User:Brews ohare/Wikipedia editing environment

How is editing on Wikipedia governed? This article describes the editing environment on Wikipedia, as described in various documents on Wikipedia, with links to the appropriate articles governing its jurisdiction. Described in particular are the facts about arbitration. This information can be helpful to WP contributors in understanding the editing process on WP, and the role for guidelines and policies.

This discussion is based entirely upon documentation from the English language version of Wikipedia. Its applicability to other language versions has not been examined.

Wikipedia editing environment

Wikipedia articles can be edited anonymously by anyone, and contributed by anyone with an account (and anyone can create an anonymous account). A variety of policies, more specific guidelines, and less established essays are intended to "describe its principles and best-known practices", but are not "hard-and-fast rules". In fact, one of the policies of Wikipedia is Ignore all rules, which says: "If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it." That may sound liberating, but it is a freedom most safely exercised by Administrators. There is also a Be bold policy that says "Just do it", but adds "...but please be careful".

It is encouraged that nontrivial changes in content of articles be discussed on the article Talk page to iron out wrinkles without huge numbers of changes back and forth on the Main page. Some behavioral rules are intended to protect the main page, the most obvious one being the three-revert rule that blocks contributors that engage in edit warring. Discussion of content is guided in part by the policies "What Wikipedia is not" and the Five "pillars" of Wikipedia. Cautions to control the temperature on Talk pages are provided: such as No personal attacks, WP is not about winning, Polling is not a substitute for discussion, and so forth. The general concepts of Talk page politeness are subsumed under Wikiquette. Content disputes sometimes can be resolved by formal resolution including mediation.

Although wise, these admonitions and processes do not always suffice, and content issues become mixed up with conduct issues. Talk pages may use policies as weaponry in battles over changes, exchanges called wikilawyering, that is, insisting upon the letter of a policy or guideline while violating its spirit or underlying principles. Policies and guidelines are used pejoratively to describe viewpoints as soapboxing, as parochial POV (point-of-view) forks, original research, fringe theory, employing unreliable sources, or synthesis of sources to support conclusions they do not contain verbatim, or violating a precept of Wikipedia to "present facts, not to teach subject matter". Tempers rise and contributors lose sight of the goals of WP to engage instead in duels of self-importance and gang enforcement. Impatience over content may lead to claims of bad conduct by one or the other disputing party. When conduct is seen as the issue, appeals for arbitration by Administrators or for arbitration by the Arbitration Committee result, requesting that the opposing parties be sanctioned. Once arbitration is invoked, content is no longer the issue, only conduct matters.

Although almost anyone can edit articles on Wikipedia, sanctions result in exceptions: certain individuals are blocked partially or completely, temporarily or permanently, through actions of the Wikipedia administration from Wales on down. These blocking or banning actions tend to be hotly contested, and frequently are sought by contributors that have run into irresolvable conflict over content, or over personalities. It then falls upon individual Admins, or upon a consensus of Admins, or possibly upon ArbCom, to invoke a ban or block. It does occur that such decisions are arrived upon by conversations among Admins or ArbCom members not open to the public, or are made by individual Admins upon their personal assessment, and the results announced with only broad-brush explanation, and next to no attempt to provide a "legal" basis for the action based upon the Wikipedia policies and guidelines. These governing rules are held to be not hard-and-fast, but are to be handled with "common sense".

More about arbitration

Requests by contributors for arbitration by year on Wikipedia. (Data from Wikipedia.)

As shown to the right, the number of requests for formal arbitration cases has declined steadily with time, and the number of cases accepted for hearing has dropped to about a dozen per year. Explanation of these declines is ambiguous. One explanation is that both arbitrators and litigants are becoming disenchanted with arbitration cases. In any case, the decline in arbitration cases, which use a formal proceeding, means that more reliance is placed upon the large number of bans/blocks exercised by administrators without formal arbitration.

According to Wikipedia:

Although Wikipedia does not employ hard-and-fast rules, Wikipedia policy and guideline pages describe its principles and best-known practices. Policies explain and describe standards that all users should normally follow, while guidelines are meant to outline best practices for following those standards in specific contexts. Policies and guidelines should always be applied using reason and common sense.

The liberty for Admins to exercise "common sense" and the Ignore all rules policy relieves rulings from strict requirement that they be based upon guidelines or policies. In other words, administration is not a "rule of law". In addition, no requirements exist to insist upon in-depth explanation of rulings, and requests for clarification can be ignored.

Appeals to Admins or to ArbCom do not result necessarily in narrow consideration of direct issues at hand. Rather, the scope of deliberations may be enlarged, or even diverted to interests of Admins and of ArbCom quite apart from community concerns. According to Wikipedia:

Arbitration is not a court case - Arbitration is not a legal process with fixed approaches to problems: all actions and general conduct, not merely the direct issue, may be taken into account. A person's general manner, past actions or incidents, and the impressions of them by reasonable people, may all be used to guide the Arbitrators.

As a result, rulings and actions are free be taken that have no bearing upon the original matter brought for adjudication and instead, to the amazement of those making the appeal, result in actions concerning other issues entirely, never envisioned by the litigants. When ArbCom introduces issues of their own, these are entertained outside the formal framework that safeguards fact finding and organized discussion. In particular, ArbCom may focus their ruling upon their own ideas of "a person's general manner" and/or the "impressions of them by reasonable people", quite apart from community opinion or specifics.

Also according to Wikipedia:

Arbitrators focus on the risk and benefits for the future, not on past issues.

In other words, ArbCom is at liberty to rule based not upon "who said exactly what in the past", nor upon what is before them, but preemptively, based upon ArbCom predictions of hypothetical future behavior that could affect the project.

An appeals process exists, but overturn is unlikely except in cases of blatant misrule. One might naïvely expect that among the hundreds of administrators, a disputant might find some Admin that would find their protests worth consideration. However, shopping for any opinion (even neutral opinion) is considered to be campaigning or possibly votestacking (selective invitation of favorable support), considered to be deliberate disruptions of dispute resolution that are frowned upon. Use of e-mail to solicit opinion is called stealth canvassing and is "looked at more negatively" than contact via user talk-pages. Despite such restrictions upon finding support, it was found that indeed Admin support for litigants occasionally did occur, especially in cases of egregious abuse of authority. Apparently fearing wars between their numbers, ArbCom passed an Enforcement Motion expressly to prevent any Admin from overturning a prior action by another Admin under the threat of immediate stripping of powers (deSysOpping). Consequently, any Admin protest over another Admin's actions is subject to protracted and tendentious review with a serious downside that strongly discourages such actions. That leaves a litigant with only a formal submission of an appeal to ArbCom or to Wales. It may be observed that ArbCom may be ruling upon an appeal of its own ruling, and Wales has little time to dig into disputes: "it is exceedingly unusual for him to intervene".

Expert opinion

Expert opinion may be, and often is, challenged on WP. Attempts by an expert to educate the unversed via an on-line article Talk page possibly will require long discussion. Impatience among readers with explanation of matters important to the expert, but not obviously significant to others, may lead to Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents. Once there, the deciding Admins or ArbCom may view an extended Talk-page exchange not so much as the expert's patient attempt at education, but more as evidence of unduly stubborn tendentious editing. This view is readily understood if one realizes that arbitrators are (by charter) blind to content, and are restricted to adjudicating only behavioral claims; for example, claims that the expert "just refuses to understand, and persists in beating a dead horse". Imagine explaining the need for extended conversation to a panel of judges where content is explicitly ruled out of consideration, and behavior is the focal issue!

The difference between edit warring as disruptive behavior and as an attempt to straighten out what an article says may depend upon who is considering the issue.

Although edit warring in principle refers to Main-page editing, in practice it is considered disruptive to argue too much on the Talk page as well, especially by contributors not inclined to discussion, or finding themselves on the short end. Although reversion of Talk-page contributions is not allowed and does not occur, extended discussion may be labeled as tendentious editing, a form of misconduct.