User:SMcCandlish/Discretionary sanctions 2013–2018 review
This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
This page in a nutshell: There has not been a Wikipedia-wide, open review of the WP:AC/DSR ) revision of these procedures; what some of the unintended negative consequences of these procedures have been; and some ways to mitigate them. |
Most of this was written 25 November 2015. I've started to provide nutshell summaries (one section so far) in a first step toward compression to a "PowerPoint" version, and have also updated some passages to reflect post-2015 happenings. Timestamp of my most recent substantive update to this review essay: — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 07:11, 21 November 2020 (UTC) Feel free to suggest updates, additions, corrections, etc. on the talk page.
Disclaimers and notes
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The crux: ArbCom's assumptions about DS's effectiveness are false
The {{
As for the second, fear is not peace, and reluctance to be involved is not collaborative participation, it's just another means to the end of
By contrast, for someone on a mission to "
The 2013 approach was more of a rubber-stamp copyedit than an real review
"Lipstick on a pig": Polishing the documentation doesn't fix the bugs
The entire
A vague, overbroad, and counterproductive scope
Some form of and approach to DS is needed, but it's only needed for intractable "holy war" behavior in topics like ethnic/nationalist disputes, and whether an alleged therapy is fringe quackery or real science. And it needs to focus on the effect on the encyclopedia, not whether a productive editor was being not quite polite enough to someone advancing a snake-oil or racialist agenda. WP has way more important things to do than manners enforcement when it comes to topics like that, and it's disheartening to everyone who cares about this being an actual encyclopedia, not some giant social networking game, to have AE and ArbCom focus on punishing people for their temperamental imperfections instead of for programmatically warping content and process to favor their external agendas, and studiously thwarting consensus formation.
DS must no longer be used hypocritically to punitively thwart dispute resolution
The last three sentences of the "Guidance for editors" section (of the current AC/DS page) badly need revision, to properly reflect that the primary purpose of the forums it mentions are for the airing and resolution of inter-editor grievances. The present wording and the variant before it have for several years been used as an excuse to permit all sorts of vile attacks on whomever is being pilloried as long as angry admins seeking to punish them don't care how they're being verbally abused, but turned into a particularly nasty form of thought-crime policing any time some admin wants to shut up someone who is criticizing someone they'd rather not see criticized (or simply because they don't like the editor doing the criticizing). As it's presently written, in a weasely way that on first reading seems reasonable, it defies the very nature of DR on WP, while missing the point entirely. DR largely consists of "casting aspersions" and an adversarial approach between editors. That's why it's a dispute and why we have boards for resolving it.
What actually matters in these disputes is a particular bright line of civility that should not be crossed. Like a highway divider, it has two stripes, detailed below.
A. Casting of aspersions that are unprovable by their very nature
"Show the door to trolls, vandals, and wiki-anarchists, who, if permitted, would waste your time and create a poisonous atmosphere here."
- Larry Sanger, on Wikipedia:Etiquette
Note he didn't say "blunt people, straight-shooters, and wiki-defenders".
I think Wikipedia never solved the problem of how to organize itself in a way that didn't lead to mob rule .... People that I would say are trolls sort of took over. The inmates started running the asylum.
- Larry Sanger, interview: Schwartz, Zach (11 November 2015). "Wikipedia's Co-Founder Is Wikipedia's Most Outspoken Critic". Vice.
This is the most common and most poisonous form of aspersion-casting that we actually need to address, clearly and without confusing it with other forms of allegation (legitimate or illegitimate).
This especially pertains to aspersions about another editor's motivation, belief, intent, or other mentality matters that no one could actually know except by mind-reading powers. This does not mean using "your edit was..." instead of "that edit was", and it does not mean vernacular constructions like "you just want this article to say..." that don't really imply psychic knowledge of another's thought processes, but are a shorthand encapsulation of observed editing patterns. It certainly does include "You're just a shill for Microsoft", and "the only reason you edit this page it to push a neo-Nazi agenda", or "your prurient obsession with this subject's gender identity ...".
However, what's is usually missed is that an accusation (including by an admin seeking to impose sanctions) that party X "is assuming bad faith" is also a violation of that bright do-not-cross line unless X has made an allegation that unambiguously questions another editor's faith and cannot back it up with evidence. If they have reasonable evidence, they are not assuming, but making a reasoned evaluation under
Point A is also important because it is essentially impossible to address programmatic
Leaping on failures do this perfectly as things to treat punitively with discretionary sanctions does not work. All it does is teach the PoV-pushers how to
Admins and noticeboard !voters frequently cross this line in another way, the allegation that an editor "cannot" change, is "incapable" of collaboration, or is mentally incompetent in some other way.
B. Accusations of disruptive acts that aren't demonstrated by the evidence presented
This is the second most common and detrimental form of unjustifiable accusatory behavior that we actually need to address, clearly and without confusing it with other forms of allegation (legitimate or illegitimate).
Note that this does not mean "which were not diffed again for the umpteeth time, and every single time the accusation has ever been made". This cannot be stressed enough. If an allegation is made and it has been demonstrated before, or can be demonstrated easily enough, especially if it's based on a long-term pattern of similar behavior, it's natural and reasonable to bring that allegation to a venue for addressing editorial behavior, as long as one is prepared to prove it (again) within a reasonable amount of time, on request.
As with point A, this is another area where hypocritical enforcement happens constantly, with admins or noticeboard pile-ons, hot to sanction someone, making a long string of rather nasty accusations as the basis for the punishment they want to inflict but without actually proving any of it. Or an admin (who did not do any real background examination on a dispute) sanctioning on the spot which ever party they don't like, they disagree with, or they think just wasn't quiet enough, when what they allegedly did wrong was re-mentioning but not re-diffing something already well-proven in previous noticeboard disputes, etc. Such "secretly involved" admin approach very often blatantly allows the favored party in the dispute to vent and vent all kinds of unreasonable, unprovable nastiness.
I've seen someone do this at AE, while under a topic ban about the issue in the request, and not a party to the request in any way but just there out of vexatiousness, and while the entire focus of the request was on aspersion casting without evidence, yet they got away with it because their target was not popular with the admins there that day, who even criticized enforcement of the topic ban against the interloper. I kid you not. I'll be happy to provide the links on request via e-mail (the editor in question was eventually indeffed, by ANI, even as AE punished his target, and I'm not comfortable naming an indeffed editor in public who cannot speak in his own defense now). It happened again recently, where an admin actually disrupted an ongoing ANEW proceeding to one-sidedly sanction one party in favor of the other, despite the hammered party actually having proven their case with a large number of diffs and external sources, and the other simply engaging in civil-PoV denialism (same deal: I'll demonstrate that in e-mail if necessary, but that dispute has quieted and need not be rekindled).
High alert cannot last forever, and DS generally should not permanently cloud entire categories
DS being applied to a topic area must have a time limit (6 months, 1 year, whatever), at which point the DS can be renewed if an amendment request makes a good case to do so. The present rule is "Discretionary sanctions are authorised ... by committee motion. Once authorised, they may only be revoked by committee motion. ... When it becomes apparent that discretionary sanctions for an area of conflict are no longer necessary, the committee may be asked to rescind the authorisation of them". One should not have to file what amounts to a new legalistic case at ArbCom to prove that a major alteration of normal WP operation should continue; the burden of proof belongs on those who think that WP process is still continually failing at that locus of the project. A time limit system wouldn't even change that rule, it would just entail the authorisation including a time span on a case-by-case basis (I would suggest 6 months by default; that's often long enough to stir the editorial pot and get new people involved). This could also obviate the "expired-alert immunity" loophole. DS should not last forever-by-default, because intelligent editors who avoid drama – the kind most needed to make an article great – tend to steer clear of DS topics, making the shaky quality and poor atmosphere at these article a self-fulfilling prophecy. That said, if some topic areas are going to remain under DS indefinitely (i.e., are shoo-ins for renewal because ongoing strife continues), then deeply involved participants can no longer be allowed to escape DS because of notice-related bureaucracy; if they're involved they're involved and they know about the DS.
And it's not just a problem with individual admins imposing this or that individual sanction without an expiration. The problem is endemic to the entire DS system, and predates it, going back to its origins as "article probation". One only has to look at the
Ds/alerts are still perceived as threats, not "notice" or "awareness"
Despite all the efforts to make them seem non-threatening and neutrally informative (including a "look and feel" overhaul a couple of years ago, primarily at my own prompting), the {{
The bare fact of the matter is that more often than not, when a regular editor leaves a Ds/alert [why isn't that "DS/alert"?] they're doing it as a threat, a warning that if the other editor doesn't back off, they can expect a nasty pile of drama. But when an admin leaves one, it's also and even more so a threat, a very direct one that the editor can definitely expect a discretionary (i.e. out-of-process, judge-jury-executioner) sanction if they do not basically flee the topic area in terror.
This is the bed ArbCom has made, but we all have to lie in it, and many of us are not comfortable since it's made of nails, and the AE crowd love to hammer them into whomever is handy, if I may mix a few metaphors. [I wrote that sentence that way on purpose to illustrate the previous point that a vernacular turn of phrase about an observed pattern is not literally an imputation of emotional state. I'm sure that what even the most hard-assed Robocop admins actually love are their families and the other most important things in their real lives. They find strongly punitive administrative action here appropriate for reasons that vary from person to person.]
"Awareness" double-think and loopholes, mutating over time
2018 Update: As of December 2017 – January 2018, several incoming, departing, and still-sitting members of ArbCom have made it clear that pages having talk page banners and/or editnotices about DS are insufficient. A notifier bot was proposed at WP:VPPRO , and received about 50/50 support (much of the opposition grounded in the incorrect idea that the community could not require ArbCom to do anything). |
The section on what constitutes awareness in
While the present AC/DS page does not contain this wording, it weirdly dropped the part about "been sanctioned [in] the area of conflict". While it retains "participated in any process about the area of conflict at arbitration requests or arbitration enforcement", the entire point of DS is that it doesn't require any such process, but can be applied any time at any editor's discretion. So, this is yet another loophole, I think the fourth that I've identified (see prior thread linked above). While the present AC/DS page no longer has "were mentioned by name in the Final Decision of the case", and does include participation in a relevant RfArb or AE discussion as sufficient, it didn't include ARCA discussions, nor does it include other discussions, e.g. at noticeboards or in user talk. In such cases it actually would be clear that the user was really aware of the DS about the topic. Loophole #5, then.
This is why my earlier post about this* focuses on getting rid of the bureaucratic approach to "awareness"; it's a loophole factory, and awareness of DS should be a common sense matter like everything else is on WP. ANI and other noticeboards have no trouble sussing out whether an editor under examination was aware of a policy, of previous warnings, of the disruptiveness of their actions, etc., so this should be no different. "Ignorance is no exception" is part of virtually every legal and other rules system on the planet, and should apply on Wikipedia as well. The entire idea of being immune to repercussions because you didn't know what you were doing was bad is not practical in any system of governance.
'
A much simpler system – We assume anyone who has edited more than trivially at a page the talk page of which has a DS banner, or anyone ever told of or discussing DS relating to that topic, is aware of the DS, and doesn't magically become "dis-aware" of them on day 366.'
The Judge Dredd club at AE is a frat party that's gone too far for too long
While
There need to be limits on length of time and number of actions that any one admin can take under AE colors (6 months on 6 off, etc.).
We must also have an elevated standard of non-
There also needs to be more community involvement in AE, so that it operates normally and sensibly, like our more familiar, other noticeboards, instead of being an special admin playground in which borderline hostility to non-admins' views is the modus operandi.
Any review of WP:AC/DS is necessarily going to have to be a review of WP:AE, since AE's sole function appears to be to bring down the DS hammer on other editors.
The appeals process is confused, false process, and a failure of ArbCom's mission
Admins can't do the right thing to ease sanctions without new bureaucratic drama
Here's why (from
Admins cannot clarify or reduce, much less overturn, the DS actions of another admin (even one who is AWOL), no matter how egregious, unless a new drama-factory is fired up at AE,
ArbCom and AE generally seem to just not get it that a wrongful DS sanction, even a seemingly minor one, may be enough to 1) drive a productive editor into quitting, or 2) be used as leverage in every possible dispute by combative PoV pushers to chill and silence that editor and others like him/her, which is liable to lead right back to point 1. It's genuinely important that one admin be able to undo the actions of another if they have good reason to question them, short of
AC/DS's present operation actually exceeds ArbCom's authority
At no point did the community ever ratify the idea that it could radically change WP's administrative operations in ways that a) empower "lone wolf" admins to impose effectively permanent and usually unappealable sanctions on a whim, and b) prevent anyone else in the community, even other admins, from doing anything about it, short of a
The community is clearly dissatisfied with the appeals process, for real reasons
The community's perennial demands for some kind of additional appeal body, with non-admin, non-arb sitting members (e.g. on a rotating volunteer basis) arises directly from the bureaucratic morass that leads to the present appeals process being a sham[bles]. While no consensus has emerged on how exactly to address it, there quite clearly is a consensus that appeals are "broken". Once the DS hounds have been set loose there is basically no way to get their teeth out of your ankle, even if you were not trespassing, short of something pretty close to divine intervention. That's not really a process, it's a façade erected to disguise the fact that there is no effective process.
A secondary but serious effect of this problem is that sanctions that would have been temporary had the community arrived at them via normal noticeboard processes are effectively forever if applied under DS and the admin didn't happen to set a time limit, and doesn't like you enough to consider your request for one later. AE/AN generally won't do it, and ArbCom at ARCA usually won't either.
The obvious solution to this problem, short of creating some new Appeals Committee or whatever, is to make
"Only by the editor under sanction" – NOT!
Almost amusingly, the first statement in the "Appeals and modifications" section is misleading nonsense: "Appeals may be made only by the editor under sanction and only for a currently active sanction.
" I know this for a fact, because after two years of trying to get a bogus DS action vacated, and being ignored by
Not only that, but the DS action in question was entirely moot as an "active sanction"; the appeal was about the retention of a false accusation in the DS log. So, not only is the "rule" not a rule, in at least one case the only way that justice was served was by ignoring both prongs of the "rule" simultaneously. See also the previous policy observation:
Today's DS is a self-undermining "judicial activism" process that guarantees unjust results
This is unbelievable
"Nothing in this current version of the Discretionary Sanctions process constitutes grounds for appeal of a remedy or restriction imposed under prior versions of it"(also found in the 2013 version). This needs to be vacated, and nothing like it ever written again here. If the process was flawed, you don't fix it but tell people suffering under the flawed version that they're screwed. Again, this is a basic principle of post-Medieval justice. If you stop making homosexuality or publication of anti-establishment pamphlets a crime, you let the gays and pamphleteers out of prison. Duh.
Fortunately, this provision isn't just ethically wrong, it has not even been consistently obeyed anyway. Though it took two years, I was able to successfully appeal something, and it was ultimately the common sense of how DS works after
DS applied to policy formation is out-of-scope, and harms WP self-governance
2017 Update: Some of the issue identified in this section have been mitigated by WP:POLICY pages. |
Proceeding with the "judicial activism" theme in the previous section, this is a fairly extensive essay unto itself, making an argument that is politico-ethical, socio-anthropological, philosophical, and pragmatic. The nutshell version:
- Our "judiciary", ArbCom, has no business trying to use our "executive branch" of admins to micromanage the internal deliberations of our internal "legislature" of policy formation processes, as it is doing in WP:ARBATC by wrongfully applying DS to that case. DS are a remedy that the community accepted (barely) because it was seen as probably necessary to restrain a completely different kind of dispute, namely intractable fighting over encyclopedia content, mostly ethno-political, or faith-vs.-science in nature. It's badly monkey-wrenching a significant aspect of WP's internal self-governance processes, and the use of admins to do it is a three-way corrosion of separation of powers, especially given the hostility that so many admins show toward the subject matter of ARBATC and toward editors involved in that policypage area.
An explication of this in detail follows.
There's an inescapable
The purpose of the legislative branch in any socio-political conglomeration of people, be it multi-nation confederation, or a small town, a world power, or a corporation and it policies, is to evenly regulate the "civic" behavior of its "citizens" for mutual contentment and productivity. It is not to dictate to the other branches how they go about their business within their own governance roles. A prime minister does not tell judges how to interpret the law. The courts do not make the procedural rules of the legislature. The legislative body does not determine presidential directives or law enforcement priorities. And so on. Aside from these roles, everyone is a citizen, subject to the same rules, enforcement, and adjudication.
DS is (even if nominally preventative not punitive) a judicial restraint – a reduction of freedom and autonomy – exercised against the subject "public" by executive officers. WP's community of "citizenry" has allowed the erection of this system of enforcement because it seems necessary to quell "civil unrest" in certain topic areas, like unto gang wars on city streets. The problem here is that it's been taken, wrongly, as blanket license to tell the legislature that it may not debate loudly, and that if anyone raises their voice they'll be banned from the capitol. Given that various members of the administration have evinced a desire to impose silence on the legislature, this is recipe for disaster.
In actual practice, the results have been very detrimental, leading to a resignations of long-term editors over unjust punitive treatment, effective derailing of proposals, emboldening of
Internal policy debates in any organization can become heated. But they're qualitatively different from content debates at articles and their talk pages, just as the UK's notorious rancorous Parliament debates are not comparable to football-hooligan violence outbreaks at arenas (even if some of the innate hominid behavioral instincts underly them all).
DS needs to be removed from all non-encyclopedia-content cases, and never again applied outside them. It's not legitimately within ArbCom's authority to interfere with the Wikipedia community's ability to self-govern, even if some of the debates it gets into in the process cause some temporarily lost tempers. There are other mechanisms (particularly ANI and AN) for dealing with these matters if they get out of hand – community processes, not vigilante admins. And DS simply doesn't work in internal matters. All it does it give carte blanche to infrequent but agenda-pushing visitors to those projectpages, who mostly do not have {{
s on their talk pages, to act out with near-impunity, while their victims have to remain obsequious or silent for fear that a predictable cluster of hammer-them-hard admins will descend in a pack to punish them for defending themselves and the project's stability.
That last point really matters: It's an order of magnitude more important that our policypages remain comparatively stable than that any particular line item in them be just so (perhaps with a few exceptions, most of which were imposed on us from on high by
Because of what's at stake, it's frequently necessary to show how irrational something is, or how biased (even if, yes, this would be done in a non-WP:JERK manner). But every editor who dares to do so more than a handful of times it at risk of disproportionate AE / DS enforcement, because it gets noticed, and someone can falsely claim its a "pattern of battlegrounding" or other bad-faith projection. An admin with a bone to pick, or who simply has not looked into the issue in any detail, is apt to side with the complainant, even if they're actual being disruptive (shopping for a new "parent" to ask, falsifying sources, relentlessly pushing a fringe viewpoint, refusing to accept a consensus decision because they weren't around to get their say, or whatever). The challengers to various central points of internal-process consensus tend to be random, from all corners.
The "shepherds", the institutional memory, of what that consensus is, when and where it was determined, and on what rationales, against what other rationales, are a limited and fairly slowly changing group. DS makes that group change more rapidly, but by nothing but shrinkage, with a concomitant loss of institutional memory and stability. It's getting to the point these days where on some of these pages the same tired old consensus matter is getting "re-legislated" in increasingly frequent repeated challenges (e.g. multiple mile-long flamewars on the Village Pump within a few months of each other, in which opponents of established consensus demonize its defenders in remarkably crappy terms with no repercussions of any kind, yet raising no new issues).
DS in ARBATC in particular has become a trojan horse for seemingly unending
DS is procedurally unclear, even as to what rules are authoritative
It's not even obvious to everyone what rules are actually in force and must be applied. While
The following are amended: ... the provisions inWP:AC/DSpage, not to a diff of any particular version of the page. It's thus directly stated to anyone reading the review page that they should ignore what presently appears at AC/DS, as historical / void. It has not been amended to say that this instruction was superseded in 2014, and that WP:AC/DS has been revised and is now the controlling document again.If someone goes and looks at WP:AC/DS, it says at the top,
"This updated Discretionary sanctions procedure was authorised by motion on 3 May 2014 and superseded and replaced all prior discretionary sanction provisions with effect from that date.", reinforcing the confusion. It doesn't link to or name the review page, and the link it does provide is just to the ratification notice of some post-review modification motion that I'm skeptical many people knew about at all, not to that discussion itself which people could compare with the review and realize that they're different. It's a fair bet that many editors who remember that there was a review and where it was will think that this note atop AC/DS refers to that review, not a "re-review" that came later; they'd have to remember or notice the 2013/2014 difference, the only indication anywhere that these were two separate revision processes. Meanwhile, the 2013 review page never mentions this 2014 modification, and still asserts that it supersedes the entire ARCA page! This isn't really much of a version control challenge, yet here we are with conflicting DS pages, each claiming to supersede the other. We call this aWP:CONTENTFORK.Given that the entire point of the 2013 review, and of the DS/alert system is stated to have been clarity, unambiguity, and reduction of bureaucracy, the opposite has been the result. This is strongly evidenced throughout my review, I just include this last bit as kind of the opposite of a cherry on top.
DS is one of the primary causes of "adminship is no big deal" not being true anymore, and thus of decline in number of admins
Overnight, DS turned adminship from "
WP:RFA) has radically changed from a once-simple process anyone competent could pass, into a grueling ordeal few editors will ever submit themselves to.This has had serious, cascading consequences:
- Our administrator pool is rapidly declining, and nearing the point where the system is no longer properly functional (many would argue it's already past that point, given the length of various
administrative backlogs).- The rate of RfAs has radically declined from several being ongoing at almost any time to often entire months with no candidates.
- RfA has become a hellhole, despite some attempts at reform. Failed candidates become so discouraged by the abuse they receive they fairly often quit the project, and few ever run again.
- Adminship is less appealing to
genuinely competenteditors, and more appealing to those seeking it as a position of power to abuse, of authority to wield, against an increasingly "peon" editorial pool – one chock full of admins at every turn, it is now only sporadically dotted with users who have the administrator bit.- Fear of losing more admins makes the community afraid to deal with administrative abuse or to create processes for this; we presently have no means at our disposal other than an ArbCom case, and that process is so legalistic and trying for all involved that it is extremely rare of administrative abuse to ever be challenged.
- Fear of being desysopped, should anyone have what it takes to get through the ArbCom red tape, makes good-acting admins afraid to do anything controversial: if a case is brought against them, they're likely to lose the bit, and have a very difficult time getting it back because the "new RfA" is such a nightmare.
Over the long haul, this is a recipe for disaster – it is a non-sustainable system. The entire notion of empowering admins to issue – on the basis of just their own opinion – long-term blocks, topic bans,
WP:AE.See also
Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Discretionary sanctions– the locus of all this trouble Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Discretionary sanctions/2013 review– the first and only community review of discretionary sanctions since implementation.
It was far more contentious than in it looks in this "whitewashed" form, because the large amount of dispute has been archived away:
Archive 1 Archive 2 Archive 3- Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Arbitration enforcement – June–August 2015 case that could have had a reformative effect, but did not
- Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Arbitration enforcement 2 – October–December 2015 case that could have had a reformative effect, but did not
- User:RGloucester/Sanctions – a history of sanctions on Wikipedia