It says everything about how the Wikipedia community is in the total grip of assholes and women haters, that a women candidate for Administrator, in 2019, when we are meant to believe Wikipedia is growing and changing, still has to profusely apologize for a five year old dispute with the notoriously misogynistic and exceptionally hateful Eric Corbett, before she can even think of standing for a position of any power over others at all.
It wouldn't be so funny if it weren't for the fact Eric Corbett is of course currently ArbCom blocked, unlikely ever to return. Not blocked for the countless violations of his increasingly complex and convoluted sanctions, all crafted over the years to find a way his nasty, uncompromising, unapologetic, vicious little ass, could be retained as a Wikipedian. No, he got blocked for committing the one policy breach that every Wikipedian can agree is at least a gross breach of trust, the crime of creating a sock puppet to evade a block.
Even then, he was at least afforded the luxury of having been let off his first offence for he exact same thing a few years years earlier, under the oldest excuse in the book, the one that makes everyone's eyes roll - 'it was my roommate'. Probably never works for a woman, what with it requiring extreme levels of good faith and a disregard for the sexist stereotype that women were schemers. Anyone know otherwise?
Perhaps this woman has been playing the long game, and after years of paying her dues for challenging the orthodoxy and the patriarchy, keeping her nose clean so as to set up a successful run as a reformed character, she intends to Administrate Wikipedia as the same person who held the same distaste of people like Corbett all those years ago. I somehow doubt it.
To truly understand how fucked up this is, this is what she said in her evidence to the GGTF Arbitration Case......
The aforementioned submission by her, added by Robert.....Evidence presented by EvergreenFir
I have little to add beyond what has already been copy-pasted from my previous comments. My thanks to Robert McClenon for that. My only other comment is that Eric Corbett's behavior in GGTF is but a part of a larger pattern of egregious behavior that is (1) blatantly repeatedly uncivil and (2) above any community recourse as seen in this ANI. EvergreenFir (talk) 05:02, 17 October 2014 (UTC)
Was she wrong? Of course she wasn't? Eric Corbett is and always was the editor his detractors said he was, and true to his word, in all the years his protectors and enablers tried to live with the consequences of allowing him to continue to be all he wanted to be, never once even expecting him to admit fault, let alone commit to changing his behavior, which is what pretty much every other disruptive Wikipedian has to do eventually.I am happy to see that this issue has finally be brought up. The talk page on WP:GGTF has been particularly plagued by polemic and disruptive comments by some editors. Of particular concern to me is Eric Corbett who has repeatedly engaged in personal attacks and general FORUM behavior. While no single edit was particularly egregious, their sum shows a pattern of incivility, disrespect, and disruptive behavior as well as the edit summaries. While he did relent a bit after I gave him a warning ([311]) (which he dismissed as "nonsense") and the resulting "conversation" on my user talk page, his actions continued. Eric appears to have a history of personal attacks judging by his extensive block log.
(followed by a bucket load of diffs of incivility, personal attacks, harassment, etc)
She wasn't wrong all those years ago, and if the Arbitration Committee had shown the balls that it's majority male membership possess by quirk of nature, they would have banned him, or otherwise acted in such a way that showed they were serious about enforcing the rules on that most famous example of the Vested Contributor problem, and it they had, he may have by now even been rehabilitated and welcomed back into the fold, a changed man. Maybe.
But to gain even a limited amount of status and respect in the male, asshole, dominated Wikipedia community, she has to act like she was wrong all those years ago, and Eric is currently blocked for some other reason than karma. You don't need to look hard to find people claiming he is currently blocked as a result of a feminist conspiracy aimed at flowering up Wikipedia with their silly notions of equality and respect for all. Objection to that as an objective was after all the reason for his sustained attacks and indeed successful nullification of the GGTF, at least in that form. It persists of course as Women In Red, but they know their allowed remit, only working on content, not user behaviour. Shhhhh!
She has to show she has leaned her place, that she offers no threat, that she will be a good girl. Then she can be rewarded with being treated as an equal to other Administrators, many of whom, whose ranks already include many men, but even some women, whose inability to hold themselves to the basic civility standards required of ordinary editors, much less the higher ones Administrators are theoretically beholden to, is well known. Even then, with her history of being an uppity woman in her new colleague's eyes, should she even pass, well, she wouldn't ever really be equal. Her blocks, warnings and even general commentary would carry less weight, or be more easily ignored/overturned, without anyone really ever admitting why. The unspoken rules.
No surprise that it is Ritchie, himself having these last few months been mercilessly harassing a women editor from a position of power over her, both on Wikipedia, and when he was blocked for a paltry length of time (even that being duly cut short by the community), continued it via the harassment site Wikipediocracy, who is her nominator. He is more than happy to support women who have shown they can be compliant and respectful to the establishment. He is an enthusiastic contributor to Women In Red of course, but I probably don't even need to tell you where he stood in the whole GGTF affair, or more generally the issue of whether rampant incivility is a gender gap issue.
A long time defender of Eric Corbett, Ritchie has only latterly turned on him, the hilarious after effects spilling over into Wikipediocracy, having realized what all his enablers do eventually - supporting Eric doesn't buy you immunity if you do something that displeases him, which in Ritchie's case, was to accept he had taken the absolute piss one too many times to be granted leniency. Even though thankfully, it was not in his remit to offer it this time.
Already people have expressed surprise at even seeing this nomination. I don't think you need to think very hard to understand why Ritchie might have picked this particular editor to choose to end his long absence from nominating candidates.
Wikipedia. A very sick place, populated by some very sick people.