User talk:HJ Mitchell/ACE 2015

logic gub

Please change:

• "with the result that no firm conclusion can be reached or that they reach an inevitably unpopular conclusion."

To:

• "with the result that no firm conclusion can be reached (always unpopular) or that they reach a conclusion (inevitably unpopular)."

I believe this gives more of the flavor of the job. Plus I like parallel-phrase linguistic constructions, they give me a warm fuzzy feeling inside. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 02:44, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

Systems

Well to be fair, Harry, we do have a system… it just is terribly poor.

For pending matters that are easily categorisable (BASC, cases, etc) there's an tracking page on an internal wiki that allows us to keep records on the time to response and result. BASC was perhaps the most organised, probably because of the sheer volume, but it was all manually maintained. And given that I wasn't sure if most other arbs even looked at it, keeping it updated sometimes felt like wasted effort. And for the "everything else" task category well… yes, those mostly relies on individuals going through their email archives and bumping things up. LFaraone 18:47, 27 November 2015 (UTC)

Fair enough, Luke, it's a system, but almost anything would be better than manual tracking on a wiki. It's just too easy for things to be missed or forgotten. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 21:16, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

Agreed. LFaraone 03:38, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Just a point

Hey @HJ Mitchell: -

It's a fairly minor point, but I don't support the outing of Cla68 in any way. I simply see a drastic and inappropriate difference between Phil Sandifer's indefinite arbcom block and Cla68's short block for outing someone. I don't support either case out of outing, but in terms of appropriate sanction, Cla68 both made little effort to hide his identity and only received a one month block for outing someone else only a matter of months before Phil got indeffed. Phil got an indef block for outing Cla68 within a handful of months of when Cla68 got a month block for outing Russavia. Although Russavia was banned by the office earlier this year, he wasn't office banned at the time. Is either action right? No, and I'd sanction both. There's just no way I'd block Cla68 for a month while indeffing Phil months later.

As a more major point, I'd encourage you to look at my exchange with Roger at the bottom of my question list. I am not shitting you in saying that I have an emailed statement jointly signed by arb and OS (although I know individual arbitrators and oversighters disagreed) saying that gender could not be oversighted even when it had not been disclosed by the user, because it wasn't explicitly in the OS criteria. By the standard Roger uses, most Americans could be effectively outed without it being oversightable. Kevin Gorman (talk) 01:08, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

On your first point, Kevin, as far as I can work out Cla68 was indef'd and (apart from 24 hours during which he was improperly unblocked and then reblocked) remained blocked from 28 February to 23 May 2013—nearly three months in total. I presume ArbCom were satisfied by whatever assurances Cla68 gave them but didn't receive satisfactory assurances from Phil Sandifer.

As to your second, I've read the exchange. I'm more than a little amused by the irony that your answer to a question about outing had to be suppressed, and your claim that "most Americans could be effectively outed without it being oversightable" is absurd. As Roger correctly points out, gender—on its own—is not sufficient to identify an individual, and therefore wouldn't normally meet the criteria for oversight. But of course, context is everything and each request needs to be evaluated on its merits, and I would do everything I could to help an editor who was worried for their privacy—as I'm sure would my fellow oversighters. It's also worth noting that just quietly changing the pronoun without saying anything is a lot more conducive to protecting privacy than raising it in multiple forums as a "hypothetical" example. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 23:00, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

Are you aware of the specific and full context involved, including the nationality and population issues? Because gender combined with the other factors involved made it an obvious problem. I don't want to quote his email without prior permission but he's had no qualms in quoting the general gist of mine without asking - I have an email from him that categorically states that gender is never oversightable. That's very different than contextual arguments that you and others have raised elsewhere. And that was just kind of comicalall around (in a week where I've been dealing with large number of wikiconf USA galleries that participants didn't want up but red/yellow/green dots as custom were not widely available,) for me to accidentally link to an on-wiki posting involving someone with the same name that didn't happen to be him in response to a question where he denied ever having been publicly identified as a man. Kevin Gorman (talk) 23:18, 1 December 2015 (UTC)