"Wikipedia has its own internal "Supreme Court""

Because no one else is doing it--not even the media.
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ericbarbour
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"Wikipedia has its own internal "Supreme Court""

Post by ericbarbour » Mon May 14, 2018 4:38 am

https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/05/1 ... edium=feed

Yes, it's about Arbcom. And yes, the Wall St. Journal article is paywalled. If anyone can get the text please post some highlights here.

Some great comments on Slashdot--saying the usual things.....

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Re: "Wikipedia has its own internal "Supreme Court""

Post by Graaf Statler » Mon May 14, 2018 9:49 am

ericbarbour wrote:https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/05/13/0830224/last-stop-for-wikipedias-feuding-editors----online-high-court?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

Yes, it's about Arbcom. And yes, the Wall St. Journal article is paywalled. If anyone can get the text please post some highlights here.

Some great comments on Slashdot--saying the usual things.....

Ah! The selected of complete academic lunatics by Jimmy himself! Not a surprise. Yes, that is the Jimmy system what you see back in his wikitribune. His amazing people. Because, as a child of two worlds long ago I found out there are far more complete mataglap (Complete crazy) academics, lawyers, etc. than handcraft man. I mean, as a complete mad car mechanical you are out after the first disaster, but in the academic world they make you a professor. And believe me, I know where I am talking about, because when I opened my eyes the first time in this world I was surrounded by professors. And when we had our dinner I have heard story's enough, to much, for a whole life as a child. The second war and lunatic academics, it's a youth trauma for me.

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Re: "Wikipedia has its own internal "Supreme Court""

Post by CrowsNest » Mon May 14, 2018 11:04 am

The full text isn't hard to find.

On a related note.....

http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/after- ... al-reader/

The article wasn't all that great. It isn't even clear why it was written. It nominally appears to be an explanation of what ArbCom is and does, and the trigger for it being written appears to be the recent Infobox case. But I cannot for the life of me think why the journalist or the editor thought these were worthwhile things to be writing about. I guess we can at least be happy that a deeper dive into now Wikipedia works is on the msm's agenda now, even if the results are questionable.

The article largely focused on what Wikipediots say, interviewing several, so it isn't all that useful for the critic cause. They did at least include some critical opinions at the very end, which is something I guess.
Piotr Konieczny, a Wikipedia editor and academic who has studied ArbCom, finds the body’s approach to sentencing distinctly American.

“I always find it shocking,” he says, when an editor expresses remorse yet is banned from an article. Polish Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee, he has heard, is more inclined toward forgiveness.

“It’s very dictatorial,” says Edwin Black, an author who has written critically about technology, including Wikipedia. “You don’t get to face your accusers because you don’t know the person behind the pseudonym. You might be talking to someone named Bizarro24 or Swampboy.”
The article heavily focussed on the views of NewYorkBrad, to the point he is even allowed the last word, an outrageous invocation of Winston Churchill to try to argue that for all its faults, any other system would be worse.

They ran with the theme that ArbCom is Wikipedia's Supreme Court, and they get the basic details of what it does right. Euralysis pushed back on this view, but not because it isn't a court, simply because their jurisdiction and available punishments are limited. Which goes to show his limited capacity for dealing with analogies.

Perhaps most troubling, is within all this talk of it being a court, there seems to have creeped into the article the basic assumption that what they do and how they do it is as fair and diligent as you would expect in a courtroom. Which we all know is complete crap. The article completely sidesteps that, except to convey via Alanshohn that apparently ArbCom's decisions are more respected by the community than those of the lower courts. Which is something we critics also know to be horseshit (and is indeed one of the reasons their case load is reduced - filers are no longer wasting their time since they see even after getting an ArbCom ruling that, for example, Eric Corbett is a nasty piece of work who needs to be stopped, will be ignored).

Disturbingly, Brad is the only person they ask for a reason why ArbCom's case load is vastly reduced, the only person they asked as to whether or not ArbCom is politically biased, and the only person they asked to actually explain the reaction to now they handled the infobox case.

As you might expect then, the picture the readers get of how Wikipedia works from this article, while slightly clearer, is still far from the unvarnished truth. There will be no Pullitzer Prize for this piece, although it would be harsh to call it fluff. It was nonetheless, a softball. Perhaps they were just bored, and desperately wanted to write about something other than Trump and hashtags.

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Re: "Wikipedia has its own internal "Supreme Court""

Post by CrowsNest » Mon May 14, 2018 11:14 am

Original link, for the Google juice.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-wikip ... 1525708429

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Re: "Wikipedia has its own internal "Supreme Court""

Post by Graaf Statler » Mon May 14, 2018 7:36 pm

A Supreme Court, give me a break. It's one big bad joke! Abitroll is the place to be for trolls and sock puppets to suck there friends, and to fuck the others. This is what there "Supreme Court" is!.

(Een plaatje zegt immers meer dan duizend woorden, dus weten jullie nu voor eens en altijd hoe ik over jullie arbitrollgedoe met die randdebiel van een Ymnes denk.)

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Re: "Wikipedia has its own internal "Supreme Court""

Post by ericbarbour » Mon May 14, 2018 9:16 pm

CrowsNest wrote:The article wasn't all that great. It isn't even clear why it was written. It nominally appears to be an explanation of what ArbCom is and does, and the trigger for it being written appears to be the recent Infobox case. But I cannot for the life of me think why the journalist or the editor thought these were worthwhile things to be writing about. I guess we can at least be happy that a deeper dive into now Wikipedia works is on the msm's agenda now, even if the results are questionable....

Given that Arbcom does its half-baked bullshit in near-silence and with almost no attention, ANY MSM coverage is welcome. Because it usually leads to user comments, which are becoming more and more negative about WP's internal bureaucracy, a bit more every year. Unthinkable back in 2007 when DO NOT CRITICIZE WIKI MAGIC was the automatic response.

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Re: "Wikipedia has its own internal "Supreme Court""

Post by Graaf Statler » Mon May 14, 2018 10:42 pm

I think that's because of the decline of wikipedia, Eric. If i look at WP-NL in the first years I was active sometimes it was about something. But, because most of/all the decent users slowly slowly have left only the complete fools are still there. it's getting worser and worser by the day.

It's a pity you can't read Dutch, but that gender porn bla bla with the gender group was so insane, it was indescribable. Bitching gender woman in a combination of hard porn and articles about brothels and sex parkings on the high way, I have given many examples in the past. To attract more woman. A arbcom what was acting and trolling like a few kids of 4 years old or younger, I wrote a summery on Aggies board. That crazy Ymnes cult we had, a complet fool what was treated like he was a top writer and the new wiki talent.

It is so weird, it is not normal, it is a complete digital madhouse with a bunch of complete fools. It is not even to consider as trolling anymore, the last Ymnes show we had a few day ago ending up in arbcom. It was a view inside a mental instituut, a psychiatric hospitals.
If I was a Arb in that case I needed exact one minute, to be exact to block the complete bunch of idiots. Because that consetration wikiidiots what is left will never, never write a decent reference work. That is impossible.

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Re: "Wikipedia has its own internal "Supreme Court""

Post by CrowsNest » Tue Aug 21, 2018 9:36 pm

It appears someone is most keen to demystify ArbCom for the masses.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/fake-ne ... -committee

It takes real skill, or just massive balls, to try and turn your biggest joke, into a shiny new selling point.

The fact that in the last election, there was just eight viable candidates for eight seats, doesn't seem to have made the press pack.

The inclusion of Fiona Apps as a seemingly randomly picked talking head, when as was revealed here recently, in reality she works for WikiTribune, is quite troubling.

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Re: "Wikipedia has its own internal "Supreme Court""

Post by Dysklyver » Tue Aug 21, 2018 10:29 pm

CrowsNest wrote:It appears someone is most keen to demystify ArbCom for the masses.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/fake-ne ... -committee

It takes real skill, or just massive balls, to try and turn your biggest joke, into a shiny new selling point.

The fact that in the last election, there was just eight viable candidates for eight seats, doesn't seem to have made the press pack.

The inclusion of Fiona Apps as a seemingly randomly picked talking head, when as was revealed here recently, in reality she works for WikiTribune, is quite troubling.


The fact I was indefinitely blocked and disqualified from the ballot just hours before the election started seems to have been missed as well.

trouble believing this rational, kind NewYorkBrad


Just needed to take that out of context. :D

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