585, Feb 18 2013
Opposed
Ktr101 (T-C-L), 2, 23 October 2007, 47025, 94742, Oct 09 2007
Bilby (T-C-L), 0, n.a. 7193, 24452, Mar 27 2007, sysop
Obiwankenobi (T-C-L), 1, 30 September 2013, 8,865, 26,881, Jun 10 2006
MONGO (T-C-L), 8, 12 April 2008, 17,931, 62226, Jan 18, 2005
Drmies (T-C-L), 1, 29 December 2012, 64538, 159660, Aug 30 2007, sysop
Kevin Gorman (T-C-L), 0, n.a., 3841, 10205, Feb 01, 2011, sysop
I just noticed that a user who had been discussing the mess on the Incidents talk page took the matter to AN/I.
Permanent link. I also noticed that Gorman was away. I.e, he was revert warring on the page, was going to leave, so he went to RfPP, to keep the page frozen while he was gone. Nice. (I see that Gorman showed up on AN/I, defending his action. It's still a fact that there were two people revert warring when he went to RfPP and he was one of them. The protecting admin shows up on AN/I and defends his action as well. He doesn't mention that it was a revert warrior who filed the request.
Gorman has a special banner on his Contributions page. Anyone know how he manages that trick?
Kevin Gorman is a campus volunteer for
Environmental Justice: Race, Class, Equity, and the Environment (ESPM 163ac, SOC 137) (course talk) and
Ethnic Studies 21ac: A Comparative Survey of Racial and Ethnic Groups in the U.S. (course talk).
So, right now, someone can look at his contributions, and that is at the top, and below is mostly his revert warring and tendentious argument over Kohs' exclusion from the WikiConference. Nice.
For completeness, that user complaining on AN/I about Alf.laylah.wa.laylah was
Ian.thomson (T-C-L), 1, 2 February 2011, 8,978, 26,025, Oct 15 2006
Apparently Ian is too busy on the drama boards to comment in the RfC. He had done one of the removal reverts in the Great Revert War over the Great Exclusion Debacle of 2014, as had Ktr101, and Tarc, while Alf.laylah, Volunteer Marek, and the content had been added by Wllm, that well-known troll, out to wreck Wikipedia by demonstrating how the place is run by compleat idiots, not only stupid but vicious. Then there were Cla68 and Gorman at 3RR each. Groman is still calling Cla68 a Wikipediocracy "mod." Which I don't think is true. He's a trustee, part of an advisory committee, essentially. I've never seen him take a mod action here. And it's irrelevant.
Gorman is outclassed. His edit count is very low for an administrator, he's missing gravitas. While Alf.laylah has been busy requesting edits under protection, Gorman is complaining about them, while Drmies is busy doing all those edits. Alf.laylah was a heavy editor of that page before this flap. Hey, Gorman, a hint: I'm sure you could collapse all those done requests. Apparently, though, you prefer to complain, a sign of immaturity. Don't want to see edit requests on a Talk page, don't get the page protected!
This is what I see happening. Another reliable source will mention the story, and then all this flap will have been for nothing, because opposition to inclusion will collapse completely. Almost all the opposition is depending on the excuse that
1. The major coverage was in O'Dwyers, published by
J. R. O'Dwyer Company (T-H-L). Supposedly this is not reliable source. I'd disagree. On the issue, public relations, this is an independent for-profit publisher with a reputation to defend. I see no excuse to dismiss this source.
2. The O'Dwyer's article was picked up by New York Magazine, showing notability, but the mention was not deep and the article contained an obvious error.
If there is no more mention, there is an impasse. There are highly experienced editors on both sides of the issue. Some compromise is possible. This is an extension of the old Kohs story which is already on the page, so that might get a sentence. Or not.
Why was this of such interest? Well, Wllm is part of it. But I think that many had some hope that Kohs would be allowed to speak about paid editing. What, exactly, are they afraid of? Learning about paid editing from an expert would surely be of value! (There are many myths about it, such as the idea that paid editing intrinsically violates policy. Kohs is fond of pointing out how silly that is. I've been paid, and I violated no policies, nor did my client. All of my work was creating wikitext and showing the client how she could
satisfy policy. She did it, disclosing her conflict of interest. Last I looked, it worked. (I was paid *after* I was banned.)
(When I was editing before the final blocks, I had declared a conflict of interest on cold fusion and followed policy. What this demonstrated was that following policy was no protection. They did not want to allow me to advise on Talk pages. Hence Koh's position makes complete sense, as long as COI disclosure is not protective.)
Kohs does claim to have many accounts. Is that a violation of policy? Well, he's not disclosing conflict of interest, and that is a violation of policy, not the accounts, per se. That's the way he does business, and it seems to work for him. As Gorman knows, the policy is unworkable, like a lot about Wikipedia. Kohs could not do business openly, so he does it covertly. I've long argued that it's much better to set up conditions that allow people to act openly, so you can make sure no harm is done.
One of the craziest actions I fomented, in the short period when I edited although blocked, was the use of the edit filter to prevent me from identifying my edits, which were being self-reverted "per ban of Abd." Thus I was really making suggested edits. Some of those suggestions were being accepted, reverted back in, and
they couldn't stand that. So they blocked any mention of "Abd" in the edit summary. Then in the edit itself. It caused quite a bit of collateral damage! Abd is a very common Muslim name!
So, banned editor edits, and self-reverts, identifying himself. Now, let's stop him from identifying himself! That makes the game more interesting! Of course, as soon as they had the filter up, I stopped identifying myself, what did they expect I would do? That's when I registered one sock and used it. I wanted to find out how long it would take to be checkusered. I didn't use evasive tactics. It took quite a while and I accomplished a fair amount that stuck. More than before being blocked, in fact.
Let me put it this way. I found it easier to do what I wanted to do, being blocked, than not being blocked and trying to deal with the mass of restrictions that had been created. What stopped me was simply that I developed other interests. Not that I
couldn't do it. Working in the Wikipedia salt mines wasn't worth the effort.