Wiki Weather

Wiki weather has been strangely unsettled in recent days. Last week, a heated argument over hidden comments in an information boxes at Sir Laurence Olivier — you couldn’t make this stuff up! — led to a tempest, an Arbcom filing, many angry words, and the forced resignation of administrator Dreadstar.

On his way out the door, Dreadstar lifted my own topic ban. He had every right to do this, since it was his mistake in the first place. He also lifted a block which depended on the ban, which quite possibly exceeded his authority. I have expressed the opinion that this block was also an error, but it might not have been his error to fix. You will not hear me complain.

Some commentators conjectured that, having found himself on the unaccustomed end of the +5 Mop of Blocking, Dreadstar sought at last to clean things up and restore everything to its proper place before he left. Others suppose that, in fury at his bad treatment by Wikipedia, he removed sanctions against the dread Mark Bernstein in the hope that hilarity and trouble would ensue. It may be the case that we cannot know the true state of affairs, as we do not choose to make windows into men’s souls.

One result was a formal Arbcom motion that cites as evidence against Dreadstar my own complaint at being called a “motherfucker” by a Wikipedia official in response to my perfectly sensible query. That’s cute because it turns out that Wikipedia has a catch-22 that prohibits admins from sending out abusive emails, but also prohibits anyone from reporting that they have done so, except privately to Arbcom — and this just happened to drop right into Arbcom’s lap and voila! there the handy evidence happened to be, because I didn’t know any better.

Arbcom has not expressed their gratitude.

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So having at least a furlough, I thought it would be churlish not to do something useful. So I trekked over for a look at the biography of Martin Fowler, author of the influential book on Refactoring. This is far, far from GamerGate, and the proper disposition of object methods does not appear to be a gender-related controversy. What could possibly go wrong?

Diderot’s Darling Dingbats! Edit war! Some anonymous account has appeared – what a coincidence! – eager to fight over whether the influential status of Refactoring is contentious. Also, is Refactoring important to Agile practices, or only to Test Driven Development? So now we’re pulling out references and piling up citations for stuff that everyone knows, because some fellow wants to waste a lot of our time, or perhaps wants to settle some score or other. Or perhaps it’s just one of my banned and blocked GamerGate pals using an anonymous account to burn theory people’s time and effort.

I can’t wait to hear what Sea Lions Of Wikipedia makes of this.