The stewards are firmly in control

[Abd]

Unless something radically shifts, and I'm not holding my breath, the stewards are, or believe that they are, firmly in control of the WMF wikis, and they are not restrained by policy.

I had reported here on a study I was undertaking of steward action. This was not a collection of gripes against stewards. The vast majority of actions studied were at least arguably proper. There were a very few exceptions, almost entirely regarding Vituzzu, but I had not drawn that conclusion, it was simply that the data came up.

I had invited correction of any errors or information about missing data (i.e, if some action *looks bad* but was explainable by missing data, this could be provided or, at least, it could be said that there was a justification -- which any steward could verify --) and I was not warned that there was anything improper about this study.

Yesterday one of the pages was deleted by Vituzzu. It was a list of involved IPs in what I call the "Santarelli" case. There was no data there that was not readily found in public logs. There are similar collections on SSP pages on it.wikipedia, as I recall.

Vituzzu gave a reason: privacy violation. I've seen this before. I was in communication with Daniele Santarelli, who has been accused of being behind various alleged sock puppets, by Vituzzu. The real Santarelli acknowledges certain edits as being his, but denies any other editing. This was consistent with the data I'd seen; the other IPs were not from his location, or, at least, unclear.

Since the data was all from public logs, created by the steward, I requested that Vituzzu email me the data. I did not request undeletion. I also requested that the generally sane global admin PiRSquared17 provide me with the wikitext. I simply didn't want to lose the work, I had saved all the other pages, but not that one. The global admin declined because of the allegation of "privacy violations."

(Some of these pages represented weeks of research, and the vast, vast bulk of it was just there for completeness.)

Today, the steward Billinghurst dropped onto my talk page. This was the conversation:

What the hell are you up to?

Do I see a similarity to Don Quixote here? You seem to be running around picking fault and analysing action of stewards for no bigger purpose than to either pick a fight, or to prove a contentious point? Or is it to just be troublesome? I am not seeing any particular benefits. What ultimately do you think that you will achieve by such an analysis? What do you think is likely to be the result of nitpicking analysis?  — [[user:billinghurst|billinghurst]] 15:07, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

:I have deleted all that rubbish, any further attempt to provoke people and/or engaging in collecting informations about actions without consent will lead to an immediate and definitive block on this wiki. --[[User:M7|M/]] 15:50, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

::(edit conflict with above) Billinghurst, my view is that we cannot design policy and assess performance without study of what is actually done. You have stated that review is welcome. That's what I'm doing. It is not "nitpicking," it is presentation and analysis of actual steward behavior. In a very few cases, I report behavior that might be questionable. In many more cases, I report behavior that may not be covered by policy, but where, easily, policy may need extension to cover the relevant situations.

::Can you give me an example of the specific "fault picked"?

::M7, I am accordingly, ceasing the study here, pending an appeal of the deletion. Thank you for making the matter completely clear. --[[User:Abd|Abd]] ([[User talk:Abd#top|talk]]) 16:02, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

:::I will block you if you just "ask" for undeletion. Is that clear? --[[User:M7|M/]] ([[User talk:M7|talk]]) 16:07, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

::::Again, thanks for being clear. It is quite useful. --[[User:Abd|Abd]] ([[User talk:Abd#top|talk]]) 16:10, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

DanielTom dropped by after this with a comment that could get him blocked, unfortunately.

It is very, very clear: it is not allowed to review steward behavior. Not even if the goal is to improve policy. Even worse is criticism of steward actions.

I had examined something on the order of 6000 steward actions. Only a handful were seriously questionable. There had been errors that the stewards promptly corrected. But there were still some quite remarkable actions by one steward, and they are obviously protecting him.

The deletion log, while it still exists. Notice that M7 deleted and Barras restored "for suppression." Whether or not the log remains after suppression, I don't know.

Now, the deletion reason given for the one page mentioned was privacy. However, the full study was deleted with this reason:

(Mass deletion of pages intended to harass/provoke other people, with many collateral damages.)

It is quite unusual to request revision suppression for pages "intended to harass/provoke" unless the pages include seriously offensive language. It can be argued that the pages contained data that could be used to identify a person real-world, but the only known person in that category was very aware of the study and was consenting to it.

The actual identification was made by the steward whose action was documented. And it was incorrect. And, I assume, still stands in the logs and edit histories as documented.

No, this is totally obvious. The pages had existed for weeks, they were announced on the Forum (seeking participation and correction), and there had been no warning on my talk page or serious objection. One of the pages deleted was a Talk page with friendly comment by a steward whose actions had been described on the attached page, and a global sysop, as I recall.

No, at least one or two stewards realized that this data showed abuse as the community would agree if it is brought to them. I had seen this early on, and began the study because of two incidents I'd seen, both involving the same steward. As the study proceeded, data collection was, I recognized, warped toward collection of data on that steward. Seeing this as a problem, I made the study generic. That study actually showed that the vast majority of steward actions, as far as I'd gotten with review, were at least arguably proper.

I had not come to the point of a consideration of the specific steward. I'd started by looking at Billinghurst's actions within the 5000 studied first. That's because Billinghurst was the most active steward, only one other steward even approached his lock count. There was no claim that Billinghurst had done anything improper.

There is some routine action that is clearly well beyond what was contemplated when lock policy was originally written and discussed, but it can easily be argued that this is *necessary*. But the nature of global locks is such that, when action goes well beyond that original intention, as expressed in policy, restraints or protocols become necessary.

Stewards do not want any restraint, obviously, and the only steward where I saw a *pattern of abuse* had explicitly complained about being impatient with policy. However, this might not have made it into the final draft. I was not planning on filing an RfC on Vituzzu. The plan was to propose policy changes, and RfC only if needed, and not to focus on some alleged Bad Guy.

Anyway, without community support, this is totally dead. Billinghurst has mentioned that the issues I was addressing are covered by the Ombudsman Committee.

That is preposterous. The Ombusdman Committee does not have the labor to do the kind of study I was doing. They would review *specific cases*. No, what is needed is policy review, and that is the purview of the community.

I'll go to the Committee, I assume at this point, but only to deal with the massive page deletion, the threat to block me if I merely request deletion according to standard procedure, and suppression, if that is done.

These were abuse of tools, as serious or worse than anything I'd collected, and certainly more obvious.

If Wikipediocracy wants the page texts, let me know. I have most of it.

(What I'd seen in the past was that Vituzzu was the most abusive steward, by far, with his actions being reversed by other stewards, on occasion, while he continued to complain (and even continued to lock after his actions were reversed). But, then, M7, several times, was the first to jump in, in discussions on-wiki, with reinforcement of Vituzzu's actions as "obvious" and any questioning of them as disruptive. M7 also revealed that while there was no on-wiki discussion on a matter I took to stewards, there were hundreds of emails between stewards. Now, stewards are allowed to communicate off-wiki because of privacy issues. However, off-wiki decision-making is obviously being done far outside that necessity.

Vituzzu and M7 are both Italian administrators as well as stewards. And the massive cross-wiki disruption I had seen originated with that wiki. Basically, I saw a quick-to-indef block, which commonly can lead to sock puppetry, as a naive user is completely outraged by the insanity of it all. Then escalation to global locks, by Vituzzu, merely based on *editing elsewhere* without disruption, then more sock puppetry as the user attempts to circumvent this, and the rest of the community, not realizing what has happened and not understanding, then blocks the user for "sock puppetry" or "block evasion" -- even where the user wasn't blocked locally, and then anyone looking at the CentralAuth pages sees blocks on multiple wikis, hey, this must be a really disruptive user! He really shouldn't be socking, right?

(Yet I found explicit statement by a steward that the registration of alternate accounts globally is not contrary to policy, and discussions where it is claimed that global locks are not global bans have explicitly said that users are free to create new accounts if locked, as long as they don't repeat "disruption." But what is being seen, constantly, is that alternate accounts are being blocked on sight. Usually that is because of a plausible claim of intention to run a spambot, the accounts are sleepers, but .... this usage creates a huge number of locks, and problematic locks are then hidden within a landslide, unless someone actually studies the flow. (Or attacks a specific steward, and specific actions, which is then vulnerable to a claim of "cherry-picking")

That indef/sock/massive blocks/locks sequence, as far as I have seen, *exactly what happened* in the Santarelli case. And what appears to be a major academic source, independently published, academically edited, on heresy in the early modern Catholic Church was, of course, unilaterally blacklisted by ... Vituzzu, probably because Santarelli is the appointed managing editor. Along with all of Santarelli's books being removed from bibliographies as "cross-wiki spam." And Vituzzu revert warring with local users over it and threatening to use steward tools to get his way. Vituzzu's actions explicitly claim that the books were spammed by the author, and that, then, outs the editors who placed the links, or attempts to. So he is covering up his own privacy violations.

And in one case, Vituzzu actually locked a user who had revert warred with him (and Vituzzu had reverted others besides that user, and the user was merely removing a speedy deletion template Vituzzu had placed. This was on en.wikipedia, and also on nl.wiki, so the user was following policy and Vituzzu was violating it.)

However, I was very careful with those pages, as they evolved, to take the focus off of Vituzzu and onto actual steward behavior, overall.

What this was doing, though, was leading to a situation where Vituzzu's actions would stand out like a sore thumb.

So what are they doing? Why are they protecting Vituzzu? It is what communities do, they protect their own. If dissent in the steward community appears, it can reduce confidence in the entire concept of stewardship. There is nothing surprising about this, but there is nothing surprising about death, either.

This is where communities go if there is not constant vigilance. The "leaders" take over. Organizations ultimately are weakened and often fail as a result.

Billinghurst was handling the vast bulk of global account locks in the last 5000 locks in 2013. Basically, what happens as a few individuals take on a massive work load, is that they are led to "own" the process. The logs only showed a tiny fraction of the work that Billinghurst had to do to identify all those real or alleged "spambots" without any edits.

Vituzzu actually had relatively few actions, comparatively, that surprised me. That makes the relatively large numbers of questionable actions much more significant.

Wikipedia has a huge torrent of spam coming in at all times. Yet it does not allow the kinds of actions that stewards are routinely taking globally. These actions are made necessary by the community leaving this work to stewards, instead of the work being spread out over a much larger community. It's a structural issue that leads to ownership and burnout.

And they shoot the messenger.

[Abd]

They are not bothering with any appearance of neutrality, any nod to recusal requirements. It's gotten worse than the day when Marco Aurelio, instead of blocking me, went to the admin request page with his request that I be blocked with a laundry list of complaints that were not supported by the diffs he gave. WizardOfOz blocked me immediately, without any opportunity to respond, and it was Vituzzu who denied the unblock request with a completely weird reason, as if I'd previously requested unblock. I'd forgotten that, but in discussions over the Augusto De Luca case, Vituzzu claimed I was holding a grudge from it. That is how they think. To them, it's all personal.

So DanielTom was just blocked by M7, for a comment on my Talk page. I knew this was very possible, that someone would block him, I winced when I saw the comment, and deleted it. However, I did not expect that the block would come from the stewards/administrators actually "attacked." This is what DanielTom had written, immediately after what I quoted above:

These guys give Italians a bad name. ~ [[User:DanielTom|DanielTom]] ([[User talk:DanielTom|talk]]) 16:20, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

DanielTom's block log. What can be seen is that DanielTom, most recently before this, was blocked by Vituzzu (that was over a relatively mild comment on Steward requests/Global, a bit of sarcasm, responding to my request, "you don't expect that stewards follow policy, do you?" or something like that. Of course, DanielTom was right: they don't follow policy. Le WMF wiki community, c'est nous.

So this comment was now specifically about M7 and Vituzzu, the Italian stewards involved in that massive page deletion.

DanielTom's comment was uncivil. But the pattern was obvious, in fact. Those two stewards give "it.wiki" a bad name. It is no longer possible to call a spade a spade on meta, if one is not a steward or some other super-user. Stewards, including M7 and Vituzzu, routinely attack ordinary users as this or that, the favorite claim is "self-promotion," as if all self-promotion is contrary to policy, and they have certainly attacked me.

And when they block for named conflict of interest, they are outing, obviously. What they are doing is exercising very strong Obey My Authority control, which, unfortunately, I suspect, is correlated in DanielTom's mind with certain Italian history.

This is how wiki neutrality is lost. There are "house points of view," as mentioned in a recent essay here. These points of view are unofficial, generally, but they are easily discernable in the patterns of actions. What happens is that actions that are acceptable from the house point of view are, at most, discouraged, often not even reprimanded, but actions unacceptable from the house point of view meet with severe and quick consequences. So, gradually, over time, dissent from the house point of view is removed, blocked, and what is left comes to be thought of as "consensus."

The basic house point of view, on meta, is that stewards can do no wrong. That anyone who criticizes stewards is, ipso facto, disruptive. And even examining steward actions is, apparently, prohibited. And even questioning the deletion of allegedly critical pages, requesting undeletion, is prohibited. Period. Unilaterally, no community discussion.

DanielTom's talk page access was shut off, but he still has email.

It was obvious in Vituzzu's confirmation election. I was concerned about his block of DanielTom, it was extreme for what Tom had actually written. I voiced that concern, and Vituzzu then threatened to block me. That was taken to the election page. It had a tiny effect. Who actually pays attention before voting? Who reads all the comments that came before and checks diffs?

No, this is what happens on wikis: most users will assume that a negative comment is personally motivated, sour grapes. I've seen this for many years, on-line, it goes way back before Wikipedia, to the W.E.L.L. where I saw what I thought of as, then, a strange reluctance to actually look at the record, which, for the first time in contentious discussions, was entirely available.

Few will do the reading and verification. Rather, it seems to be assumed that as a steward, Vituzzu is doing all this valuable work. That may be a false assumption. It's entirely unclear, certainly he is not the tireless cross-wiki worker, rooting out spam, that he's been understood to be (and that I expected him to be, I thought his problematic actions would be rare exceptions). Way too many of his actions, to the contrary, seems obviously motivated outside of policy.

But he is allowed to do this, and there are only two communities that can restrain him, and with the immediate action today, only one of these is left: the other stewards. They appear seriously, so far, disinclined to even allow the compilation of evidence, that would allow the compilation of neutral summaries, that would then make it possible to assess the situation objectively.

It is worse than I expected. Maybe someone will pull a rabbit out of the hat, but I'm not holding my breath. Unless I see a rabbit, I'm treating the WMF family of wikis as largely lost, unsafe, and this has consequences.

I've been inviting notable scientists and academics to Wikiversity. I'm not quite abandoning that project, but it just got a lot shakier, because the stewards can and have reached into individual wiki business.

DanielTom's block reason was preposterous. Nobody was harassed. However, that's a technical point, and it only shows how incautious these stewards are. They don't care.

And I'm not bringing all of this up on-wiki, unless specifically requested by someone who will assure me of at least some level of protection, some support. It would be a stupid waste of time, it would actually be the tilting at windmills that Billinghurst imagined.

I had requested participation in the study. None showed up. That's telling. It was much more vulnerable because of this. It would have been easy.

No, the community is largely dead. When I realized that on Wikiversity, I abandoned it for almost two years, until an admin finally asked me if I still wanted unblock.

There is no support of or protection of whistle-blowers, one of the most basic necessities in true collaborative communities. Wikipedia is a fake collaborative community, with a pretense of being open equally to everyone. No. Not. It used to be that the global community was more open. Maybe it still is, but it's radically unsafe. If you offend certain stewards, they can and will globally lock, and they actively suppress appeal. That, again, was shown in the deleted material. I did not expect to find this, it was a surprise.

The stewards obviously discuss all this privately. Their agenda does not include transparency or responsibility to the community, that's become totally obvious. There are individual stewards who behave in the old fashion, but they do not act against those who use the tools for their own agendas. Appeal is quickly shut down, discussion is not allowed.

[Kiefer.Wolfowitz]

https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Abd&diff=prev&oldid=8639100
These guys give Italians a bad name. ~DanielTom (T-C-L) 16:20, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

Blocked
Such comments qualify you for other projects. Not this.
Ciao, --M/ (talk) 16:33, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

Hi DanielTom!
Your block is discussed at Wikipediocracy.
Your statement could have been about "WMF stewards" rather than "Italians", but I'd have advised you not to save even a revised statement after typing it. What good would it do? I'd have liked to think that you would have given an opportunity to apologize and resume contributing in short order.
All hands on deck to speed the Wikipedia movement and its vanguard WMF towards The Yawning Heights (T-H-L) & The Radiant Future of freikultur!
Best regards, Kiefer.Wolfowitz (T-C-L) 19:27, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php? ... id=8639222

[Zoloft]

I find this fascinating, and appalling.
It's an excellent and tragic example of poor governance.

[Hex]

See also: :meta:Requests for comment/Global ban for DanielTom (T-H-L)

[Kumioko]

Wow that was a lot to read but great post. I would also point out that with the new privacy policy being imposed by the WMF, the Admins and functionaries including the Stewards will be exempted from it. Behold the Wiki Wild West is upon us all.

[Abd]

I find this fascinating, and appalling.
It's an excellent and tragic example of poor governance.

It's an opportunity, but I'm not convinced there is anyone in position and willing to take the opportunity and the associated risks. I took a risk compiling that data, I knew that, and I was willing to take the risk in the name of transparency and the possibility of actual community governance -- through improvement and clarification of policy. (Which would only consequentially lead to sanctions against, say, a particular steward, down the road, if the steward continued to violate policy)

The goal was not, at all, to make the stewards' jobs more difficult. Sound policy would make their jobs easier. I saw a great deal in collecting that data.

For example, I now know, pretty well, how to set up massive cross-wiki disruption, because I can readily see how it's detected. As to real, serious spam, my guess is that they aren't detecting it until it's up, and even less conflict of interest editing. They are only catching the naive and relatively clueless.

I have done studies like this many times in my life. Before on-line discussion, I have taken an audio tape of a contentious discussion and transcribed the whole thing, studying how conflict presented and was resolved. One of the things I learned there was that *my own memory* was defective. What actually had happened was different than what I thought.

And this very much bites the Wikipedia community. They do *not* generally remember what actually happened but the impact it had on them, the judgments that they formed. Few actually will look at evidence and attempt to understand it, much less verify it. So they reject evidence that does not confirm to their expectations, and accept evidence that confirms expectations, and that's that. They vote based on these impressions, it is quite obvious, and this has been consistent since the beginning of the encylopedia project.

There is no study of actual performance. There is no responsibility, as there would be with any ordinary for-profit organization and many nonprofits. These all lead to *inefficiency.* So, then, they are overworked, and become even more likely to err.

This answer from Vituzzu was great:

request for copy of page you deleted

User:Abd/Antispam practices/Santarelli/IP addresses

While I do not believe there was any violation of privacy policy there, I do not need to keep that evidence on-wiki; however, while I generally have copies off-wiki, that particular page I do not have, and would thus need to recompile it. (Everything on the page would have come from public logs, so I can recompile it, it's simply extra work.) Would you mind emailing me the wikitext? If it has been suppressed, please let me know so that I can request a copy from an oversighter.

I am in communication with the real Daniele Santarelli, that is, the professor, the published author, and the managing editor of ereticopedia. Most of the IP that would have been listed on that page was not his. Some clearly was, and it can be distinguished. A few examples are possible, but unlikely.

Thanks. --Abd (talk) 11:45, 23 May 2014 (UTC)

I won't give out any information violating the privacy of any user. Meanwhile you must avoid defaming users as you are implicitly doing. Also you should asap stop posting posting private information here and at en.wikiversity even if the relevant legal responsibility are, anyway, yours. We evaluate behaviours of accounts catching violations of our TOS all other implications are simply completely irrelevant. --Vituzzu (talk) 15:12, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for response, Vituzzu. TOS violation is a serious charge. Can you point to a specific example of any TOS violation so that I may correct it? To my knowledge, I have not posted any private information, but only what is found in public logs, often with names concealed -- even though that is not actually required. If I have erred, of course I want to know. --Abd (talk) 19:21, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

I'm not holding my breath for any supplied evidence. I'm particularly concerned about the Wikiversity comment.

During the compilation of this study, I wrote many times the goal and purpose of the study, and the procedure. I solicited participation on the Forum (and here). This was transparent. I've seen this before, that stewards will decline to release data to the user who presented the data in the first place, claiming that privacy policy prohibits it. So Vituzzu is not the first. However, I have almost all that data, and I've seen no sign, so far, that the original logs are being suppressed. In other words, Vituzzu is acting against the collection of data that can *exonerate* a user, with no new accusations or outing. Rather, he must think that the pages are defaming users, i.e., stewards. This, of course, would define any on-wiki report as to admin behavior as "defamation." Even if there are no accusations, just the links.

I've been through all this before, it preceded my two ArbCom cases on Wikipedia. I had compiled information about JzG and his faction assumed that it was cherry-picked and full of biased comments. Their response set up the Arbitration that followed, where an arbitrator, God bless him, compiled the *same evidence* using a script. No, I had not cherry-picked the data, and what they thought were my outrageous comments were JzG's own comments, on-wiki.

The study began with a focus on some specific incidents, and was, because of my particular experience, mostly an examination of Vituzzu's action. I considered that a defect, because of lacking context. What is normal steward behavior? So I began compiling that, going over the last 5000 lock actions in 2013. I did not seek to select out Vituzzu actions. However, what I looked at was unlocks, because it was a manageable number. Who had the most reversed locks, reversed by another steward, not the locking steward? It stands out, the number for Vituzzu was, I think, two, in that period, and none for any other steward. However, I hadn't pointed this out, it's simply in the data.

Then, the steward with the most actions in that period was examined, and my plan was to go down the list, in order of number of actions. Vituzzu is way down that list, this is it:

*Billinghurst 1675 - 15 unlocks, [[/Billinghurst|study]]
*Trijnstel 1129 - 2 unlocks, [[/Trijnstel|study]]
*Bsadowski1 399 - 33 unlocks
*Mathonius 280
*Tegel 278 - 2 unlocks
*J.delanoy 159 - 1 unlock
*Teles 130 - 1 unlock
*DerHexer 117
*Shizhao 114 - 4 unlocks
*Barras 113
*MF-Warburg 90 - 8 unlocks
*Vituzzu 88 - 2 unlocks
*Elfix 82
*Matanya 68
*QuiteUnusual 46
*Mentifisto 29
*Jyothis 19
*Snowolf 16
*Wpedzich 16 - 1 unlock
*Mardetanha 7
*Amqui 5
*Thogo 4
*Bennylin 1
*M7 1
*Pundit 0 - 1 unlock
*office actions:
:*Jalexander 3
:*Jtrias (WMF) 1
:*JTrias (WMF) 7

It's obvious: the bulk of the locking, which is almost entirely antispam, is being done by Billinghurst, and I'd started the Billiinghurst study subpage. What was there was in no way critical, and the only problem I saw there had already become obvious to me: Stewards are very likely identifying "spambots" using checkuser on registration, possibly through loginwiki. The other possibility is that something about the names identifies them, and that is quite unlikely. Many of their names are indistiguishable from ordinary editor names. It's a "problem" only because this was not contemplated in lock policy.

As I had noted already in the study, in a comment (comments were signed), the real problem is a clumsy and inflexible lock tool. It has long been wanted that there would be global named account blocks, like the present global IP blocks. Account locking is massively offensive, if done with a legitimate user, and two cases of that showed up in the record, they happened to know how to appeal! Most would not. The global lock simply causes login failure, WMF-wide. Users cannot access their watchlists, cannot shut down or set up email and email notification. Fixing this, alone, might handle a great deal of the residual error rate.

I don't know what the error rate is, the study had not proceeded to identify possible errors, and it is highly unlikely to be possible to be complete about that, if I am correct that the stewards are relying on checkuser data *for accounts with no edits.* However, the extent to which this happens as a possibility can be documented.

Nothing on the Billinghurst page criticized him, at all.

Some of the early study pages, standing for a long time, could be considered critical, though I think I was pretty careful. Still, that data was collected with a bias. I.e., I saw a problem action by Vituzzu, then started looking for similar actions. Vituzzu was removing references to Santarelli books (published by an academic press, these were actually Reliable Source for the articles, where they had been listed in bibliographies), and he was doing that cross-wiki. To find them, I had to look on various wikis for Vituzzu edits. I found a lot.

But this would be grist for an RfC/Vituzzu, and I made it clear that it was not my plan to file that. My understanding is that the wiki problem is not the result of Bad Users, but a weak and dysfunctional community. If the community could strengthen and clarify policy, with the stewards participating from their point of view, all would benefit. If we were to get rid of one Bad Steward, if we thought he was that, a lot of work for no real gain.

Of course, if policy was clarified and confirmed, and Vituzzu -- or any steward -- continued to violate clarified and confirmed policy, my expectation is that the other stewards, the ones who mostly remain silent now, would, with clear community support, act.

This would not be a result of my action. My hope was only to clarify and confirm -- or change -- policy.

I loved the concept of "implicit defamation." I.e, if I say that "steward X did Y and Z," and show diffs showing that steward X actually did Y and Z, -- *no interpretation saying that Y and Z are Bad -- this is "defamation"?

It could be argued that data has been cherry-picked, but it would still be data showing a problem, if it is "defamation." This position completely disallows any study of behavior at all. So, for example, when Vituzzu comes up for reconfirmation, having a study of his actual behavior, information the community would need to assess the wisdom of confirmation, is completely unacceptable.

This has all be debated many times by the community, particularly on Wikipedia. Vituzzu's position on this is completely bankrupt, but ... it is being supported by M7 (no surprise there) and Billinghurst. I must say that I have been very disappointed by Billinghurst in recent events. I was compiling data that could be used in an RfC *at his invitation.* He had said that Steward requests/global was not a place to debate policy, and he suggested RfC, and he explicitly said that review of actions, I forget the exact language, was welcome.

It looks like, very much, it is not welcome. Was he lying? I doubt it. I think he believed his own rhetoric, he said "the proper thing to say." People do this all the time. The fact is, nevertheless, that in an actual case, civil review of actions was very much not welcome, and he was part of that, he obviously supports the actions suppression. He did *not* delete or suppress the pages, but he mischaracterized them, setting the stage for M7 to delete all of them and Barras to handle suppression.

So, it's great. From a complex study, a huge pile of data, there is now a small set of pages deleted as being attack pages, effectively. That is far easer to review.

When I took William M. Connolley to ArbCom, the case was quite complex, there was a huge history to detail, and it was hard to see through the barrage of data. However, when WMC blocked me during the case, because I openly withdrew from my *voluntary cooperation* with his unilateral ban, which was the very subject of the filing, and then made a harmless edit, all hell broke loose. They talked about immediate desysop, but ArbCom is really, really reluctant to desysop popular administrators. In the end, it was all too obvious, and he was desysopped. If not for that block, it would have been much more difficult.

Even though I knew that it was possible or likely he would block me, when I defied his ban (with one day notice!, my goal was not to desysop him. It was to clarify policy, same as in this case. WMC was violating policy, and, in fact, that case clarified policy in quite the direction I had urged. But they also shot the messenger, and failed to address the underlying problem, factional editing with administrators involved, so they have faced this problem again and again, with, each time, very weak response. Then everyone is surprised when the problem reappears. The blame the factions, instead of taking responsibility for failure to provide clear and enforced guidance4. Sanctioning an editor or administrator is easy, it's just a button push. Dealing with factional editing is a difficult problem, they absolutely did not want to face it.

It would not be difficult, in concept, but the factions would scream bloody murder, and ArbCom has shown, many times, that it cannot face heavily expressed disapproval. They have little or no courage. I knew an arb that was willing to look at this, and he was threatened with harm to his family, off-wiki. He decided that it wasn't worth it and retired. I have no idea what the issue was that he was threatened over, I think may have just been "resign or else."

There is a very dark side to the WMF and "the community." That side is inevitable from human nature, given the wiki structure that was set up. It will take something new, something currently missing, to address the neutrality problem and return to the original concept of genuine consensus.

[Abd]

Wow that was a lot to read but great post. I would also point out that with the new privacy policy being imposed by the WMF, the Admins and functionaries including the Stewards will be exempted from it. Behold the Wiki Wild West is upon us all.

Thanks, Kumioko. This is another aspect of the problem: until a user is directly impacted by abusive administration, the tendency is to avoid the issue, to assume that it is just because "those editors cannot get along." So the factions pick off one editor at a time, usually, or small, defenseless groups, and if someone has confronted a faction, that editor is quickly identified as a "trouble-maker," not "collaborative," even if that would not be sustained as a judgment by careful review. And this process rolls on for years, accumulating a vast residue of people out there who are convinced, from personal experience or the experience of someone they know, that Wikipedia is radically unfair, arbitrary, and vicious. Meanwhile, most editors have never encountered the situation. Since things are working fine for them, they easily assume that the system is just fine, the problem is just a few bad eggs. Until it hits them

I have seen editors who worked for years with no problem, then ran into abuse and went completely bonkers. They were completely outraged, expressed that, and then, of course, were quickly blocked for incivility.

They had read the policies and expected the policies to be enforced. I was totally naive when I confronted Fritzpoll over his transmission of a non-ban to a user as a ban. I assumed that, why, of course, he would immediately recognise the problem and revise his action. He didn't. Later, in fact, he said that it was all a misunderstanding, that he was impaired then, dealing with real-life stress, and he became a very good friend, including after his election to ArbCom. But his election was useless in terms of helping me. He, and any other arbitrator who had been helpful, recused, leaving behind arbitrators who were, in fact, biased in the other direction. It was all bad process design, a failure to understand how a *representative* ArbCom would function.

The supermajority election process used for administrators and arbitrators is known, to voting systems experts, to produce highly warped representation, it suppresses minorities. It made some sense in a very small community with very high cooperation. It was quickly obsolete.

[thekohser]

Today I learned that "Daniele" is sometimes a man's name!

Also, I am mentally unable to read Abd's long posts, for some reason. I don't know if it's how he breaks up content into 3-sentence paragraphs, or whether it's how he introduces topics like "There were a very few exceptions, almost entirely regarding Vituzzu", as if we all know who or what "Vituzzu" is. However, I see that others are finding his analysis insightful; so, could I ask someone to write up a 5-sentence summary of what his two lengthy posts are all about?

[Peter Damian]

Today I learned that "Daniele" is sometimes a man's name!

Also, I am mentally unable to read Abd's long posts, for some reason. I don't know if it's how he breaks up content into 3-sentence paragraphs, or whether it's how he introduces topics like "There were a very few exceptions, almost entirely regarding Vituzzu", as if we all know who or what "Vituzzu" is. However, I see that others are finding his analysis insightful; so, could I ask someone to write up a 5-sentence summary of what his two lengthy posts are all about?

I too have the same difficulty. However the following sentences seemed to make some sense:

The bulk of the locking, which is almost entirely antispam, is being done by Billinghurst

From a complex study, a huge pile of data, there is now a small set of pages deleted as being attack pages, effectively. That is far easer to review.

My understanding is that the wiki problem is not the result of Bad Users, but a weak and dysfunctional community.

My hope was only to clarify and confirm -- or change -- policy.

Sanctioning an editor or administrator is easy, it's just a button push. Dealing with factional editing is a difficult problem.

There is a very dark side to the WMF and "the community."

[Abd]

Today I learned that "Daniele" is sometimes a man's name!

Yup. He's Italian, and claims it is a common name.

Also, I am mentally unable to read Abd's long posts, for some reason. I don't know if it's how he breaks up content into 3-sentence paragraphs, or whether it's how he introduces topics like "There were a very few exceptions, almost entirely regarding Vituzzu", as if we all know who or what "Vituzzu" is. However, I see that others are finding his analysis insightful; so, could I ask someone to write up a 5-sentence summary of what his two lengthy posts are all about?

Okay, I was writing about a study of steward behavior, and said that almost all the actions were proper or at least seemed reasonable. Then I wrote that. Perhaps I should have written, "the steward Vituzzu."

I will separately summarize what this is about. However, the title of this thread is a summary. The stewards are firmly in control, and they don't want the community to even be aware of what they do, and they will use their steward tools to prevent the examination, at last on-wiki. Even when it is done very carefully. And they will block anyone who stands up to them, even if what that user does is fully within policy. Such as requesting the undeletion of a page.

Ah, yes, they will make up a reason for the block, such as "violating privacy policy," and, of course, since they have not only deleted the material, but *suppressed it*, not even admins can check what they say. Frankly, I don't think they even read it. It was voluminous, it was study notes, not a final report, it was collected data, lots and lots of it. They took one look and assumed that this was attack.

They claim to be protecting users' privacy, but there is only one person in that pile of data whose privacy is compromised. Yes, his name is Daniele Santarelli.

I am working with him in connection with a project he manages, ereticopedia.org. No, it's not a porn site. "eretic" is Italian for "heretic," and he's an academic and the site, owned by an academic publisher, qualifies, my opinion, as reliable source for a host of encyclopedia articles.

I did not out him, Vituzzu did. It was the first thing I saw, weeks ago. Vituzzu had gone cross-wiki to remove references to Santarelli's books, claiming "self-promotion." Well, that would imply that Santarelli had added the references, right? So I opened the can, and worm after worm crawled out. This is a loose-cannon steward, supported by another loose cannon, M7, and at least tolerated by the rest of the steward community. I'd taken two abusive actions to the relevant request pages. Not fun. They are not about to review the actions of a steward based on a report I file, not matter how clear it is, and no matter how clear the policy issues are.

Vituzzu appears to be incorrect. Santarelli did not add the references to his books. The first page deleted (by Vituzzu), was about the involved IP addresses, and it was showing, as I recall, that nearly all the IP editing connected with the case was not Santarelli. I did have the advantage of knowing Santarelli's actual IP, where he lives and his school, but I also confirmed all this with public data.

[Abd]

Wow! Some comment appeared from a very unexpected source:
Ottava Rima on User talk:M7.

This is about what came down on my own Talk page:
outrage from Billinghurst and then threats of block from M7.

DanielTom was blocked by M7 for the following comment, which referred to the two Italian stewards, Vituzzu and him.

Do I see a similarity to Don Quixote here? You seem to be running around picking fault and analysing action of stewards for no bigger purpose than to either pick a fight, or to prove a contentious point? Or is it to just be troublesome? I am not seeing any particular benefits. What ultimately do you think that you will achieve by such an analysis? What do you think is likely to be the result of nitpicking analysis? — billinghurst sDrewth 15:07, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

I have deleted all that rubbish, any further attempt to provoke people and/or engaging in collecting informations about actions without consent will lead to an immediate and definitive block on this wiki. --M/ (talk) 15:50, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

(edit conflict with above) Billinghurst, my view is that we cannot design policy and assess performance without study of what is actually done. You have stated that review is welcome. That's what I'm doing. It is not "nitpicking," it is presentation and analysis of actual steward behavior. In a very few cases, I report behavior that might be questionable. In many more cases, I report behavior that may not be covered by policy, but where, easily, policy may need extension to cover the relevant situations.

Can you give me an example of the specific "fault picked"?

M7, I am accordingly, ceasing the study here, pending an appeal of the deletion. Thank you for making the matter completely clear. --Abd (talk) 16:02, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

I will block you if you just "ask" for undeletion. Is that clear? --M/ (talk) 16:07, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

Again, thanks for being clear. It is quite useful. --Abd (talk) 16:10, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

These guys give Italians a bad name. ~ DanielTom (talk) 16:20, 24 May 2014(UTC)

I removed DanielTom's comment, though it was pretty funny. He was blocked anyway.

So Ottava dove in.

He filed an admin action request. Nemobis deleted it. Restored by Ottava, Billinghurst closed it. Basically, meta is the only place where review of steward behavior is clearly appropriate, but it is not being allowed. There are some signs of discontent over this. I'm suspecting that, behind the scenes, Billinghurst is trying to talk some sense into M7, but that's just a guess.

What I found, dealing with these stewards, was that they had no clue about normal wiki editing. M7 actually seems to think that something was wrong with Ottava removing those comments from his talk page.

Elsewhere, I saw a steward -- it was Vituzzu -- revert warring over the removal of a speedy deletion tag on enwiki and nlwiki, that he'd placed. He claimed that only an admin should remove it.

I saw M7 and Vituzzu make issues personal, if an action was questioned, it was, "you are just trying to annoy me" or "you resent my denial of your meta unblock request" (I had completely forgotten about it.)

M7, of course, refers to Ottava Rima's block log. "problematic user." Argumentum ad hominem.

Yet these users, ignorant about normal process on the largest wiki, have the highest level of privilege on WMF wikis, and they do not hesitate to use their tools when involved. How did that happen? It's pretty clear, in fact, but who looks at these things?

[Poetlister]

Today I learned that "Daniele" is sometimes a man's name!

Indeed, one of my favourite authors. link As a female name, it should have a double l.

[thekohser]

As a female name, it should have a double l.

You're saying that Daniele Suzuki (T-H-L), Daniele Hypólito (T-H-L), Daniele Gaither (T-H-L), Daniele Alexander (T-H-L), Daniele Laumann (T-H-L), and Daniele Vidal (T-H-L) had illiterate parents?

[Flameau]

As a female name, it should have a double l.

You're saying that Daniele Suzuki (T-H-L), Daniele Hypólito (T-H-L), Daniele Gaither (T-H-L), Daniele Alexander (T-H-L), Daniele Laumann (T-H-L), and Daniele Vidal (T-H-L) had illiterate parents?

Isn't this along the lines of "Just be thankful your parents didn't name you Le-a and pronounce it "Ledasha" because "the dash don't be silent"?

[tarantino]

Wow! Some comment appeared from a very unexpected source:
Ottava Rima on User talk:M7.

This is about what came down on my own Talk page:
outrage from Billinghurst and then threats of block from M7.

DanielTom was blocked by M7 for the following comment, which referred to the two Italian stewards, Vituzzu and him.

M7 is one of the founding members of wikimedia Italia, and the technical contact for the wikimedia.it domain.

[Abd]

Wow! Some comment appeared from a very unexpected source:
Ottava Rima on User talk:M7.

This is about what came down on my own Talk page:
outrage from Billinghurst and then threats of block from M7.

DanielTom was blocked by M7 for the following comment, which referred to the two Italian stewards, Vituzzu and him.

M7 is one of the founding members of wikimedia Italia, and the technical contact for the wikimedia.it domain.

Yup. He is also on the Obmudsman Commission. I remember when Lar resigned as a steward because he was accepting a position on the Ombudsman commission. Apparently it is no longer considered a problem that the commission that reviews complaints about checkuser abuse, includes stewards.

I was told on meta to take my issue with the page deletoins to the Ombudsman Commission, but it does not appear to be within their remit, and I have no confidence that what I send would be confidential, that it would not be disclosed to M7.

What I've seen from M7 has been a series of very weird comments, often suggesting that his understanding of English is very poor. But he's quite definite that he is in charge, and any opposition will be dealt with severely. And he intrerprets any investigation of what stewards actually do as "opposition." After all, if one doesn't believe there is abuse, who would investigate, who would put all that work into reviewing those miserable logs, would compile the 5000 locks issued by steward in roughly 3 months at the end of 2013.

I explained many times, like at the top of the top-level user page they deleted, that the goal was to observe existing practice, and to compare it with policy, not to claim that existing practice was "wrong," for policy might need improvement.

So did M7 know what he was doing? I don't know. But he and Vituzzu are definitely highly involved with each other, and support each other. M7, until this recent action with the investigation page and the treat of block, had done nothing I considered a clear problem, just some weird comments, not his own actions. However, that was not so for Vituzzu.

So, my guess, M7 was protecting Vituzzu. Billinghurst went bananas over the pages, which surprised me. He's usually much calmer. He read them as "nitpicking." Well, I *was* examining nits, whatever showed up in that 5000 locks. Billinghurst had done over a third of the locks. I had started to examine them, they came in bursts of up to 30 locks, typically for being "spambots." Most of these locks were of accounts with no edits.

From that, I concluded what Billinghurst was actually doing. It makes sense, it is what stewards developed to deal with spambots. They are looking at checkuser data on registration. But how they do this cross-wiki without dropping into local wikis to assign themselves checkuser privilege? I think I know. It is login.wikimedia.org. If you have a global account, there is an account set up on login.wikimedia.org, and, I suspect, this account, checkusered, shows login activity on all the wikis. Looking at loginwiki, the only clearly assigned admin rights there are ... checkusers. Including Billinghurst and some of the stewards.

They didn't tell us about this with the rollout of SUL. This vastly increased central authority over who could edit. And what I was finding was that this wasn't only done with spambots. It was done with editors with any kind of conflict with ...

Vituzzu.

He actually warned an editor that if he reverted him again, he'd shut down his accounts. In that revert war, someone else reverted him, then. He reverted back. The next day, the threatened editor reverted. This, I first saw was on enwiki. Vituzzu had placed a speedy deletion template and was insisting that this only be removed by an adminstrator, not an ordinary user. So Vituzzu was grossly ignoring local policy. As it happened, this same revert warring was also happening on nlwiki. Vituzzu locked the editor, saying it was for two hours. Shot across the bow, eh? Three hours later, he unlocked, saying it was "better handled locally." Indeed. Those articles still stand, last I looked. Three articles had been created by a rather naive editor, on itwiki, on nlwiki, and on enwiki. Vituzzu had speedy-deleted the itwiki article, and in that discussion I saw him tell the truth about himself. Tired of following complicated rules, -- i.e., policy, while enraged at "self-promotion." He thought the article he deleted was promotional, and he did not undelete it on request when the creator made an account, described herself, and requested it. See, Vituzzu is always right. And he is supported on it.wiki. Since the itwiki article was promotional, so too must be the articles on other wikis.

this was only discovered when I was investigating the Daniele Santarelli incident, where Vituzzu ran a years-long campaign against a user who had allegedly violated BLP policy. Because that all happened in Italian, it was difficuilt for me to assess the original incident, but it was easy to see what happened later. Vituzzu used the global lock tool to shut down this user's activity on all WMF wikis, without any disruption elsewhere (as shown by local blocks). The user then created a new account on enwiki *and disclosed it* per policy. An Italian user complained of "sock puppetry" about this new account and the old one, asking for checkuser. The user was told that he was block-evading, and both accounts were blocked for "block evasion," but what block? They were not blocked before that, there had been no trouble!

The user was told that he should appeal at meta. So he did. The review request was deleted and the requesting IP was globally blocked by ... Vituzzu.

I came across the Santarelli incident while investigating the case of Augusto De Luca, who was globally locked, with a massive deletion campaign, for creating a user page on 555 WMF wikis. Each user page consisted of one photo by De Luca, who is probably a notable Italian photographer. We don't know because not only did Vituzzu lock Augusto De Luca, he also locked five other users who had not edited, some of them, for years, including one with no cross-wiki edits at all. Augusto De Luca's daughter, she'd been open about it.

This lock of users with no cross-wiki disruption, no block record, only what Vituzzu considered "promotion," was what first raised my eyebrows, and quite a few others thought that, particularly the block of Augusto's daughter, was ... excessive. *But I requested unlock on meta, and that's where I first saw evidence that, indeed, the other stewards were not going to restrain Vituzzu. One expressed "concern." But did nothing to promote or suggest a real discussion. The request was quickly shut down.

Then, later, I had found that ereticopedia.org had been blacklisted. Same basic case. This is an academic encyclopedia specializing in heretics and the history of the Church, involved in the Inquisition, etc. It's published by an academic publisher. Daniele Santarelli, an academic with something like five books, published by the same publisher, in that area, has clearly been identified by Vituzzu as that editor whom he had effectively banned, some years ago. That was obvious from edit logs and arguments he made in some of his removals of references to the books in bibliographies.

Since there had been no significant spamming of ereticopedia, there were only a handful of links where they were totally appropriate, I requested delisting. Again, quickly denied, and M7 jumped in with arguments about BLP violations, etc, which had nothing to do with the issue of ereticopedia. It would have everything to do with some attempt to punish the real-world person they believe to be Kurt4.

Now, by this time I was in communication with Daniele Santarelli. He's an academic, quite visible, with open contact easy. He had disclosed to me his editing history. He was not Kurt4, but I've seen what appearance might have led Vittuzzu to that conclusion.

Ereticopedia was started as a Wikia wiki. A user on that wiki had a certain name, Francesds, as I recall. Francesds is the name user by the declared enwiki sock of Kurt 4 (globally locked by Vituzzu also). Francesds appeared to be the major editor of that project.

Then the wiki was transferred to a different wiki host. The new host used real names, and by this time, the academic publisher was, I think, already announcing Daniele Santarelli as the managing editor of the ereticopedia project. So, hey, Francesds must be Daniel Santarelli who must be Kurt4, and that guy is an LTA (long term abuser), right?

So I asked Santarelli. Yes, he knows who was Kurt4, he is a member of the team, but Francesds was a role account, used by quite a number of users. The name comes from a famous heretic.

(Kurt4 was obviously, from his editing, a topic expert, but he also edited other articles, and he got into trouble with a BLP. It was all very quick, he was obviously amazed at being blocked for what he thought was nothing, he'd been misunderstood and surely he could explain, something I'd seen happen many times.)

What the IP evidence was showing was that most of the IPs identified as being Kurt4 IP could not have been Santarelli. Kurt4 lives in Italy, Santarelli in France. A page that had been set up to consider just the IP accounts was the first to be deleted on meta, by Vituzzu, claiming privacy policy violation. Yet the only violation of privacy policy would be Vittuzu's own declarations. He was removing the documentation of what he had done. And more was coming.

But by this time, I knew that the stewards weren't going to lift a finger. Billinghurst had suggested that I go to RfC. But diving into an RfC without having clear evidence and argument is a formula for failure, it would produce a train wreck, only. So I was doing the study, collecting evidence, and my major concern was *not* Vituzzu. It was the gap between steward practice and stated policy. The goal was to harmonize these. Almost everything I found that could be considered a violation of policy was probably justifiable. There were only a few exceptions. And they all involved Vituzzu. I had not stated that in the study, but it was becoming obvious. So it might have been obvious to the stewards that looked at this, and they assumed this was all a plot to attack Vituzzu, by creating a blizzard of evidence that would be thrown at him.

No. That's not what I do. I do not consider Vituzzu the problem. The problem is a community that abandons its collective responsibility to supervise those who serve it.

This could be handled in many ways, but if the problem is not even recognized, there is little hope of any improvement.

There was no plan to file RfC/Vituzzu. The study was just study notes, collected as what eventually became a general study of steward actions. What is actual practice? I'm not sure that even the stewards know about some of what I found. They may be, they actually make decisions, not on-wiki, but on a private mailing list and with IRC. But we don't know what the stewards actually think. They do not make decisions through open process. What we see on Steward requests/global is only a small fraction of the global blocking and locking they do. A tiny fraction.

Public requests are often denied when certain criteria are not me, such as being stale. As I have reported above, this was certainly not followed by Vituzzu. They are denied when there is not cross-wiki disruption, generally shown with local blocks in more than one wiki, and certainly cross-wiki editing is a requirement, otherwise the consensus is to leave the matter to local administrators.

None of that is respected as to what stewards themselves actually do. The spambot issue is a possible legitimate exception, but the core problem is the inflexibility of the lock tool. I found cases where fully legitimate users had been locked in error. These cases had been immediately corrected when discovered, but sometimes it took a long time! The editor doesn't know what the hell happened! Poetlister can, I assume, tell us what locked users see, but all indications are that they simply see login failure. They cannot log in, they cannot change their watchlists, they cannot set up or shut down email, none of that.

It's long been known that a global account block tool is needed, that would be more flexible. And that would then allow local admins to make exceptions. Global lock, they routinely say, is not a ban. But, in fact, as practiced, and for some users, it is. They are thus globally banning users -- with socks locked on sight -- without what global ban, and for quite good reason, requires, certain preconditions and local discussions, and then a meta RfC.

Nobody would suggest that this process be followed for spammers or spambots, and the zero-account blocks of accounts with no edits could raise some eyebrows, but those users had little to nothing invested in those accounts, and protecting the wiki from spam can easily justify this technical violation of policy. Policy, basically, should be revised.

However, when there are editors locked with substantial contributions, and without any due process, simply on the personal decison of a steward, following no policy and without the user violating policies (in a manner that would justify a local block on major wikis), that is probably not justifiable. That is what I was starting to see, but ... only with one steward.

But I was continuing to collect and analyze the full data. Billinghurst may have seen the page devoted to his locks, that was created because he, in that study of 5000 locks, was by far the most active steward. He thought it was "nitpicking," but I wasn't finding any nits. Studying Billinghurst, I was finding, perhaps, a baseline steward behavior for a very active steward. I was, all the time, thinking of what an insane amount of work he was doing, as a volunteer, to find and block, apparently properly, as far as I could tell, 1691 account actions in about three months. He would lock about 30, sometimes, all at the same log minute

(bot, anyone? They consider anyone editing at rates far lower than that to be using a bot. But that's a technical problem. He was not blocking continuously at high rate, he had obviously set up a list to be blocked, and then pushed a button to implement. It's hard to consent to 30 actions a minute, but maybe. I really don't care about that. What must have really taken him a lot of time was identifying the accounts with checkuser, because that would be the only possible basis.)

[Abd]

Wow that was a lot to read but great post. I would also point out that with the new privacy policy being imposed by the WMF, the Admins and functionaries including the Stewards will be exempted from it. Behold the Wiki Wild West is upon us all.

I have tried to read the new privacy policy, and I find it totally weird: there are pages of fluff about how great the policy is, but it is strangely difficult to find the actual policy. I'm sure it's there somewhere. Yeah, here it is.

All contributions made to a Project, and all publicly available information about those contributions, are irrevocably licensed and may be freely copied, quoted, reused and adapted by third parties with few restrictions. [...]

In general, this Policy only applies to private information stored or held by the Foundation which is not publicly available.

See Meta Forum on the antispam study and update on study deletion, added today.

Violation of privacy policy was alleged, May 23, in the first shot fired in the Great Deletion Rampage of May 24, as a harbinger of what was to come the next day, my 70th birthday. However, what was on that page did not violate privacy policy, unless the deleting steward had violated privacy policy, as shown on the page. However, the individual involved knew about the study, and certainly did not object to it. No, this was clearly a steward deleting information that was embarrassing to him. The whole study was embarrassing to him, because what was floating to the top of a study of overall steward behavior was that one steward's actions stood out from the rest, as being policy violations. In this case, the steward had concluded that Kurt4, who is considered globally banned without any global ban discussion -- the stewards not uncommonly disregard global ban policy, that's one thing I'd found -- was Daniel Santarelli, an academic, managing editor of ereticopedia.org, an academic encyclopedia of the history of the church and heretics.

I had begun the study because of the Augusto De Luca case, which is documented, still, on Wikiversity. Seeing that Vituzzu had globally locked a series of accounts without any recent editing *at all*, the crime being SPAs interested in Augusto De Luca, a possibly notable Italian photographer with 188 photos hosted on Commons, and had directly deleted many encyclopedia articles on the fellow -- Vutuzzu hates self-promotion and is impatient with policy -- I decided to look for other edits, cross-wiki, by Vituzzu, and came across his removal of long-standing bibliographic entries of academically-published books by Daniele Santarelli, as "self-promotion." So, of course, I looked at article histories for who had made those entries. There was no obvious pattern, but on enwiki there had been entries by Kurt4, before he ran into problems. I looked into the history of Kurt4 and quickly there were worms crawling all over.

Kurt4 possibly had committed a BLP violation on itwiki, and his main sin may have been reverting Vituzzu. He was with little or no warning indef blocked. Young, hot-blooded, Italian, what would we expect? Be nice and go away? Good luck if you expect behavior like this.

He socked, apparently. Massively on itwiki. He was *pissed.*

However, he was not blocked on enwiki, where he had done substantial work. But Vituzzu globally locked him, without cross-wiki disruption. So he created a sock on enwiki and disclosed it was him with the first edit. i.e,. did not violate alternate account policy. Both the new account and the old one were blocked for "block evasion." He was told to appeal the lock at meta.

He did. The appeal was deleted, not archived, making it hard to find, and the IP was globally blocked by Vituzzu.

And this went on for years. Vituzzu jumps to conclusions, and locks accounts based on it.

I contacted Daniele Santarelli, he's easily accessible. I invited him to participate on Wikiversity, suggesting that he register an account there, and wrote *do not register on itwiki." He didn't realize what would happen. This was actually a fairly new editor, with only sporadic edits by IP before.

He did register on itwiki, using his real name. Quickly locked by Vituzzu.

When I had reviewed the evidence, I concluded that ereticopedia.org was blacklisted without any substantial conflict-of-interest "promotion" -- Daniele Santarelli had added several links to the project, violating COI guidelines, but this was after the blacklisting, I was unable to find any original problematic contributions, and global blacklisting of an academic web site based on something like two edits is ... very far from the norm.

No, it was retaliatory. Vituzzu believes that Kurt4 is Daniele Santarelli, and I see the foundation for that. This is what I consider likely: Kurt4 is also an academic who knows Daniele Santarelli. Kurt4 is one of the editorial panel for ereticopedia, which one I do not know, but not Santarelli. Ereticopedia was largely edited on wikia by Francesds, a role account, and Santarelli and others used that account. Francesds was also the user name for Kurt4, created on enwiki, globally locked against policy by ... Vituzzu.

So I requested delisting of the site. You can see where that went.

M7 ranted about how abusive Kurt4 was. What did that have to do with ereticopedia?

Beetstra made his usual usual, that assumes that an original blacklisting was necessary, completely missing that (1) there was no discussion, (2) nobody found any abusive additions at all for the site; what Beetstra pointed to was post-blacklisting "blacklist evasion," which is common. And which was by no means widespread. They will also normally argue that a blacklisted site is not needed for reliable source (even though there are lots of cross-wiki legitimate uses that aren't about reliable source). They didn't even consider that here.

From the blacklist log the original reason: '''\bereticopedia\.org # Vituzzu # addition lta.''

"lta" refers to editors, not web sites. If a web site is "long term abused" it would be easy to find abusive links that were added. I searched extensively for "ereticopedia." All I found were bot references to abuse filter from the later two additions. In any case, were there such abuse, I'd expect it would have been brought up in the blacklist discussion. Ereticopedia.org is an academic site. It's a wiki, but is not open editing, it is academically published and academically supervised. Reliable source, in other words. Anyone searching for information on certain topics, in Italian, will find ereticopedia, so links may have been added and removed.

You can see the close sympathy between M7 and Vituzzu in that blacklisting discussion. They are both entirely opposed to any community review of their actions. Beetstra was utterly useless. He has massive tools that I don't have, and reported no abusive linking, but simply assumed that it must have existed. I went ahead and requested and obtained whitelisting on en.wikiversity, and have created a resource there to collaborate with ereticopedia. It's just gotten started, documenting what is there. See Heresy_and_the_Church_in_the_Mediterranean_world

You can see the assumption of Vituzzu that this is "personal." Dismissing review as personal could be a way to make it personal! However, my position is still that Vituzzu is not the problem. The problem is that the community absolutely does not supervise the stewards, and the steward community does not restrain its own. (I should qualify this: it is entirely possible that there is some restraint, and I saw, in the record, one or two places where Vituzzu backed down, and this may have been due to off-wiki communication. But it is also obvious that such restraint is mostly ineffective, and does not increase community confidence.

There was no violation of privacy policy. There also was no harassment. One will note in the blacklisting request that Beetstra suggested I ask Vituzzu about the blacklisting. I didn't. He did show up, however, claiming something about discussions on his talk page. I looked. Found something, but not really related to the blacklisting of ereticopedia. Vituzzu is dizzy.

[eagle]

The problem is a community that abandons its collective responsibility to supervise those who serve it.

In essence, stewards were given the job to assist with projects that did not have their own well-developed admin corps. By definition, they are paratroopers who jump in because there are insufficient police on the ground to maintain law and order. So, it is illogical to expect "a community" to exist to supervise them.

I find it troubling that the WMF would use (largely untrained and unsupervised) volunteers for this important role. Perhaps the job description of the stewards should be rewritten to require each one to submit a monthly written report to one or two people in the WMF community relations department of their actions and the reasons that the actions were taken. A WMF employee should also be designated to receive complaints about steward conduct for remedial action.

The stewards are a mixed bag. I interacted with one who was very helpful and mature. However, there is another one who was recently elected who had come up through the ranks of the WikiProject U.S. Roads drama-fest. Perhaps they should be selected by WMF staff following a Skype interview process, because the current selection process assumes that an active community is electing them, which is not the case. The steward selection process does not attract the projects that the stewards are intended to serve. There is no guarantee that the steward candidates have sufficient language skills to be helpful outside their native projects.

In sum, the steward concept should be redesigned and reimplemented.

[Abd]

The problem is a community that abandons its collective responsibility to supervise those who serve it.

In essence, stewards were given the job to assist with projects that did not have their own well-developed admin corps. By definition, they are paratroopers who jump in because there are insufficient police on the ground to maintain law and order. So, it is illogical to expect "a community" to exist to supervise them.

There is a trope that there exists a meta community. This is the community that elects and confirms stewards. The meta community also reviews global policy.

The steward actions in question were affecting and regarding, almost entirely, projects that are not the small wikis. Eagle has somewhat described the global sysop hat. Global locks affect every wiki, and so does the global blacklist (that technically is maintained by meta admins, but stewards can and do take direct action with it).

I find it troubling that the WMF would use (largely untrained and unsupervised) volunteers for this important role.

No, the "WMF" uses the "community", and defers to "community decisions." The WMF enables the wiki community by providing it with tools. By doing this, the WMF avoids legal responsibility, in theory. Nobody has tested the limits of this, to my knowledge.

The WMF will presume that if a steward is responsible to the community, the community will restrain the steward if needed. It's the same with all administrators. The actual fact on Wikipedia: removing an administrator is so difficult, if the administrator has not offended too many other administrators, that it can be an insane waste of time to try, even in the presence of abuse, and any non-administrator who tries it is very likely committing wiki-suicide.

I didn't even attempt to remove two administrators, but to request that ArbCom guide them about policy, and I still ended up banned, even though one admin was reprimanded and the other actually desysopped. It was a long and complex story, but that is what actually happened.

Perhaps the job description of the stewards should be rewritten to require each one to submit a monthly written report to one or two people in the WMF community relations department of their actions and the reasons that the actions were taken. A WMF employee should also be designated to receive complaints about steward conduct for remedial action.

Highly likely answer if one complains: "This is for the community to resolve. Take it to the community."

The stewards are a mixed bag. I interacted with one who was very helpful and mature. However, there is another one who was recently elected who had come up through the ranks of the WikiProject U.S. Roads drama-fest. Perhaps they should be selected by WMF staff following a Skype interview process, because the current selection process assumes that a active community is electing them, which is not the case. The steward selection process does not attract the projects that the stewards are intended to serve. There is no guarantee that the steward candidates have sufficient language skills to be helpful outside their native projects.

In sum, the steward concept should be redesigned and reimplemented.

Indeed. There used to be quite a number of stewards who had obvious qualifications, gravitas, etc. I'm having trouble finding them now.

[Poetlister]

The "Meta community", such as it is, is even more a nonsense than the English Wikipedia "community". Since Meta has no encyclopedic content, by definition nobody there is a content contributor. All you get is as it were the "cream of the cream" of WP:ANI type people from many different projects.

[eagle]

I had edited WP for over four years before I discovered that "meta" even existed. English (American or British) is the basic language of English Wikipedia. If you believe that "meta" is for all projects, it is odd that so much of its posting is in English.

The problem is that "meta" does not represent the content-creating editors - it draws people who are admins, wikipolicy wonks and people who want to get funded/hired by WMF.

[Poetlister]

I had edited WP for over four years before I discovered that "meta" even existed. English (American or British) is the basic language of English Wikipedia. If you believe that "meta" is for all projects, it is odd that so much of its posting is in English.

The problem is that "meta" does not represent the content-creating editors - it draws people who are admins, wikipolicy wonks and people who want to get funded/hired by WMF.

There are probably far more editors who are fluent in English than any other language (USA, UK, Australia, most Indians, etc.) And the other sort of person you get on Meta is the deliberate awkward troublemaker. It would be interesting to know how many Meta regulars have been blocked elsewhere.

[Abd]

(how I came to meta hidden)

I came to meta because an abusive blacklisting on en.wikipedia was moved to the global blacklist by JzG when it became obvious that en.wiki wasn't going to support the blacklisting. I requested delisting there, it was denied, and then I went through the tedious process they recommend for showing that a site is legitimate. There never was a decent reason for that blacklisting, it was essentially a pile of misrepresentations, so bad and so piled up that maybe I should just call them "lies." That got me interested in blacklist process and I reviewed a lot of blacklisted sites, and worked a bit on this on enwiki. Later, as a sysop at Wikiversity, I had plenty of reasons to go to meta. I requested action on a languishing bureaucrat promotion. I requested blacklisting of sites being spammed, I requested at least one global lock, as I recall. And I started to observe meta process, when it worked, and when it was abusive, and started to confront some of the abuse. Predictably, I was blocked when, it was obvious. a steward clearly didn't understand the English of my request on his talk page and believed I was threatening him. I was suggesting that he might help Abigor, who had, in fact, been an abusive meta administrator, I'd tangled with him, but when the Dutch cabal turned on him, and he got angry, etc., he ended up in trouble. He'd been charged with some quite abusive vandalism, he claimed it wasn't him. Given that he'd admitted all kinds of stuff, his claim on that one point was plausible, but it had been checkuser confirmed. He was requesting the checkuser data, and the steward was saying that, no, that data cannot be given out, Nix, Privacy Policy, and Go Away. I pointed out that the checkuser policy specifically allowed giving private checkuser data to the user who was checkusered.

His answer was priceless. He was willing for his finding to be published, so everyone could see that Abigor was this Terrible Monster Vandal, but ... he said that if Abigor was not the vandal, then the vandal's privacy would be violated.

Abigor needed that information so that -- if he wasn't lying -- he could know if his notebook computer had been used. He'd been at a wiki conference at the time.... or it had been hacked, etc.

Yes, I was helping someone who had, himself, been abusive, when he held the tools. He was grateful, actually. I was, of course, for this, considered a troll, disruptive, and had been threatening and harassing that steward.

Meta does attract hat collectors. It's pretty easy to get sysop privileges there, and some real doozies have been promoted. Much more difficult, for some, to become a steward. Risker couldn't make it. However, she would have been far, far better, with all her problems, than some of the existing stewards, and I have in mind, specifically, M7 and Vituzzu.

I just found another problematic lock by Vituzzu. This was of a very minor user, a "little guy." Few will invest any time to check these things out. But I have Vituzzu's meta talk page on my watchlist and saw this edit, today.

So then I look at the IP contributions, and I see edits to User talk:Tnxman307 and User talk:Ajraddatz.

Sghezza (T-C-L) was blocked by Tnxman307 (T-C-L), 10 June 2011. The user page notice says

This account is a sock puppet of Ragusino and has been blocked indefinitely.
Please refer to contributions for evidence.

Tnxman has used a standard sock template. Sghezza never had any contributions to enwiki. However, if we follow the link to User:Ragosina, we get a link to the SSP page, and the archive is here.

Sghezza is not mentioned in the enwiki investigations of Ragusino. I found no clue as to why Tnxman307 concluded that Sghezza was Ragusino. He was a checkuser, he may have seen something. It used to be that unrequested checkuser blocks were considered a bit fishy. That restraint seems to have disappeared. There may have been IRC or email conversations. It used to be understood that wiki process should be transparent. That's gone by the wayside. Tnxman307 retired.

It looks like Sghezza still retained access to the talk page, but Sghezza never requested unblock, until this edit on meta, 14:41, 8 April 2014. Had I seen that edit, I'd have responded to Sghezza, suggesting that he request unblock on enwiki.

One of the problems with these blocks for being a sock puppet is that the user is typically not given a block reason and instructions for appeal, as happens with most blocks. Often talk page and email access are shut down; that does not appear to have happened here, but still, a clueless newbie was left with no guidance. If Sghezza were really Ragusino, no harm would have been done by a block notice with appeal instructions. It's just a template.

There was a response to Sghezza's meta request, however, shown in CentralAuth for Sghezza:

15:05, 8 April 2014 Vituzzu ... changed status for global account "User:Sghezza@global": Set locked; ... (crosswiki abuse: tamburellista)

"tamburerllista," or "tambourine player," is apparently itwiki slang for spammer or promoter.

Sghezza was only blocked on one wiki, enwiki, and that was a quite questionable block. Global locking was intended for substantial cross-wiki abuse, the discussions of the tool considered how many wikis should be disrupted, with the user being blocked, before a lock would be used. "Ten" was the speculation of one not particularly restrained steward. It is now fairly routine for accounts to be locked with no global edits, and no blocks, the result of watching of account registrations, probably with checkuser on loginwiki, and possibly watching edit filter IRC messages. It's now hair-trigger. Did Vituzzu have such evidence? Not checkuser, likely. The response to Sghezzas request of Tnxman was quite rapid.

Ajraddatz knows that some of Vituzzu's locks are questionable. But he won't look into it himself, the IP also asked him, and Ajraddatz referred him to Vituzzu. Hence the edit I saw.

The stewards obviously do not care how all this looks. They are accustomed to the "community" having much better things to do than review the boring actions of stewards. And, of course, if someone does look at these actions, they must be out to wreck the place, to "harass the volunteers." I.e., them.

But about the ordinary volunteers who build the content, or those who seek to become part of that community, they care nothing.

We'll see how Vituzzu's response goes. It's not impossible he will look at the case and find a reason to unlock. I'm just not holding my breath, though. He has confessed a hatred of "promotion," and a complete disdain for policy. We will also see if, should Vituzzu blow off the IP -- or block it, he's done that for other appeals -- Ajraddatz will continue humming a merry tune, confident that all is right with the world, and it's more important for stewards to show solidarity than for stewards to be accountable.

[Kumioko]

The problem is a community that abandons its collective responsibility to supervise those who serve it.

In essence, stewards were given the job to assist with projects that did not have their own well-developed admin corps. By definition, they are paratroopers who jump in because there are insufficient police on the ground to maintain law and order. So, it is illogical to expect "a community" to exist to supervise them.

I find it troubling that the WMF would use (largely untrained and unsupervised) volunteers for this important role. Perhaps the job description of the stewards should be rewritten to require each one to submit a monthly written report to one or two people in the WMF community relations department of their actions and the reasons that the actions were taken. A WMF employee should also be designated to receive complaints about steward conduct for remedial action.

The stewards are a mixed bag. I interacted with one who was very helpful and mature. However, there is another one who was recently elected who had come up through the ranks of the WikiProject U.S. Roads drama-fest. Perhaps they should be selected by WMF staff following a Skype interview process, because the current selection process assumes that an active community is electing them, which is not the case. The steward selection process does not attract the projects that the stewards are intended to serve. There is no guarantee that the steward candidates have sufficient language skills to be helpful outside their native projects.

In sum, the steward concept should be redesigned and reimplemented.

Yeah the Stewards pool is another perfect example of a group with no oversight. There is absolutely no one at the WMF that is over these folks and they know it so it goes to their heads. You fires the King and court? I dunno, but they surely aren't going to fire each other and its outside the ability of the lowly peasant editors to do anything about them.

[SB_Johnny]

Yeah the Stewards pool is another perfect example of a group with no oversight. There is absolutely no one at the WMF that is over these folks and they know it so it goes to their heads.

They'd pretty much need someone like Larry Sanger to do a sane job of keeping an eye on the multi-lingual and multi-community-oriented Stewards. Nobody like Larry Sanger would ever work for the WMF while Jimbo is still in charge.

You fires the King and court? I dunno, but they surely aren't going to fire each other and its outside the ability of the lowly peasant editors to do anything about them.

Is this an appropriate time to say "lolwut"?

[Silent Editor]

Yeah the Stewards pool is another perfect example of a group with no oversight. There is absolutely no one at the WMF that is over these folks and they know it so it goes to their heads. You fires the King and court? I dunno, but they surely aren't going to fire each other and its outside the ability of the lowly peasant editors to do anything about them.

Well, they did fire Lar, who was generally one of the better ones (albeit with some drama) a while back.

[Abd]

Yeah the Stewards pool is another perfect example of a group with no oversight. There is absolutely no one at the WMF that is over these folks and they know it so it goes to their heads. You fires the King and court? I dunno, but they surely aren't going to fire each other and its outside the ability of the lowly peasant editors to do anything about them.

Well, they did fire Lar, who was generally one of the better ones (albeit with some drama) a while back.

Lar had confronted the cabal on Wikipedia. It's fascinating to look at that election page. First of all, I notice that M7, who is a *horrible* steward (at least now), was unanimously confirmed, 43/43. No negative comments. Mike.lifeguard did a series of highly disruptive actions, supporting the cabal. 76/77. He was soon to resign.

Then I notice that Lar's vote was 93/144. On enwiki, the trope is that administrators should not be forced to reconfirm, because if they do their jobs, they will attract negative votes. Lar did his job, and Lar attracted negative votes. But, still, almost two-thirds of those voting supported him. Lar had more positive votes than any other steward. it stands out. He had twice as many positive votes as M7. He still had almost 2/3 support. If the community of those who voted was sitting as an ArbCom over removal, removal would have failed.

That page maintains the trope that this wasn't a vote, that arguments are what mattered.

The arguments were fascinating. Durova's comments, I found shockingly petty. Durova was burning out, obviously.

However, Lar had laid down the steward tools to serve on the Ombudsman Commission. So I was surprised to find, recently, when looking at what to do about the deletion of the steward action study, and advised to go to the Ombudsman Commission, that active stewards, including the one who deleted all those pages, were serving on the Commission.

So if it wasn't by votes, how were the results decided? On enwiki, that's done by a closer. Who was the closer, and were arguments actually considered?

The election page had these instructions:

During the 2010 elections, please mention if you are unhappy with one of the persons listed below and why. For example, you may mention inactivity or negative behaviour. ...

At the end of the elections, the current and newly elected stewards will consider complaints left on this page, and choose to remove stewardship as necessary taking into account both the comments left by community and their own perspective and understanding of the job. All stewards will go through this process after each election.

So the page *solicited* unhappiness. Then there is a discussion, apparently, among the "current and elected stewards." How do they decide? Where? When 'crats close RfAs on en.wiki, they explain the close, unless the result is totally obvious.

Broken process. Most of the negative arguments had nothing to do with what stewards do. In hindsight, they dropped quite a good steward, and currently stewards pay no attention to consensus at all. They don't do consensus. They do star chamber proceedings, off-wiki, and don't restrain each other.

The community seems to think that electing functionaries by high-supermajority vote will generate reliable administration. No. Reliable administration takes constant supervision. And supervising the stewards is exactly what the community doesn't do. The few who do are readily ignored, or, worse, picked off by stewards.

[Abd]

We'll see how Vituzzu's response goes. It's not impossible he will look at the case and find a reason to unlock. I'm just not holding my breath, though. He has confessed a hatred of "promotion," and a complete disdain for policy. We will also see if, should Vituzzu blow off the IP -- or block it, he's done that for other appeals -- Ajraddatz will continue humming a merry tune, confident that all is right with the world, and it's more important for stewards to show solidarity than for stewards to be accountable.

Well, hats off to Ajraddatz. He spent some time on this case, see his comment on Vituzzu talk.

Just a note that I've looked into this as much as I can through logs and enwiki's SPI page, and can find no indication (behaviour or other) that User:Sghezza is a sockpuppet. That being said, I don't have access to the CU log on enwiki or itwiki so I don't have any access to the original data. Ajraddatz (talk) 21:34, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

Ajraddatz looked at what I looked at. I also looked for any edits or other actions from the enwiki blocking admin/checkuser. Ajdraddatz may have access to the checkuser wiki. At this point, though, it's a reasonably surmise that Sghezza's block on enwiki was simply some kind of error. It showed no thought, no clue as to the basis, it wasn't called a "checkuser block," etc. Behaviorally, i.e, the duck test, it made no sense at all.

Ajraddatz, though, hasn't commented on the reason why Vituzzu is involved. Vituzzu globally locked Sghezza, not based on being a sock (which isn't a reason for a global lock, per se, but that's a separate issue), but on being a "tamburellista," i.e., promoter or spammer. The place for Ajraddatz to look would be the edit filter logs, which he should be able to see. Maybe he has already looked there. That is, perhaps Vituzzu saw some *attempted* edit, from a spamtrap filter. Vituzzu is not a checkuser on itwiki nor on enwiki, and did not assign himself the privilege, so that's out.

Vituzzu is also https://login.wikimedia.org/w/index.php ... [hyperlink][/hyperlink]not a checkuser on loginwiki. The current list:

Ajraddatz
Avraham
Billinghurst
DerHexer
MF-Warburg
Mentifisto
Quentinv57

Stewards, all, but far from all stewards. The assignment of user rights doesn't appear to be a public log on loginwiki. My guess is this: stewards figured out that with checkuser rights on loginwiki, they don't need local checkuser for much, other than to see user agent string for IP editing. Basically, SUL, implemented through loginwiki, created a device making it easier for stewards to detect cross-wiki socking. Which is not specifically against policy. It is fairly obvious that they have gone, and routinely, outside of what was contemplated in global lock policy. This, and a whole series of identified actions, are outside of policy. Most of that may easily be justifiable, i.e, the community would approve, but they have never asked the community. They don't mention this situation, and definitely, they did not want it to be known. That is why the study was deleted and suppressed.

It is hard to imagine what I could have had on those pages that was so bad that it legitimately needed to be not just deleted but suppressed, while the pages had been open and viewed for weeks, with a steward and a global sysop commenting on them and not complaining. Of course, those comments were also deleted and suppressed.

I wasn't deleted and suppressed, not yet. DanielTom, however, made a fairly mild comment about "you guys give Italian a bad name," on my user talk page, and was immediately blocked by M7. He is still blocked. Ajraddatz invited him to email him, and I've encouraged DanielTom to follow up on that, but DanielTom is a crazy-head, who believes that his mission in life is to confront evil, to tell evil what it is, to its face, and he has no concept of discipline or actual effectiveness. I.e., of what it takes to bring real change. He's really about being right, i.e., it's enough for him that he said something. What actually happens, well, so what? At least he told the truth. But there was no "truth," there was only his personal impression. Which I might or might not agree with, but speaking truth to power is a virtue, at the same time as it can be insanely foolish, especially when it is not "truth" but is merely blame and judgment.

One good thing came out of DanielTom's block, Ottava Rima intervened, giving the whole thing greater visibility. Not nearly enough, though. No comments on the meta Forum on the antispam practices thread. As far as I can tell, no metawikipedians who read the Forum care enough to make any serious comments or offer to assist. Bad sign.

[tarantino]

Vituzzu is also not a checkuser on loginwiki.

He can assign himself that right at will.

[Abd]

Vituzzu is also not a checkuser on loginwiki.

He can assign himself that right at will.

Thanks, yes. I knew he could assign it, but had been unable to find the log with the magic combination of parameters. I did find it, after writing that. For Billinghurst, see the loginwiki user rights assignment log. I saw that a series of stewards seem to keep the checkuser bit set on loginwiki. So for Vituzzu, you gave the link. Last used April 11. Before that, 25 March. This wasn't for Sghezza, locked on April 8. April 11, he was fishing and it looks like he didn't catch anything.

He also locked that pile of ordinary users on March 26, one more on April 10, but they hadn't edited for donkey's ages. Checkuser was irrelevant. He might have been looking for other socks of Augusto De Luca the 25th. I don't think there were any. All the accounts he locked the 26th were very old (except for De Luca himself), who was locked March 25. He locked the other users anyway, the next day, based on very old edits to articles on Augusto De Luca, with one more, GIUNCO, locked April 10.

Some of these were using their real names, such as Augusto De Luca's daughter. Who had been warned about COI editing on itwiki, and who had *stopped*. Still locked. The stewards blew away the unlock request. (And threatening noises were made by M7.)

This was all extremely irregular. Augusto De Luca had done something very much out of the ordinary. It looked like a spambot (and a global sysop argued on Wikiversity that it was *obviously* a spambot, and then cited the CA account creation data, apparently not realizing that CA creates a pile of accounts in a burst, automatically, without any user action other than initial account creation and globalization). I went over the account creation times and assumed that most of them were created (outside of two bursts) close to edit time for the user page. (That was verified in a sample from what was left after the deletion rampage). This wasn't a bot. 555 user pages, each consisting of a single image linked from Commons, with no title or other text, had been created manually, I consider that a definitive conclusion from the time behavior. Basically, the global sysop and stewards were idiots, making up arguments to justify what they had done.

Watch the stewards all start keeping the checkuser bit on loginwiki, it completely bypasses all that nuisance, and there is no local community to complain. Billinghurst has figured that out, but Vituzzu hasn't. Great for invisible fishing, globally.

A user may be able to avoid this visibility by not allowing a global account to be created, keeping the account purely local. I saw one case where a steward created a global account for someone so they could lock them. Nifty, eh? Pulls away all local jurisdiction, no messy and time-consuming discussions needed, just stonewall if asked.

[Abd]

Okay, as described above, on meta, steward Ajraddatz was asked by Sghezza, editing as IP 151.12.58.2, for unlock, and Ajraddatz referred him to the locking steward, Vituzzu.

my account Sghezza is globally locked since this my post user talk:Tnxman307#Unblock. What's happen? I consider globally locked a mistake! May you to unlock Sghezza? Regards 28 May 2014

The lock was not done by me. Please contact the locking steward at User talk:Vituzzu or email stewards[at]wikimedia.org. Thanks, Ajraddatz 16:55, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Sghezza, as IP, requested "sblocco," i.e, unblock, on Vituzzu talk:

[request in Italian]

Just a note that I've looked into this as much as I can through logs and enwiki's SPI page, and can find no indication (behaviour or other) that User:Sghezza is a sockpuppet. That being said, I don't have access to the CU log on enwiki or itwiki so I don't have any access to the original data. Ajraddatz (talk) 21:34, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

[more Italian from 151.12.58.2]

Hey Vito; I've unlocked User:Sghezza after investigating the matter. It looks like the block on enwiki was a false positive and the editing patterns are indeed different. I've posted more info on User talk:Sghezza. If you get back and have an issue with this please let me know. Thanks, Ajraddatz (talk) 19:26, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

[and this edit by Sghezza, now using his unlocked account:]

la mia utenza-IP è stata bloccata globalmente dall'amministratore Vito, che vuole contrastare l'utente Tamburellista: ma io che c'entro? Mentre l'amministratore Tnxman307 vuole contrastare l'utente Ragusino: ma io che c'entro?--Sghezza (talk) 14:22, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

[translation: "my-user IP has been blocked by the administrator globally Vito" ... i.e., Vituzzu]

O rlly?

Yes. The global block log.

08:15, 11 June 2014 Vituzzu globally blocked User:151.12.58.2 (expires 08:15, 11 December 2014) (Long-term abuse: Tamburellista)

I.e., the same block reason as for Sghezza's lock.

What the right hand gives, the left hand takes away. This global lock was in spite of Vituzzu replying to Ajraddatz, though not in one of the two active threads. If we didn't know what was going on, the Vituzzu comment would make no sense. As it is, it's a lie. He does care.

Re:

Actually it was him almost for sure, but nvm, I no longer care about it, see ya. --Vituzzu (talk) 08:17, 11 June 2014 (UTC).

This is not the first instance I've seen of Vituzzu blocking IP used to appeal his global locks. It's blatant recusal failure. What the deleted and suppressed study pages showed was that, out of a massive flow of global locks, very few stood out as problematic, and the only ones that were truly problematic (as distinct from a handful of errors, quickly corrected) were those by Vituzzu.

As readers here will know, I'm not thrilled by how the steward community handles, not just criticism, but simple observation and organization of the activity data. However, that study would have led to an RfC on locking and antispam policy, not on an individual steward, at least that was my plan. The point would be *mostly* to refine and clarify policy, and this would only indirectly have impacted Vituzzu, because most global actions would have been seen as outside of current policy, but nevertheless legitimate, i.e., policy would be amended to bring action and policy in alignment. That, however, would have made Vituzzu's actions stand out all the more clearly, and give the other stewards clear support in confronting them.

I'm fascinated to see how Ajraddatz handles this blatant defiance (or, maybe it is not defiance, perhaps it is utter bumbling incompetence combined with arrogance).

(For those who don't know, a hard global IP block will disable all editing from an IP unless the editor has the IP block exemption right. Global IP blocks are not effective on meta, so that they may be appealed. The IP in question, as to any recent editing, had only been used to edit meta, but it was not blocked. So Ajradattz clear the way so the editor could edit, and then Vituzzu closed the door.)

Ajraddatz' message on meta user talk:Sghezza:

Unlocked

Hi, I've unlocked your account, as I can find no evidence that you're the person you were blocked for being and the original locking steward is currently away. Apologies for the inconvenience.

As for your enwiki block, you were blocked with a batch of three other users because you had also edited from the same public IP that they had. There are differences as well - your account was made on itwiki, the others on enwiki. Your account had no local edits, the others all had local edits. I think it's pretty clear that you are a false positive. If you want to appeal your enwiki block, please do so on your talk page there. Add en:Template:Unblock to your talkpage there, and I can provide the evidence that I've gathered. Again, sorry for the inconvenience. Ajraddatz 19:24, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

Of course, Sghezza, unless something else is done, cannot edit enwiki, because the IP block there will stop him.

[Abd]

Ajraddatz has responded. To Vituzzu:

Re:

Actually it was him almost for sure, but nvm, I no longer care about it, see ya. --Vituzzu 08:17, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Obviously you do if you globally block his IP. How do you know it is him? Which of his edits are vandalism or disruptive to warrant a global block or lock? Ajraddatz 15:02, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

And to Sghezza:

:You can appeal the block at [[SRG]]. I'm not willing to overturn another block by Vituzzu without outside consultation. Ajraddatz 15:04, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Sghezza is an Italian user, flopping around like a fish out of water in English, and I would not expect him to navigate SRG well. Sure enough.. The user actually wants global unblock for 151.12.58.2, not "Sghezza." Ajraddatz should have taken this to SRG himself, not expected a user with only 43 edits total (including the appeals) to handle SRG. Billinghurst did correct the filing, but, then, shows that he has not done more than the most superficial examination:

Account was unlocked a day or so ago, so I have amended this request. The IP address is still blocked, and I will have to let someone with some more current knowledge deal with it. — billinghurst sDrewth 16:13, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Yes, the account was unlocked a day ago. The IP was just blocked, and two minutes later, Vituzzu wrote he didn't care. I.e., Ajraddatz could have unblocked. And so could Billinghurst.

Global locks for possible "promotion," ("tamburellista") should not be like ArbCom blocks or other strongly-established actions. But they are being treated like that, in spite of the very low likelihood of problems from error in unlocking. If Vituzzu had actually seen recent IP activity, he'd have said so, or would have told Ajraddatz where to look. (I.e., there could have been edit filter activity showing attempts to add spam). What I've seen from Billinghurst has been an extreme reluctance to allow any examination of steward actions. His nose is now being rubbed in it, and he doesn't like it. Obviously.

There are only two stewards who know what happened with Sghezza: Vituzzu, who has disclosed nothing, in spite of being given lots of opportunity, and Ajraddatz, who took the time to do the research, and who, then, unlocked based on it. Vituzzu *then* globally locked the IP, based only on it being used to appeal the global lock, and he has done that, as I recall, at least twice before.

That kind of block should be slapped down immediately, and that should be policy. If the appeal edits were abusive, they would easily have been deleted, and the IP locally blocked. If the editor really was trying to spam, that, as well, would be a basis for a block or lock, and such are requested all the time on SRG.

Vituzzu, blocking the IP, was displaying a complete lack of what Ajraddatz was showing, the polar opposite: extreme reluctance to act against another steward, i.e., Ajraddatz, and "I don't care" blocking in defiance of the other steward's action, i.e., Vituzzu. On enwiki, we'd see bits falling.

If this were an isolated incident, okay, we could shrug it off. It is not isolated. Billinghurst would have immediately seen Ajraddatz's action, easily, from looking at Sghezza contributions, and he'd have seen the unlock immediately (he did), knowing then to look at Ajraddatz's relevant editing.

No, there is an extreme reluctance to call a spade a spade: Vituzzu is a loose cannon, and he, with the collaboration of a few others, has been causing massive global activity damaging the projects, all out of his "hatred" for "promotion," and his acknowledged impatience with policy. He is not one of the major actors in combatting real spam, see the post above, he's minor. Given that relative lack of activity, his error rate is enormous.

I had not gotten, in the study, to the point of examining his lock log, because I deliberately wanted to avoid the results of focusing on him, that can create a dangerous form of bias. That is why I started, with weeks of work, creating the overall study, and that overall study would have, as well, long-term use in the development of policy.

However, it's typical of the WMF community -- not just a few abusive or sloppy stewards -- that this kind of work is not appreciated. tl;dr.

Of course, the RfC would have been carefully compiled, what they deleted and suppressed was not just the draft RfCs (very primitive as I recall, I don't think I saved copies), but, more seriously, the study notes, which were voluminous, as such needed to be to not be cherry-picked.

[Abd]

This is what Vituzzu just blocked as 151.12.58.2: Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities (Italy) (T-H-L). From whois: 151.12.58.0 - 151.12.58.255. Brilliant. This would be the kind of organization that one would think it.wiki would be attempting to collaborate with. Likely Sghezza is an employee of the Ministry.

[Poetlister]

This is what Vituzzu just blocked as 151.12.58.2: Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities (Italy) (T-H-L). From whois: 151.12.58.0 - 151.12.58.255. Brilliant. This would be the kind of organization that one would think it.wiki would be attempting to collaborate with. Likely Sghezza is an employee of the Ministry.

If so, he would presumably be regarded as a COI editor who needs to be blocked. That's wikilogic for you.

[Abd]

This is what Vituzzu just blocked as 151.12.58.2: Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities (Italy) (T-H-L). From whois: 151.12.58.0 - 151.12.58.255. Brilliant. This would be the kind of organization that one would think it.wiki would be attempting to collaborate with. Likely Sghezza is an employee of the Ministry.

If so, he would presumably be regarded as a COI editor who needs to be blocked. That's wikilogic for you.

Right. However, that ministry is responsible for libraries, archives, museums, and similar institutions.

I learned that, contrary to my inference, "tamburellista" ("tambourine player") doesn't mean "spammer," though I think that was a reasonable surmise. It is the nickname of an alleged long-term abuser. I found little reference to this on meta, and it appears that thin similarities are being used (on the stewards mailing list) to make a claim of sock puppetry, the kind of similarities that would ordinarily be rejected on Wikipedia. The use of the lock tool in these cases (and global blocks) is definitely outside policy, but, as we know, stewards pay little attention to policy as to their own actions. They only refer to it when someone else asks them to do something, if they want to reject the proposal.

[Poetlister]

I'd agree with you, but not everyone here would, it seems.

Collaborating with universities is one thing - and definitely deserves high scrutiny and care. But government departments are qualitatively different from educational institutions, and this crosses the line into gross impropriety for me.

[Abd]

I'd agree with you, but not everyone here would, it seems.

Collaborating with universities is one thing - and definitely deserves high scrutiny and care. But government departments are qualitatively different from educational institutions, and this crosses the line into gross impropriety for me.

And where, pray tell, did Ahcole write that?

[Zoloft]

I'd agree with you, but not everyone here would, it seems.

Collaborating with universities is one thing - and definitely deserves high scrutiny and care. But government departments are qualitatively different from educational institutions, and this crosses the line into gross impropriety for me.

And where, pray tell, did Ahcole write that?

Here: link

[Poetlister]

Is there a way to provide links automatically when a post on a different thread is quoted?

[Zoloft]

Is there a way to provide links automatically when a post on a different thread is quoted?

Not in the forum software we have.

[Abd]

I'd agree with you, but not everyone here would, it seems.

Collaborating with universities is one thing - and definitely deserves high scrutiny and care. But government departments are qualitatively different from educational institutions, and this crosses the line into gross impropriety for me.

And where, pray tell, did Ahcole write that?

Here: link

Thanks. The context was a June 10 announcement of an agreement between the Israeli Education Minister Shai Piron and Jan-Bart de Vreede, chair of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees "on a collaborative program to train history, geography and science teachers to guide their students in completing missing or insufficient information on Wikipedia." While concerns can obviously be raised about details of implementation, the opinion from Anthony was a gross generalization. Earlier in the thread, a report was cited that had

The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects, has signed an agreement that will allow Israeli propagandists to promote apartheid Israel and its racist, Zionist policies through the pages of Wikipedia, the world’s largest and most popular free encyclopedia.

Look, I'm a Muslim, highly sympathetic with the Palestinian cause, and could agree with, for example, a claim that "Zionism is racism," though the language of that is sloppy (not to mention inflammatory, and we don't need more gasoline on the fires, fires that burn real people, including real children, to death).

However, the agreement does no such thing, I'm sure. Indeed, it's unclear, completely, that this "agreement" is anything more than feel-good fluff. If, for example, the WMF actually intervenes to protect the Israeli students while they are, on the project, "promoting apartheid and racist, Zionist policies," it would raise a firestorm of protest. Given that the WMF, in general, stands far back from dealing with content and user behavior issues, I'm not expecting that.

If we want some real feel-good, how about negotiating some similar agreements with other Education Ministries from, say, Arab countries? Or Turkey?

Basically, in many countries, "education departments" and "educational institutions" cannot be cleanly distinguished, and even in the U.S., where schools may be nominally independent, there are, of course, massive interrelationships.

The opinion that government ministries are intrinsically corrupt is parallel to the opinion that corporations are intrinsically corrupt, and that anyone who is an employee of a corporation should be excluded. It's a POV, obviously; those holding it may imagine that there is some collection of people free from bias and taint, probably meaning themselves and their friends.

It's a fantasy. A true project to compile and present all human knowledge must work with all humans, not some select and politically correct subset. At least that would be the ideal, perfection might not be attainable, but we will not even approach it if we don't recognize the possibility.

In this case, the Italian Ministry in question, according to the Wikipedia article, is responsible for "Antiquity and Fine Arts, and Academies and Libraries." One would think that collaboration between the Ministry and the WMF would be of high potential value.

Meanwhile, on-wiki, another user complained about the block mentioned here:

Please unblock this IP as soon as you can, as noted above by Adb [sic, Abd] that's one of the out-facing IP addresses of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali in Italy - that means blocking thousands of people from editing. I found myself blocked this morning to my surprise. --Steko (talk) 08:49, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

(Steko doesn't say, but it is not impossible that this IP is being used by libraries affiliated with the Ministry, these are not necessarily Ministry employees.)

Remarkably, the issue was noticed by Sj (the WMF trustee), and he actually unblocked Sghezza on en.wikipedia. But that unblock is useless as long as the IP Sghezza is using is globally blocked. This was a quite straightforward situation, made complex by steward culture that ignores policy and, instead, protects stewards from being corrected if they err.

In private discussion, Vituzzu apparently convinced Ajraddatz that there was some reason to suspect Sghezza of being "tamburellista." Without pointing to it, Ajraddatz agrees that it is possible. But anything is possible. The issue is whether or not many, many people are blocked based on a suspicion that one long-term-abuser -- if tamburellista really is that, some of Vituzzu's lta's are not -- is using the same IP. There has been no pointing to *any* abuse. This is what Ajraddatz wrote:

Just a note that I've discussed this with Vituzzu (stewards see ML), and do agree that there is behavioural similarities which could suggest sockpuppetry, though not with the other accounts that he was blocked with on enwiki. That said, there is no indication of any other socks, and Sghezza hasn't been very disruptive - I'd be OK with giving them some rope and seeing what comes of it. Worst case scenario we can lock/block again, best case we've allowed a good user to return. Ajraddatz (talk) 23:43, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

The whole point of the original requirement that discussions be on-wiki is so that misleading argument, that would be recognized as such by the community, doesn't propagate uncritically. Ajraddatz does give the basic wiki answer:

Sghezza hasn't been very disruptive .... worst case scenario was can lock/block again, best case we've allowed a good user to return.

In the discussions I've seen and been involved in, vague language is used to protect the misbehaving steward: "hasn't been very disruptive" then allows Vituzzu to save face. I.e., it implies that there was some disruption. In fact, no disruption has been shown. None. We can speculate on what Vituzzu wrote.

In fact, what happened here was that Ajraddatz reviewed the case, apparently taking some care, and found zero problem. So he unlocked. Vituzzu then, next day, blocked the IP that Sghezza had been using to appeal, but, without mentioning that, wrote "I no longer care about it," instead of providing some actual information.

The behavior is utterly outrageous, equivalent to wheel-warring, it is only that the object itself is not a huge issue, i.e., Sghezza is an editor with very few edits. It was behavior like this, some of it with much larger implications, that was being uncovered in the study that Vittuzu and his friend M7 deleted and arranged to be suppressed. I do find it remarkable that nobody has asked me for that content, if they don't have the oversight privilege, or looked at it and confirmed that it was suppressable. Remember, outrageous incivility and even some illegal content will only be revision deleted.

The lack of concern continues to demonstrate to me that the WMF wikis are largely lost, unless something drastic happens, far out of the norm. Sj's involvement here might be a positive sign. Or not. He took a small step. Will he complete it?

[Abd]

Okay the Sghezza issue appears resolved; however, the resolution demonstrates how important it is to Billinghurst to preserve the appearance that nothing untoward happened. Billinghurst did, in fact, frustrate Vituzzu's obvious attempt to undo the effect of the unlock of Sghezza by Ajraddatz. He wrote this:

I have modified this from a hard block to a soft block, as an intermediate solution worth trialling, such existing accounts need to login to edit. {{ping|Steko}} If we can prevail on your goodwill. If there is a means for this general issue to be raised by social means in the Ministry (internal yammer?) about (ab)use of Wikimedia wikis, that may be helpful. If abuse becomes problematic then we are more likely to tighten again and look to use block exemptions. It is a right PITA, however, the options to chase the person down though your complaints systems, or look for self-regulation. Thanks. billinghurst 06:33, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

Great. Looks reasonable, if people don't know what happened. "Compromise." Nice. However, what abuse? Was there abuse? When? The IP may be a library IP, the users may just be ordinary members of the public using a library. (I certainly don't know, Steko didn't say, just that he could not edit -- and obviously, later, he could. He may have gone home or somewhere else.)

Notice, the suggestion is to raise an issue of abuse of Wikipedia, but no example of abuse was given. In other words, the suggestion is totally useless. I think it is only being done to save face for Vituzzu.

Essentially, if there is actually a problem, revealing it can allow other users to watch out for edits. The stewards do a lot to deal with spam, and perhaps to deal with "long-term abuse," though that is iffier. By not sharing information, however, they end up doing it alone. And then they burn out.

Okay, I tried to find information on "tamburellista" and this time something leapt out at me, from 2010. A blocked IP complained, and wrote:

Again I request unblock of IP 193.206.126.34 because it's part of 50 computers in a national library in Italy where thousands different persons connect every day: 1 year global block is by user:M7 for insults but from solo guy in single language. I would like edit for support your project but it's impossible because this IP is static in all computers here in national library; evidence: see http://toolserver.org/~chm/whois.php?ip=193.206.126.34

To all admins I assert: I am not Italian but I am Croat and my name is Milan! You check: http://toolserver.org/~luxo/contributio ... 206.126.34 all edits from IP are valid and no vandalism! Evidence examples: 1 and 2 Admins M7 and Vituzzu where found insults? They can block IP in site of insults but 1 year global block is absurd and punitive for thousands different persons who connect in a national library free open for people's use! Consider this point: why punish guys who simple want to edit and develop wikipedia like as me?

The IP actually is a library IP, I checked. The luxo tool is dead. (Meta and the wikis depend on quite a number of tools that have been going dark lately.) The response:

You vandalised pt.wiki, it.wiki, en.wiki and simple.wiki (here some sockpuppet of yours): aren't these cross-wiki vandalisms?. Please don't lie you're italian but even if you were croatian you'd be just a troll. Thousands of users? It seems that just two people are using this ip, you and sometime (really rarely) another non-vandal one, please stop lying. --Vituzzu 14:18, 26 February 2010 (UTC)

I've seen this a number of times from Vituzzu. He cites evidence. If one looks at it, there is nothing intelligible there. M7 did the same thing, he provided, at one point, a link to a search on it.wiki for a user name, as proof of severe disruption. That was one of the pieces of evidence that I examined in the deleted/suppressed antispam study, I looked up every occurrence. In Italian. I don't read Italian, so I had to google translate a pile of stuff. There was far less there than what he had claimed. It was fluff. (There really had been some disruption, but for a short time.) But who checks?

In another report, M7 provided "evidence", on the face, but really only pointed to contributions for the IP. The IP edits do show, for that period, evidence that the user was from the former Yugoslavia, he was not necessarily lying as Vituzzu so casually claimed (but was using an Italian library, as he acknowledged). Over time, this IP shows wide-ranging interests. The IP actually is library IP, and at various times, only one user might be using it to edit the WMF wikis. But at any time, another person could use it. Long IP blocks on Wikipedia are deprecated for this reason. But the stewards live in a different universe; unfortunately, if they globally block your IP and it is a hard block, you cannot edit any of the wikis unless you have the IP block exemption flag. That old report from 2010, and the current flap, were singularly evidence-free. it's like making an accusation of trolling on enwiki and, for evidence, linking to massive contributions by a user, with no specifics. When one looks, edits seem normal, or occasionally there might be a problem. The last 1000 contributions, globally, from 193.206.126.34, supposedly tamburellista. The same for 151.12.58.2

It is very obvious. The stewards do not believe that they have any obligation to document what they do, to show evidence. (or even to make a checkuser claim that X and Y are the same user. -- which would be very iffy for library computers!) This is library IP, so there may well be some bad editing in there. However, what does that have to do with the specific user Sghezza, in the time period in question? As far as anything I have seen, there is one common thread only: M7 and Vituzzu.

[Ajraddatz]

I was linked to this, so I think I'll provide a quick response :-)

The stewards do not believe that they have any obligation to document what they do, to show evidence.

Apologies for that. I personally think that accountability is important, though sometimes do take the easy road of referencing generalities instead of specifics. Also a note with the mailing list; it can be good for getting input from stewards who aren't active on meta, as well as discussing any topics which deal with private information - it's not a move towards as little accountability as possible.

For the Sghezza case, the evidence is largely behavioural. Compare, for example, the contributions of https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciale: ... ti/Sghezza and https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciale: ... i/Schivoso - the latter is another alleged sockpuppet. The topics that both accounts are editing are very similar. Other similarities include unblock requests from other alleged socks which match the format of Sghezza's unblock requests very closely. That said, there's no connection with any other accounts via CheckUser, so the evidence in this case is present though perhaps not compelling for some. Hence my own suggestion to unlock and see what happens.

It's difficult dealing with these cases, because there is no vandalism outright coming from a lot of these accounts. Similar deal with Bambifan and a few other "long-term abusers". I personally try to not lock accounts unless they are vandalizing regardless of who they allegedly are, but other stewards do differently. I don't think there's one right way of handling those cases.

Please note that I do not support you using this medium as a platform to criticize Vituzzu's actions. I'd like to think that such concerns could be brought up on-wiki and investigated/actioned on more effectively. But I know you've tried this unsuccessfully, so perhaps I am naive in that thought.

[Abd]

I was linked to this, so I think I'll provide a quick response :-)

The stewards do not believe that they have any obligation to document what they do, to show evidence.

Apologies for that.

Thanks, Ajraddatz, especially thanks for showing up here. I do have a sense of what you are facing.

I personally think that accountability is important, though sometimes do take the easy road of referencing generalities instead of specifics.

It is very obvious that some stewards do a vast amount of work, and if they specifically documented all of it, it would take even more time. I'm sympathetic to that. One avenue of approach would be how Wikipedia handles, say, speedy deletion. However, Wikipedia also has process for appeal. It is the appeal process that is missing. If an action is questioned, someone has taken the time to question it. There are ways of handling this without taking up *too much time.* However, it's quite clear: SRG on meta is not a discussion page. I actually support that, except that there should be a page where specific decisions are discussed. Right now, if one is blocked, there is no clear guidance. People will be told to go to SRG, where decisions may be abrupt and poorly-explained.

Also a note with the mailing list; it can be good for getting input from stewards who aren't active on meta, as well as discussing any topics which deal with private information - it's not a move towards as little accountability as possible.

I don't think it was intended as such, but when decisions are justified by reference to the list, it is possibly being used that way. ArbCom has been around and about this issue. Because the ArbCom mailing list was hacked at one point, we know that much of the discussion there has nothing to do with protecting private information, it has to do with arbitrators doing something else, an apparent goal being the presentation of conclusions on-wiki rather than discussion, as Arbitration process would imply happens on-wiki, based on evidence and argument. What I know about ArbCom is that public trust in it is fairly low, as a result of how the process developed.

For the Sghezza case, the evidence is largely behavioural. Compare, for example, the contributions of https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciale: ... ti/Sghezza and https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciale: ... i/Schivoso - the latter is another alleged sockpuppet. The topics that both accounts are editing are very similar. Other similarities include unblock requests from other alleged socks which match the format of Sghezza's unblock requests very closely.

I'll review that. My position has never been that Vituzzu was "wrong," but that he is making decisions that, on a more mature project like Wikipedia, would not be implemented, though they might be proposed. Your stand on this was quite what I'd expect on Wikipedia. I'll note that the evidence you cited is on it.wiki, but Sghezza was not blocked there. Global lock policy was not designed to use as it is being used by Vituzzu.

That said, there's no connection with any other accounts via CheckUser, so the evidence in this case is present though perhaps not compelling for some. Hence my own suggestion to unlock and see what happens.

Indeed. That is what would normally be done on Wikipedia, unless there was a clear pattern of disruption, not merely similarity of interest.

It's difficult dealing with these cases, because there is no vandalism outright coming from a lot of these accounts.

It is only "difficult" if one thinks that action is necessary. Vituzzu has been very open about his position. He "hates" promotion. And he is impatient with policy. This is a dangerous combination in a steward.

Similar deal with Bambifan and a few other "long-term abusers". I personally try to not lock accounts unless they are vandalizing regardless of who they allegedly are, but other stewards do differently. I don't think there's one right way of handling those cases.

I don't think that there is, either. However, what exists of global lock policy did not contemplate pre-emptive use, merely from some risk. What I've seen is a decision that a user is engaged in cross-wiki disruption, with no evidence, no cross-wiki editing, only some evidence or suspicion of sock puppetry. And no cross-wiki disruption from any of the accounts, and I've only seen this emanating from it.wiki, through the two stewards, M7 and Vituzzu, though M7 is not nearly as active this way as Vituzzu.

Lack of policy support is not a reason for not acting where one sees harm. However, then, it would be important to be open for review, and for the development of clearer policy -- or correction by the community. Without that review, actions come to be taken that would never be approved by the community on review. I've brought up a couple of cases, at least three, on SRG or the Talk:Spam blacklist, and I think you know what happened.

Please note that I do not support you using this medium as a platform to criticize Vituzzu's actions. I'd like to think that such concerns could be brought up on-wiki and investigated/actioned on more effectively. But I know you've tried this unsuccessfully, so perhaps I am naive in that thought.

Indeed.

What happened was that Billinghurst suggested I file an RfC if I didn't like what was being done. Sure. However, I wouldn't file a meta RfC over some single action I disagreed with. I might file it over a pattern of actions. And even more, I might file it to clarify and establish policy. However, filing a policy RfC without a study of what is actually being done, is a formula for creating one of two things: an RfC that is ignored, or a train wreck. Hence I started to formally study the antispam situation in documents in my user space. I put weeks of effort into this. There was no immediate need for anyone to respond to them, nobody was being "harrassed." Before they were used, there would have been plenty of opportunity for correction or clarification.

I think that, once, I referred to a document for some evidence, in the ereticopedia blacklisting case. I announced the studies on the Forum and solicited participation, and/or correction. A steward and a global sysop had commented on an attached talk page. There was no hint of any problem.

And then Vituzzu deleted one page, relating to IP accused of being Kurt4. Nothing was on that page that wasn't in public logs or readily accessible. Nobody's privacy was violated without their consent (unless it is the "privacy" of a Steward, which is not, by policy, protected in this way). (I'm in communication with Daniele Santarelli, a real person, accused of being Kurt4 by Vituzzu, and he knows what I'm doing. I do not know who Kurt4 is, though he is probably a member of the fairly large editorial board of ereticopedia, which would be a small set to consider, since we know that Kurt4 lives in Italy -- Santarelli, while Italian, lives in France.)

So, anyway, the violation of privacy is in edit histories and logs, by Vituzzu, it wasn't on that page.) And then, next day, M7 deleted all the pages, both the antispam study pages and the beginnings at drafting RfC. And I was threatened with a block if I even requested undeletion. Vituzzu had earlier threatened me, when I questioned an action of his, during his confirmation election.

Ajraddatz, there is a situation there, it's ugly, and it is damaging the wikis. How badly, I don't know, because I'd never gotten to studying Vituzzu's actions overall. While it was a set of incidents involving Vituzzu that got my attention, so I started there, I had moved into studying *all steward actions*, particularly using the lock tool. And the most active steward was Billinghurst, so the first specific steward action study was of him. I'd have moved next to Trijnstel, the next most active. Vituzzu is way down the list.

Billinghurst either did not know what I was doing, certainly did not understand it, because of his rant on my talk page. "Nitpicking." Of course! Except not nits. Detail. I didn't find any problematic pattern with Billinghurst, only what might need to be documented in policy. I.e., lots of accounts are being globally locked *with no edits at all,* Tons. I have a pretty good idea of what is happening, and it's not necessarily wrong. However, it's moved outside what the public can verify and understand, which is a transparency problem. There are ways of handling this, but it isn't going to happen if study and discussion are prohibited.

And they are.

So, Ajraddatz, if not here, where? It is possible to do studies on Wikiversity, but it could also damage the wiki, because it is certainly possible that a steward would delete pages there. I had studied the first "Vituzzu situation" there, but only because we needed to understand the Augusto De Luca situation, to make a local decision. So far, no hint that this might be deleted.

What is really worrisome, Ajraddatz, is that the studies on meta were not just deleted, they were suppressed, so that even administrators could not read them. There was nothing there that was worthy of suppression. I'd claim not even deletion, but suppression? And, of course, except for one of the pages, I do have copies. I'll put them up at some point. And it will be visible to anyone who cares to check, that there was no "harassment" there, that the deletion reason was deceptive, and that the real reason was to protect Vituzzu from visiblity through documentation of his actions.