the_mark wrote:the_grifter wrote:They were more dumb than I could have imagined in their target selection algorithm.
Hmmm. I was like, "Why Fram?" There are plenty more. I guess the choice did not matter.
Who should they have banned, if thinking straight? One higher up the food chain? Maybe an Arb?
Look at this bullshit.
Fram was a perfect choice for sending a message.
He was an Administrator, but only an Administrator. He was long serving, highly active, highly visible, friendless, and had a very long history of getting into conflicts but also getting free passes from the community, including right from the very top. Fram might be the only editor with all those characteristics.
The algorithm, as dumbo calls it, must have been programmed perfectly, given the requirements were obviously to identify an editor whose unblocked status perfectly demonstrated en.wiki has a systemic governance problem.
You can't attribute Fram being continually let off because of who his friends were, or because he was too powerful. You can attribute it to a sick culture where ordinary Administrators could quite easily insulate themselves from serious consequences for major misconduct if they just put enough good old fashioned spirit into their beatings. If they were considered a faithful community servant, acting on their wishes, treating users how the community wanted them treated, and not necessarily how policy said they should be treated.
Not even the fact he was a prominent critic of the WMF made him a poor target for their purposes, for who at the Foundation didn't jump for joy at the press reporting the fact that the asshole Wikipedians who have always hated the WMF, gleefully believed legally accountable corporate officers would engage in a corrupt conspiracy to silence a critic, rather than believe one of their own was really an asshole. The name of the game was to come out of this looking better than the asshole community, and they did.
Even better, the reaction of the assholes was so ridiculous, their community leaders are now on record admitting that once they were shown the dossier that the Foundation had built up as part of their investigation, that maybe the community did go off half-cocked, and had made ridiculous assertions about the supposed incompetence of the body corporate, who had actually done a pretty detailed job with full accounting of the quirks of the asshole community.