So, what's the deal? Well, in a controversy I'm just gonna call FRAMBAN because as a title for a scandal it's pretty punchy and to the point (see Ma!, I could have been a Wikipedia editor1), the Foundation has banned a long serving Administrator who goes by the pseudonym Fram, from Wikipedia. For reasons that I'll come to, this has been hugely controversial among the community. It is arguably one of the top five controversies to have ever rocked the their world, in the nearly twenty years they've been grinding on that millstone.
First, what is a Wikipedia Administrator, is the question you should never ask in company. It is merely a standard Wikipedia editor given a few extra buttons to help with the upkeep of Wikipedia, protect an article here, hide a copyright violation there. Just about their hardest job is to judge the magical consensus, the expression of a community gathering's settled will (or declaration of a lack thereof), by which all decisions by the community are arrived at (or not). Since it is not so different to just taking a stab and seeing if anyone important objects, it isn't really that hard.
Everything done on Wikipedia is meant to accord with one of their myriad of policies, documents arrived at through consensus, which are supposed to describe how they should do things, how to behave, how to write, etc. There is a safety valve called 'Ignore All Rules', an overarching policy that means what it says, but only if you can know in advance if you are genuinely merely invoking it to bypass some silly and illogical rules conflict for the greater good, and not to merely get your own way in a dispute where consensus would be absent or even against you if you had bothered to ask anyone. Understandably then, in the conflict loving community, this is one of the most widely misappropriated rules. It has been invoked often even in this Great Matter, unsurprisingly.
Originally cast as mere janitors, the Administrator's other power, to block editors, of course meant the role soon attracted great significance due to endless power plays and turf wars, and so as to reflect this, it has always been the community's expressed will, through policy, that Administrators should have exemplary judgement, excellent people skills, and in all things be held to the highest standards.
So, where does the Foundation fit into all this, is what you were dying to know. Well, for reasons no more complicated than humans are stupid and by extension so are lawmakers, the only way Wikipedia can survive is to let the community take all the editorial decisions, with the Foundation merely collecting the money that pays for the servers. The Foundation just sits there, removing content and blocking users if absolutely necessary, i.e. when in receipt of a valid legal complaint. But in what has weirdly become termed by the community as autonomous self-government, much of the work of Wikipedia is done by volunteers, as first responders to any and all complaints. You may be aware of the myriad of stories that show how badly they fare at even this elemental task.
The Foundation has since ballooned into a massive entity that far outstrips the meagre task of maintaining English Wikipedia, but it is all to be expected given they had to find some way to keep the money rolling in. The paying public were eventually going to catch on to the fact this is no way to build an encyclopedia, that their basic operating model is and always will be the chief reason why it sucks so badly at that basic task. So they've rebranded as a knowledge service, seeking to persuade the public they are not just useful, but indispensable. And so unsurprisingly, the power sometimes goes to their heads, and the community sometimes feels aggrieved at being left behind. As the Foundation has grown, the community of just those people interested in English Wikipedia, has shrunk, in relative size and influence. And boy do they carry a chip on their shoulder.
A big chip is their legal status. Or lack thereof. Legally speaking, there is no community. The are just a collection of individuals whose legal relationship to the encyclopedia project is either merely as individuals legally responsible for their own activities, or as same but with a parallel legal contracts with the website's owner regarding matters such as handling non-public data for and on behalf of the legal owner, if granted that role by whatever process the owner deems necessary. The basic legal agreement between users and the Foundation, is unsurprisingly, their Terms of Use.
Administrators for example only exist in part because it is wise to restrict the number of individuals who can access material on the website that is potentially illegal. Where other corporate entities exist, such as the many Chapters (local non-profits), and affiliate themselves to the website owner, this relationship grants them no rights or responsibilities regarding the website or its owner's employees, save some trivialities.
So speaking in terms of absolute truth, the community has no rights. Certainly not to free assembly, expression, self-determination, self-defense, or any other right you can apply to a nominal group in any other context.
There is, or until now was, one other highly important aspect of the legal situation. As a way to ensure everything is as it should be, legally speaking, the Foundation has always specifically made clear to all communities that it reserves the right to take "actions without going through the normal site/community process(es) to do so", and these actions cannot be reversed by volunteers without first consulting the Foundation.
All the legal and indeed moral authority over and for Wikipedia resides with the Foundation. Why? Because they have all the responsibility, beyond that which individuals expose themselves to through action, which absent abuse, is a shared responsibility. Volunteers can walk away from any community role or task any time they like, their only loss is whatever significance they personally assigned to that status for themselves, and perhaps whatever it was they might have had to do, officially or otherwise, to be granted that role. Staff have no such luxury. Inaction is an action.
This sovereign power, little used but extant nonetheless, therefore reflects the reality of their situation - any higher powers over others which appear to have been granted to the community of individuals, are exactly that - grants. Gifts from the Gods. An illusion of power from people wise enough to realize the inherent benefits in letting the drones think they have some control over their tiny miserable lives in the Salt Mines.
This is not to say the community doesn't have a stake in Wikipedia. They are, as individuals and a collective, still the legal holders of all copyright in the material they legally contributed to Wikipedia (I say legally because posting of stolen material to Wikipedia is common). It just isn't worth anything because part of the deal of being a Wikipedian is you irrevocably release that material on a royalty free license, and anyone is free to modify it to the point it is unrecognizable as your creation.
So this longing for some idea they matter, that they're not just faceless drones persuaded to work for free for a non-profit that is surprisingly effective at finding ways to pay its own salaries and assorted other nice things off the fruits of volunteer's labour, they continue to search for some higher meaning in their chosen hobby. It can't just be because Wikipedia is super addictive, they must ask themselves in the dead of night. But they really don't have one.
Wikipedia has plenty of internal advice pages written by its own users, outlining just now worthless and insignificant the individuals are when weighed against the collective. By contrast, the counterpoints are long on romance and short on substance. Perhaps the most crushing blow you can deliver to a Wikipedian, is that for most of them, nobody even really cares about what they do for Wikipedia. It is totally a self-sustaining hobby, paradoxically a purely selfish endeavour.
Readers don't care if you poured your heart and soul and thousands of hours into the article on Little Crumpet Bottom railway station, they likely don't even know it exists, and their donations, if they even are a donor, aren't aimed at gaining more of the same. The Foundation is hated by many a volunteer, because in moments when they remember what their charitable goal is, they often deliver the hard truths, like telling editors that surveys show readers want high quality articles of the sort you would actually find in an encyclopedia. By their own self-assessment, only 0.1% of Wikipedia articles is good enough for Britannica, and even there, few are on what they have identified as the high importance articles. Like "Earth".
So, what do you do on Wikipedia for genuine satisfaction, if you really don't matter. Well, if the good feels of creating pseudo-knowledge just for your own sense of self-satisfaction doesn't do it for you, even as a lowly editor, you can find friends, form gangs, exert dominance over others, have long and sprawling arguments over nothing, and generally do a bunch of stuff that really doesn't get Wikipedia built faster or maintained quicker.
Even though it is largely an illusion, the perceived power that certain users, Administrators and higher, those with more user rights than mere editors have over others, up to and including access to their personal data, is a strong motivator for individuals to keep engaged with the Wikipedia game, leveling up, gaining status and reputation. As long as you steered clear of doing anything really over the line, you could pretty much be guaranteed to be safe from Foundation interference.
Indeed, if you were so inclined, you were free to ensure other user's compliance with the Terms of Use, as an individual volunteer. Although it should never be necessary in such a large project as English Wikipedia, since all the usual issues would be covered by existing local policy, the relevant parts of which direct users to the Foundation where necessary.
At no point however, is any such user considered an agent of the Foundation. Tellingly, in several instances where local policy never quite seemed to cover a situation, the community of individuals have not been afraid of invoking the Terms directly, worrying about updating local policy at a later date, if not never if that proved controversial. Common targets have been paid editors and the like, reflecting genuine community divide over the policy specifics.
One might say a burgeoning cottage industry was developing in the community, pre-FRAMBAN, whereby the Terms were being used as a blunt instrument by certain activist Administrators hoping to exert authority not granted them by local policy. The immutable sovereign power of the Terms therefore became most useful. 'Direct your protest to the Foundation' is a powerful deterrant against all but the most experienced of opponents, who would not detect the sleight of hand. An Administrator invoking the Terms is still just an Administrator, not a Foundation employee editing on Foundation business.
Enter Fram. An old school Administrator, in many ways he led the charge against progress toward the repositioning as a knowledge service, fighting the Foundation tooth and nail at every turn. No mistake was too small, no sleight too unimportant, that he couldn't spin it into a mini-war between the traditionalists and the progressives. And because that spoke to the groundswell of jealousy and dissatisfaction of the proletariat, he became rather a cult hero of the community. An anti-social anti-hero if you will, since in an example of turning the orthodoxy of the community's basic feature on its head, Fram's power to be such a one man-jerk didn't derive from being anyone's friend, he was quite unlikable in truth.
His power came from his unwavering belief that everything he did was pursuant to Wikipedia policy, and he would lock up his own grandmother up if he could. There are some whispers he wasn't quite as brave as all that, that he did steer clear of some of the really powerful volunteers, but it is also true he wasn't as afraid as most of his peers to confront the so-called unblockables. The irony being, many felt he was one too (FRAMBAN was his first and only block).
This brings us to the crux of the matter. To an unbiased observer, you read all the stuff about what Wikipedia Administrators are supposed to be, and you don't see anything in Fram that isn't the complete and total opposite. He was argumentative, petty, emotionally vested, verbose, a so called wikilawyer, a lone wolf prowling the wiki for victims, picked off at will.
Some say his most redeeming feature was that he was so often right. It isn't relevant in policy. It also sadly isn't true if measured by the actual number of successful, policy compliant kills, of high profile targets. He had many enemies among the core community of highly active users, simply because he often failed to despatch them. Which begs the question, how many were saved after friends and neighbours rallied to beat back the wolf, putting personal feelings above the project. We may never know.
But this is all rather the point. With Fram, contrary to his claims, to both his target and many onlookers, it really did feel like it was all about the thrill of the chase, not enforcement of policy. A cop with a personal quota, not a beat. And needless to say, done well, per policy, Wikipedia Administration isn't meant to make people feel like they're being chased, and certainly not by a highly motivated individual looking for a scalp. Regardless of what they might have done or are still doing, every community member has the right in policy not to be "hounded", a clear distinction being drawn in policy between that which is misconduct, and responsible impersonal community endorsed disciplinary action.
On Wikipedia, in theory, such misbehavior is meant to be dealt with by the Arbitration Committee, a panel of twelve Administrators who sit in judgement as final arbiters of long running behavioural disputes (editorial matters are kept strictly out of their reach, reserved to the community at large). They're meant to be the last stop, end of the line, for any exercise in user discipline. Although there's no real reason or it, by custom the community has granted the Committee pretty much exclusive rights to sit in judgement over Administrator conduct. For this reason, Arbitrator is one of only a handful of roles for which you have to stand for community election, each serving a two year term, six up for re-election each year. This is in stark contrast to Administrator, which is a lifetime power, granted via consensus.
So you've waded through all this shit, all sadly necessary context, now where's the beef? Well, if we are to believe the Foundation, and no reasonable person would disagree on this point given the balance of probabilities, FRAMBAN happened because the community, and by that they basically mean the Arbitration Committee, had proven itself incapable of upholding basic behavioral standards, the global minimum, the Terms of Use. And so it was time to step in and right the ship. As a result of numerous complaints from numerous people, details of which are all kept confidential for obvious reasons, after he had disobeyed a previously issued specific User Conduct Warning (also confidential) in early May, after a four week investigation into his activities, Fram was duly banned for a year.
In a show of extraordinary generosity, Fram wasn't banned the way people have usually been banned by the Foundation, namely from all WMF projects (and real world events), for all time, and without any possibility of appeal. This extreme power is supposedly reserved to only the most heinous of offenders, but as the WMF have recently admitted to a judge given one such user is suing them over use of said bans, under their Terms of Use it is their view that they can be applied for any reason, and indeed no reason at all.
Seeing a clear problem with only having that nuclear option in their locker, as a way to handle the competing priorities of community safety with the long standing tradition among the community of everyone who is banned having the right to be reformed (just not those wiped out in a precision nuclear strike), in cases like Fram's, new powers were introduced, the ability to block a user from a single project for a limited time, if their misconduct was localized and they had previously been a good faith contributor.
A crucial difference between the nuclear option and these new partial ban tools, something the community seemingly really does rather not want people to know, is they can only be applied if in the opinion of the Foundation, i.e. the collective decision of people with contracts of employment who would lose those jobs if they were negligent or corrupt in discharging their duties, concluded that the user had been found to have committed:
Speaking directly to his misconduct, the Foundation did something else that no nuclear strike victim has ever been granted - he was given a chapter and verse breakdown of the precise legal clause that it was deemed he had violated, specifically Section 4 "Refraining from Certain Activities", further specifically the "Harassing and Abusing Others" clause, and even more specifically the sub-clause which prohibits "harassment, threats, stalking, spamming, or vandalism". Qualifying this, it is further something that likely features "victims" that have been subject to "hostilities".Repeated misconduct within a single Foundation-supported project, with considerable impact either on that project overall or on individual contributors who are active in that project.
So far, so very Fram. So if this has all been a conspiracy to eliminate a vocal critic as many in the community have openly claimed without a shred of evidence, the conspirators obviously did their homework as to exactly what would sound like a plausible reason Fram would have been banned. Or the rather more simpler explanation is the truth. Asshole gets banned.
Fittingly, under these new powers, the ban placed on Fram is broadly similar to the sanction an Administrator would likely receive at the hands of the Arbitration Committee if found to have breached the same policies in the same way - banned for a year from English Wikipedia only (the limit of ArbCom's jurisdiction) with no possibility of appeal, the only difference being that where the WMF ban expires automatically, people banned by the Committee typically have to then also appeal their ban. In both cases, whether the returning editor Fram can ever again be an Administrator, is left up to the community.
Although the community rather shamefully would have people think otherwise, the reasons for the WMF feeling they needed to step in, in the face of an apparent persistent failure of the community to react to the Fram situation, are clear and obvious. Fram being what he was, his misconduct was the talk of the community for years. Whether they were false allegations tabled by jealous factions, or the truthful words of genuine victims and concerned onlookers, it really isn't in any doubt that the archives of the community's own dispute resolution process are filed with examples of Fram being decried by all manner of experienced and trusted volunteers, from veteran editors and his fellow Administrators.
Indeed, such was the controversy that several people had tried to get the Arbitration Committee to do something about Fram many times, he'd been given advice and even often formal warnings from his fellow Administrators who were then being met with defiance. There were multiple rejected Arbitration
Requests to examine his conduct specifically. He was also a named party in an accepted request, which theoretically means his conduct is as up for review as the nominal defendant, but in an astonishing display of incompetence if not cowardice, the Committee deferred action until such time as someone could be bothered to file a request that was specifically about Fram.
As befits a community that is terrible at owning its own mistakes, the Committee has tried its best to obscure these details from the subsequent fallout. In writing an open letter to the Foundation, the blame has been pretty much squarely been put on the Foundation. We have not been told, but can guess, why only nine out of twelve Arbitrators signed that letter.
In hindsight, that is hypocritical at best, since we now know that toward the end, one Arbitrator had resigned due to his disgust at his colleague's failure to back him and at the very least privately warn Fram after he went after said Arbitrator (in typical fashion their resignation statement at the time declined to air the Committee's dirty laundry). We now have almost complete certainty the one Arbitrator who didn't sign their open letter to the Foundation did so out of long standing annoyance at their failure to act, and he too had specifically been personally attacked by Fram. And finally a third Arbitrator has admitted their concerns about Fram were such that they tried, and apparently failed, to move the Committee to action on their own initiative, and when that failed, even considered playing the role of public prosecutor, temporarily standing down as an Arbitrator so he could formally ask the Committee himself, to investigate Fram.
This very best example, centres on these community claims that the Committee were somehow blindsided by the Foundation, who supposedly swooped in with the FRAMBAN and somehow denied them their sovereign rights to do something about the Fram situation (other than doing nothing, which in a dispute resolution chamber counts as something). Reflecting community disquiet, the subject of Fram had come up many times in the regularly scheduled conferences between the Foundation and the Committee.
Through dribs and drabs, almost lost in the cacophony of noise, those paying attention now know the truth.
The very last one came days before FRAMBAN. The news a ban was likely, was communicated by the Foundation to the Committee, this was recorded in the minutes, and these were seen by enough Arbitrators that we can safely say the Committee's resulting lack of any action, any action at all, belies their later claims they were somehow not minded to simply let the Foundation take this difficult task out of their hands. Perhaps because they already knew it was one of more of their own Committee who had triggered the process, signalling their own willingness to be abrogated of their responsibilities to convince their colleagues of the necessary need to act for and on behalf of the community, even in cases where the community was going to be mad as hell.
As many community members will no doubt be aware of, but who are now strangely silent upon, it was not merely a desire not to act that explains these many missed opportunities. Their inaction was also seemingly down to their own long standing difficulties in working efficiently or effectively. It is said they can never get a quorum, the crucial conference call was only taken by one member, decisions were delayed as much for reasons of events overtaking their ability to react as it was an inability to decide what to do.
Overshadowing all this, is of course the enormous burden placed on an individual editor or Administrator, to be the person who first presents a case against Fram, that actually succeeds in being accepted to trial. Block out the next three months in your calendar, because all you will be doing is answering to Fram over many lengthy and repetitive discussions, as he feels the need to address each and every single point, and that can be torture in of itself. Although given the potential number of complainants that would have come out of the woodwork to give evidence at an accepted case given the history of inaction, you can't help but wonder if the cruelty would be tenfold for Fram. Whether he would feel discomfort, or genuinely relish the challenge, is an open question.
It has even rather sadly become the norm that rather than treating the Request phase of their procedure as merely an opportunity to be given some indication there is smoke, it has become the norm for Arbitrators to be presented with evidence of the fire. Not for nothing was it long presumed then, that the mere acceptance of a Case certainly signalled your guilt, all that remained was the time honoured dance of weighing your contributions against your crimes to ascertain your punishment.
And in time honoured fashion, these things never seemed to rightly apply the 'higher standard' requirements. It has in fact become rather a running joke that being an Administrator is like being Super Mario - for conduct that would get an editor banned, an Administrator is simply defrocked, becoming a mere editor again. It is isn't beyond the realm of possibility that given his own service and spotless record, that any Case filed against Fram, would have merely resulted in a formal warning. A tremendous disparity in risk for reward, for want of a better term. Although the current Committee's distaste for issuing mere warnings perhaps explains why they were always so reluctant to accept a request.
The most damming evidence of the community's failure to act, ironically came from a rare moment of introspection from Fram. It was done when he was facing a Case Request, so has to be seen in that light (Wikipedians are only human, sometimes it really does take pushing them right to the door marked 'consequences' before they admit any kind of fault). Way back in March 2018 he admitted he had been overly confrontational and obstructive, dickish to use his own words, and needed to change his ways. It didn't last.
Indeed you can take your pick of any number of things that Fram did in May 2019 that might have been a last straw for some anonymous complainant who knew of Fram's long history of escaping justice. We can only speculate this may have been him either testing the Foundation's resolve, or just otherwise having a really bad reaction, to their User Conduct Warning being issued to him privately in April.....
It doesn't take a genius to realise a Wikipedia Administrator in receipt of such a warning, if he really cares about improving himself as a person, even if he thinks the Foundation are worthless bureaucrats who just don't know what it's like to be in the shit maaan, armed with only your trusty M16 and a ton of pesky VC to kill, goes back to at least reflect on the advice and even warnings of several trusted community members. But he did not. I mean, not even fucking close. These are the aspects of FRAMBAN that the community would rather you not hear. But hear them you must.I have taken a look at several conflicts you’ve had over the years with other community members as well as Foundation staff, and I have noticed increasing levels of hostility, aggressive expression—some of which, to the point of incivility—and counterproductive escalations.
All these things are baked into how the community chooses to govern itself, and together with the repeated failures of ArbCom to act when given the opportunity, it more than adequately explains why a responsible Foundation in receipt of seemingly valid complaints, would choose to act the way they did, on that fateful day on June 10. SOLDIER DOWN.
This was a targeted strike, of that be in no doubt. When the community asked the Foundation, in a rare moment of lucidity, well, hey, sure, even if we did think these less lethal munitions of yours were cool, which we don't, how come if you wanted to send us a message that we were failing to uphold standards, you didn't choose a more obvious target? It's simple, they replied. No use wasting these expensive new toys on a nobody who you wouldn't miss.
And who is really going to argue that logic? It got their attention, it sent the message. As I sit here now, contemplating who they could have picked who would have been a better target, given the long record of community inaction, the specific kind of misconduct, and the seemingly wide reaching and never ending nature of it. While other more powerful figures exist in the community, I can't think of anyone who was causing as much damage from such a heavily pockmarked bunker as the invincible Fram. It is not unlike a President executing the head of the Army. Not only are the officers and troops going to be reminded who is in charge, the few individuals above him are going to be more aware of who really rules the roost. Or at least be more careful and strategic in their coup planning.
It all rather puts into stark relief, the community's insistence that ArbCom are and should remain the only body tasked with investigating local instances of harassment, or even just hostility if you really want to pretend that's all it ever was. The only body that can command their trust to properly discharge their elected duties. Hmmm. On a cold reading, a reasonable person looks at the Wikipedia policies that describe what an Administrator should be, and describes what harassment is to them, the community, and they can see no other outcome of any fair and unbiased community process designed to hold him to account to said policies and presented with this rich body of evidence, than a year long ban for harassment.
Rather shamelessly, all the efforts of the Committee as a whole in the aftermath of FRAMBAN, have seemingly been about deflecting blame and evading scrutiny regarding their own role in ensuring a potential drama became a full on constitutional crisis. It is ironic given all the community complaints about secrecy and transparency on the part of the evil Foundation, these are the very things which have helped the Committee. Much of these deliberations and communications having happened on the private channels reserved for Committee business.
Also shamelessly echoing their supposed enemies at corporate HQ, the Committee even now wants to claim this is all privileged information. The community will be shown no emails or any pertinent deliberations on the Committee's own internal wiki (yes, they have one all to themselves), even though these are all produced by them in discharging their duties as elected representatives of the community. They will be only fed summaries, if that, it being impossible therefore to know what has been kept from them because it is deemed irrelevant or trivial or some other reason that in this scandal will just look like an excuse.
The community hasn't seemingly noticed the irony, given their most easily met demand seems to be to merely transfer the responsibility of handling private complaints from the legally responsible Foundation staff, with identifiable roles and responsibilities and a flowchart and everything, to an often anonymous Committee of twelve whose skill in passing the buck and generally being inefficient and ineffective and entirely opaque in their processes, is legendary within the community, or at least used to be before FRAMBAN. A cynical person might think the Committee has taken advantage of FRAMBAN to earn some much needed respite from their place as the community's punching bag for everything that they couldn't by some hook or crook, pin on the Foundation.
The Foundation wanted to send a message. The most surprising thing about the scandal, is how spectacularly the community went about proving that message was long overdue, in the many different ways they chose to react.
There has been what they have called "civil disobedience", essentially direct challenges to the Foundation by Administrators prepared to cross what were previously assumed to be clear lines of jurisdiction, with attendant lawyering excuses to wave away the obvious intent, only admitted to by the perpetrators after several days of watching their defenders misrepresent their actions as somehow being backed by policy or consensus (impossible, on both counts). To date these breaches of decorum have gone unanswered by ArbCom, an olive branch of deference from the Foundation as to their ultimate fate for unambiguous high crimes, cynically reimagined as somehow clearance to leave sleeping seditionists lie.
There have been mass walkouts and assorted protests designed to disrupt the maintenance of Wikipedia, proving that the community, when pressed on what they really care about, care very little about the actual product. It is not unlike watching a dog owner abandon or even kill their own dog, rather than accept animal control has any business telling them how to care for it.
Worst of all, and prompting a very on point observation of the whole gamergate from The Chairwoman of the Board Of Trustees to it all, with the assistance and tacit acknowledgement of an external harassment site, they have pursued women they think might have reported Fram. So far, no men, at least none that have not stepped right infront of the mob demanding to be engaged in battle, has been similarly targeted. The women CEO/ED of the Foundation has been similarly pilloried, with calls for her resignation.
Complaints that the community have been given insufficient information to understand what happened have rung hollow. I've got no inside contacts, and I was able to deduce all of the above. The truth is of course that they just don't like what they are being told, and imagine that if they scream and yell and break enough stuff, somehow the facts on the ground will change to something that actually fits their desired narrative, namely that the Foundation have blindsided the community merely to scalp a prominent critic, and everything before then was fine and dandy.
There has even been an absurdity in how the community has even responded to FRAMBAN on an organizational level. Showing none of the calmness and ability to work together for a common cause that you might have seemingly assumed were desirable traits, ignoring the pleas for calm even from Jimmy Wales on behalf of the Board of Trustees struggling to chart through way the growing storm as the community hurled everything it has at the Foundation, the response has been nothing short of chaotic. Text has been spread far and wide, highly relevant details buried in the noise.
There's been no effort at all on the part of the Administrators to even do basic things like a stop an obvious lie in its tracks, before it becomes an established fact to others coming late to the party without the time to dig back through the walls of text to find the nuggets of truth. What little effort has gone into the task of protecting real people from defamation and harassment, the supposed highest duty of any Wikipedia Administrator, has itself been stymied and disrupted as the Administrators fight amongst themselves, all as the Arbitration Committee evidently sees no irony in how they just keep waving away requests from the community for quick and decisive rulings on these decidedly local problems.
The crisis isn't over. But the end of the beginning has surely passed. What happens now is likely going to be inconsequential in the grand scheme, although this being the Foundation, you really can't discount them doing a daft thing like coming this far down the road, only to surrender to an already defeated army. But all signs point to there being no will or desire in the Board to concede any ground on the fundamentals.
The community is not totally autonomous or self-governing, it never could be. They do have an obligation to maintain minimum standards, regardless of local difficulties which make that task hard, and makes those doing it unpopular. But in future, recurrent situations like Fram will be dealt with by the Foundation, and when the need arises, it won't matter what improvements in communications and processes and policy awareness have happened as a result of this controversy. Without fundamental change, the community is still going to be madder than a volcano full of angry bees. And they will still be wrong.
There is a fundamental truth to Wikipedia, you see. The Foundation at least has an excuse for any mistakes it makes. They don't have the best people, because they can't pay for them. Indeed, another detail often overlooked in the reactions to FRAMBAN, is that many of the paid staff, including many in the exact department that took Fram out of the game, are internal hires, former volunteers, people who often still are volunteers in their spare time.
The community has no such excuse. If you genuinely can't say you hate your job because you lack training and guidance and the customers are horrible, but you can't leave because you have a mortgage etc, then you have to take full responsibility for what you do in your life. This darkness, this need to be bad when there was nothing stopping them from being good, it's within the community. Don't tell me there are institutional problems stopping the good overpowering the bad, not on a website where ultimately the ability of everyone or anyone to be bad, in normal conditions, rests with the collective judgement of twelve of their peers judging them against a body of laws drawn up by the people for the benefit of the people. I think you may have heard of such a system before........
I watch Wikipedians. It's my curse. Comparing what they do in their society, to what happens the civilized world, or in any number of popular but well managed online communities, it becomes clear that any suggestion their failings are down to anything other than their own lack of moral character, is at best, misguided. Maybe it can't be fixed. I say nobody has ever tried. Not really. Humans are what they are, you won't drag them out of the stone age without some elbow grease. So Wikipedia isn't paying you enough to care that much? Wasn't that always the case?
It wasn't my idea to create Wikipedia, and I'd pull the plug tomorrow if I could. Exposing the darkness within, is all I can do.
HTD.
