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User:MBisanz/ACE2008/Guide/Jehochman

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Hello, below are some optional questions to help the voters at the 2008 Arbitration Committee elections get to know you, the candidate, better.

  • 1. How long have you been an editor of Wikipedia?
  • A. About 3 years 8 months.


  • 2. How many total edits do you have on Wikipedia? What is your % of edits to the article space?
  • A. 17,865. 20%. These are virtually all hand edits. I do not use any automated or semi-automated tools.


  • 3. Are you an administrator? If so, how long have you been one?
  • A. Yes. One year one month.


  • 4. Do you hold any other userrights or positions at the English Wikipedia? (crat, medcom, WPPJ, etc)
  • A. No.


  • 5. Do you hold any userrights or other positions of trust at other WMF projects? Which ones?
  • A. No.


  • 6. Have you ever been named as a participant of a Request for Arbitration? If so, please link case(s).
  • A. Yes.


  • A. I was blocked by User:Archtransit (immediately overturned by Animum).[1] This lead to a chain of events that ended with Archtransit being de-sysopped, banned, and exposed as a suspected sockpuppet.[2]


  • 8. Have you ever been blocked or formally sanctioned at another WMF project? If so, please describe.
  • A. No.


  • 9. What is your best work at Wikipedia? (an article, list, image or content template)


  • 10. If elected, would you request the Checkuser and/or Oversight userrights?
  • A. I have filed many requests for Checkuser and a few requests for Oversight. Access to the Oversight tool is important because I deal with cases of harassment and sometimes it is necessary to remove information that should remain private. More importantly, many recent ArbCom cases have hinged on private information, and one case has dealt with the use of the Checkuser tool. To evaluate these cases intelligently, I think it is necessary to have direct access to the evidence. I am also interested in having access to the tools and their mailing lists to help monitor them for possible abuse.
  • 11. Please list any disclosed or undisclosed alternate or prior accounts you have had.
  • A. I have User:Jehochman2 for use on insecure connections, and a doppleganger or two that have never edited.


  • 12. What methods of off-wiki communication do you use to discuss Wikipedia related matters? (IRC, Skype, WR, Mailing Lists, blogs, etc) Please link to any publicly available forums you use.
  • A. I prefer not to use off-wiki methods, for the sake of transparency. However, I may use email if a matter requires privacy. I participate in IRC, Skype and Gchat for social reasons, to get advice about how to do things (e.g. how do I edit the watchlist notices?), and sometimes to solicit help from other administrators or checkusers. I do not use such media as a substitute for on wiki consensus. I have posted a very small number of times at WR.
  • 13. Do you have OTRS access? If so, which queues?
  • A. No.
  • 14. How do you resolve the apparent inconsistency between RFAR/MONGO and RFAR/Jim62sch as to off-site activities by users?
  • A. Both are correct. Mongo says that if you post at a site that criticizes Wikipedia, your activities may receive closer scrutiny by the community. Jim62sch says that except in extraordinary cases (such as real life harassment) Wikipedia will not sanction users for their external activities. To synthesize them, "If you shoot off your mouth elsewhere, people may be suspicious of you, but you will only be judged for your activities here, usually."
  • 16. Besides compromised accounts, under what circumstances would you support or initiate an emergency request for desysopping?
  • A. Emergency desysopping is appropriate in case of serious ongoing harm to the encyclopedia or its contributors. If an administrator executes suspect sysop actions, and especially if they do not respond to talk page requests to stop and discuss, they can be desysopped, at least temporarily, to prevent disruption. We have plenty of administrators. Nobody needs to have sysop access while their competency is in serious doubt.
  • 17. Currently, only Jimbo Wales and the Arbitration Committee are authorized to perform/request involuntarily desysop an administrator whose account has not been compromised. What is your view of community-based desysopping decisions?
  • 18. If you owned Wikipedia as the WMF currently does, what would you do to fix the BLP problem?
  • A. I don't think there is an easy fix other than promoting responsible editing, and recourse to common sense.
  • 19. In 2004, the Arbitration Committee referred issues to the Mediation Committee. However, as of recent, the Arbitration Committee has not referred issues to the Mediation Committee. Would you refer more content-based disputes to MedCom or continue the current practice?
  • A. Mediation is voluntary. Arbitrators are free to suggest mediation, but I do not think it would be successful to force mediation upon unwilling participants.
  • 20. In the past the Arbitration Committee has taken a checkered view of wheel wars, desysopping in some cases and not desysopping in others. What do you believe constitutes a wheel war which would result in a desysopping?
  • A. Each situation is unique and depends on how they react to any arbitration case. The question to ask is, "Would this administrator do such a stupid thing again?" If the answer is "yes," then they should lose access.
  • 21. How involved must an administrator be to be unable to enforce policy on a user? Given that it is expected that all admins understand policy when they pass RFA, under what circumstances would you not desysop an administrator who was clearly involved with a user they blocked or an article they deleted/protected?
  • A. As with question 20, each case should be decided on its merits. Administrators are allowed to make occasional mistakes. Somebody who recognizes a mistake and learns from it probably does not need to be sanctioned. An administrator is uninvolved when uninvolved editors would not question the neutrality of the administrator. Disputants often shriek, "you are involved," but that does not make it so. The bottom line is that administrators need to act in a way that earns the community's trust.
  • 22. Besides the technical capabilities administrators have, the Arbitration Committee has granted administrators the rights to enforce certain general sanctions with regards to specific editors and articles. What is your view on these new non-technical privileges being considered part of the "administrative" function for purposes such as RfC, Recall, and RfAR?
  • A. Absolutely they are included. There is nothing about the "button powers": delete, block, protect. Use of "discretionary powers" should be subject to the same types of scrutiny and controls.
  • 23. Current checkuser policy at the English Wikipedia prohibits checkusers from fulfilling "fishing" requests. However, global privacy policy does not prohibit such requests from being fulfilled, so long as personal information is not disclosed. Would you support the alteration of the en.wp policy to permit fishing requests?
  • A. fish CheckUser is not for fishing. If a checkuser request does not have evidence linking accounts to each other or to a specific puppetmaster, the request should generally not be run, except in extenuating circumstances (e.g. severe harassment).
  • 24. In 2006 the Arbitration Committee asked the community to address the issue of protecting children's privacy on Wikipedia. To this day there is still no policy on how to handle children's privacy on Wikipedia. What steps would you take to ensure children's privacy is protected under policy?
  • A. I routinely remove any personal information posted by minors, such as their ages. This should be done in all cases to help prevent children from being targeted. I have three computer-using kids, so I am quite sensitive to the issue.
  • 25. How do you resolve the apparent inconsistency between RFAR/LevelCheck and RFAR/Durova as to what may be considered justification for blocks of educated new users?
  • A. Preturnatural knowledge of wiki may be a reason to scrutinize an account's behavior, and combined with other evidence may be used to justify checkuser. However, suspicion alone is not a reason to block. To borrow terminology from criminal law, probable cause is not guilt. New editors may be coming from another language Wikipedia, or may have used MediaWiki software previously. en.wikipedia.org is not the world's only wiki.
  • 26. Originally RfARs were named in the style of Party X v. Party Y in line with the idea of two groups in opposition to each other (eg. User:Guanaco versus User:Lir). Later it was changed to naming an individual user (eg. Husnock). Now cases get random names like Highways 2. What naming convention do you believe is the appropriate one for ArbCom to use in designating case names? under what circumstances should a case name be changed after opening, such as in RFAR/Zeraeph?
  • A. Case names should be descriptive. If a case is all about Zeraeph (I started that case), that is how it should be named. If a case is about a mass ruckus, such as Sarah Palin protection wheel war, naming the case after the locus of dispute or the nature of the dispute (or both) may be useful. When a case starts with the names of two users, such as Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Durova and Jehochman, but one user turns out to be a wallflower and editors are asking, "Why was this person named?" it may make sense to re-title the case.
  • 27. A case is presented between two administrators who have repeatedly undone each other's administrative actions with regard to the deletion of an article. The basis for the deleting administrator's action was an OTRS ticket showing the article to be a copyright violation. In performing the deletion, the administrator clearly referenced the OTRS ticket number. Assuming the undeleting administrator did not have OTRS access, do you penalize him more or less for wheel warring? Do you penalize the deleting administrator for wheel warring?
  • A. If one sysop has OTRS access, and another does not, I would be concerned about the second overturning the first without knowing the full facts of the matter. However, the deleting administrator also needs to learn self-control. Wikipedia probably was not about to explode if that article remained online for another hour or two. The deleting administrator should not have repeated an overturned sysop action without prior discussion and consensus. A quick trip to the administrators noticeboard might have cleared up the situation, and avoided the wheel war. Wheel wars have a high cost to Wikipedia by bringing the project into disrepute and wasting volunteer time. Whether a sysop loses their access for the first incident of wheel warring depends on whether they recognize the nature of their mistake and whether they are likely to repeat it. This is a judgment call.

28. To what extent do you believe policy on Wikipedia is or should be binding?

*A. Policy is binding, but it needs to be applied with a healthy dose of common sense. Policy is what the community agrees to do, subject to a few external requirements set by the Foundation, such as Privacy and Copyright. Written policy is a reflection of what the community has agreed. It is usually accurate, but not always. Our policies cannot foresee every possible circumstance. Editors, administrators and arbitrators need to recognize the limitations of formal policy act according to common sense, and avoid quibbling over policy technicalities.

29. Do you believe that former arbitrators should be on the Arb Comm mailing list? Why or why not?

*A. Sometimes. Often matters come before the Committee that relate to past cases or incidents. It is very helpful to have institutional memory. There are currently at least two lists, one for sitting Arbitrators and one for current and past Arbs. That was set up within the last year. I myself lodged complaints on two occasions when list members were named parties cases and there was no way to exclude them from confidential discussions about the case.
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