QUOTE(Theanima @ Tue 21st June 2011, 2:53pm)
Now if only all of us had the courage to stand up to bullies like SandyGeorgia, perhaps Wikipedia would be a more pleasant place to edit.
That's never going to happen. What could happen is that those who understand the problem of bullying and attack editing stand up to it, and that enough of the rest of the community support them, instead of assuming that they are just "attack bullies themselves, a pox on both your houses," which is what happens in on-line communities, knee-jerk.
I stood up to two administrator bullies, JzG and William M. Connolley. In the first case, I was (originally) completely uninvolved, and careful, and there was enough support in the community, about one-third of commentators, to make the stand viable, especially since it was backed by basically irrefutable evidence. It really should be noticed that RfC/JzG 3, presented quite neutrally, with overwhelming and clear evidence, still resulted in a two-thirds opinion "Ban Abd."
With the next situation, I had become involved. When I was writing RfC/JzG 3, Durova had told me to expect being banned from cold fusion as a result. I really didn't care. Initially, I was completely neutral on cold fusion, and I only became exercised about it when I read the evidence, and saw how the balance of publication in peer-reviewed sources had flipped in recent years. (I only became COI, seriously engaged in the field, later, after I knew I was being banned.)
The appearance of involvement, then, gave the cabal much more cover to go on the attack before ArbComm, and they piled in. Because I knew these names, knew that they were far from neutral, it became necessary to call the cabal a cabal. Perhaps I should have called it a clique or faction. But didn't. ArbComm has a knee-jerk reaction to claims of "cabal." They didn't look at the evidence, I strongly suspect. I have other reasons to believe that they looked at very little evidence, it was too complicated for them. Okay, okay, WMC did go a little bit outside of norms, we gotta address that. But this Abd fellow, look at how much he writes. He *must* be an obsessed POV-pusher, and we know how to deal with them.
Actually, they don't. That's the problem, in fact. I've seen no evidence that the arbitrators, as a group, understand real dispute resolution, they are more like bouncers in a bar, and unskillful ones, at that. Real bouncers know how to defuse situations, because it's messy if they have to kill someone. I know. I was a volunteer chaplain, at San Quentin State Prison, and knew more than one such bouncer. The legal question will become if it was *necessary* to kill the guy who pulled the knife. Better have a good attorney, if you don't, ten to life.
In the second case, there was very little community support, because the issues had become far more complex.
ArbComm should really appoint investigators to filter the evidence, it cannot possible read and review in detail all that is presented to it, there are only a few cases where I saw evidence that arbitrators took that kind of care, and it's not clear that they got it right there, they were trying to be "amateur experts" themselves. (PHG is what comes to mind.)
Durova had it right, she knew. It just didn't happen right away. They, through Hipocrite and WMC, who were almost certainly coordinated or cooperating in some way, came after me. WMC had long before predicted I'd be banned, when I confronted his use of tools with the Global Warming article, which was where I became visible to the cabal....
The young RfAr candidate here may not realize it, but he's better off not being so involved in such a cesspool., increasingly dominated by people who can tolerate the smell.