On Dec. 9, Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee (ArbCom), the site’s version of a Supreme Court, sanctioned three editors over their purported involvement in a Wikipedia channel on the “Tech for Palestine” (TFP) Discord server.
The relevant policy at hand is canvassing, meaning that any kind of offsite coordination of editing Wikipedia articles is prohibited, which is what was reportedly occurring in the Discord channel. Telling people what to edit falls under canvassing. The existence of the TFP channel has previously been reported by Jewish Insider (JI), “The Wikipedia Flood” blog and a Pirate Wires piece that went viral.
The relevant policy is canvassing, meaning that any kind of offsite coordination of editing Wikipedia articles is prohibited, which is what was reportedly occurring in the Discord channel. Telling people what to edit falls under canvassing.
“Ïvana” was indefinitely site-banned and topic-banned from Israel-Palestine related articles, “for making edits in the Palestine-Israel topic area after off-wiki canvassing requests, and encouraging other users to game the extended confirmed restriction and engage in disruptive editing,” ArbCom announced. The “extended confirmed restriction” is a reference to how Israel-Palestine-related articles fall under extended-confirmed protection (ECP), meaning topics where only those who have been editors at least 30 days and have made at least 500 edits can make changes. Ïvana had been billed as the TFP channel’s “resident Wikipedia expert.”
“Samisawtak” was also indefinitely topic-banned from Israel-Palestine-related articles “for making edits in the PIA [Palestine-Israel articles] topic area after off-wiki canvassing requests, and violating the extended confirmed restriction in the Palestine–Israel topic area,” per ArbCom. Both Ïvana’s and Samisawtak’s sanctions can be appealed in 12 months. Samisawtak is believed to also be Samer, one of the Discord channel’s ringleaders.
“Tashmetu” had their ECP privileges revoked after ArbCom concluded that the editor had gamed the restriction; “CoolAndUniqueUsername” also had their ECP privileges revoked for the same reason, though it does not appear that CoolAndUniqueUsername was involved in the TFP channel itself. ArbCom had made their decisions based on privately submitted evidence, according to the announcement.
Prior to ArbCom’s announcement, Ïvana had acknowledged that she had joined “an off-wiki group at the beginning of the year,” but claimed that she was only trying to help “newcomers/people interested in [Wikipedia], mostly answering basic questions,” provided a table on Wikipedia of “easy edits for newcomers” and most had nothing with the Israel-Palestine topic area. She denied engaging in canvassing or “tag teaming.” After the announcement and during a separate ArbCom case in which eight editors were topic-banned from the Israel-Palestine topic area, “Sean.hoyland” claimed “that Ïvana does not believe that ArbCom definitively established that they responded to specific off-wiki requests i.e. that ArbCom did not distinguish between correlation and causation.” “Moneytrees,” at the time a member of ArbCom involved in the case, replied to Hoyland that he didn’t find Ïvana’s explanation to be convincing.
For their part, Tashmetu wrote that they accepted “the judgment of the committee regarding me. I am however not pleased the committee seems to acquiesce to such clearly politically motivated acts of intimidation.”
In a Dec. 13 blog post, The Wikipedia Flood criticized ArbCom’s actions as being “limited and ineffectual. … “A grand total of one editor was kicked off the site. …That was ‘Ïvana,’ who was the ‘resident expert’ in charge of the propagandizing effort. But other pro-Hamas editors involved in the offsite effort were merely ‘topic banned.’ This kind of ‘canvassing’ flies in the face of Wikipedia rules, totally perverting the site’s ethos by rigging the game, and pro-Israel editors involved in such efforts in the past have been site banned. But the pro-Hamas editors, by contrast, were treated with kid gloves.”
“‘Canvassing’ flies in the face of Wikipedia rules, totally perverting the site’s ethos by rigging the game, and pro-Israel editors involved in such efforts in the past have been site banned. But the pro-Hamas editors, by contrast, were treated with kid gloves.”
– The Wikipedia Flood
One editor I spoke to similarly described ArbCom’s sanctions as “a bit light” here. Tamzin Hadasa Kelly, a Wikipedia administrator, told me that while she wasn’t aware of the facts of the case, “Speaking generally, ‘site-ban the leader(s) and topic-ban the rest’ is how ArbCom tends to handle evidence of off-wiki canvassing. But I couldn’t tell you whether that was the appropriate response in this case, because I haven’t seen the evidence.”
Another editor told me that they were “made privy to the complete contents of the Tech for Palestine Wikipedia Discord channel and, plain and simple, there were at least 12 editors that were fully and knowingly violating site rules by engaging in an organized and regimented wiki manipulation operation for more than six months. This should have resulted in site bans for every single person involved. I have seen editors receive site bans for far less egregious behavior.” This editor also lambasted ArbCom for taking “more than three months to rule on the findings submitted to them (and) doing nothing as those malicious editors continued to affect pages unhindered. … Outside of Ïvana, who did everything possible to seal her fate, it’s like they went out of their way to avoid punishing those involved.”
“There were at least 12 [Tech For Palestine] editors that were fully and knowingly violating site rules by engaging in an organized and regimented wiki manipulation operation for more than six months. This should have resulted in site bans for every single person involved. I have seen editors receive site bans for far less egregious behavior.”
To fully understand the depth to which the TFP coordination occurred, The Journal will be publishing a 244-page dossier of screenshots from the channel taken by a source who infiltrated it, as the channel was open to the public until the beginning of September 2024.
Targeted Articles
The dossier begins: “From Feb. 6, 2024 through Sept. 3, 2024, the ‘tfp-wikipedia-collaboration channel on the ‘Tech for Palestine’ Discord served as a basecamp for widespread off-wiki coordination, team editing, canvassing, and other banned activities in explicit violation of Wikipedia rules and policies. Further coordination was conducted via private DMs, weekly ‘office hour’ group audio chats.” Samer and Ïvana also used their respective talk pages and sandboxes (which Wikipedia editors use as a testing space or to draft their own essays) to keep an ongoing to-do list of edits and organizing their team. These were later deleted, but screenshots can still be found in the dossier. Ïvana also purportedly took efforts to scrub her messages in the TFP channel, though screenshots show her being referenced in the chat. The dossier ends at Sept. 3, when the channel was closed to the public. In January 2025, regarding the Discord server’s efforts on Wikipedia TFP Founder Paul Biggar wrote: “We’re not working on that anymore. We’re planning to put out some content on Wikipedia propaganda … but no other work at the moment,” according to a screenshot I obtained.
At least 114 articles are believed to have been affected by the TFP coordination. Screenshots show that the TFP channel targeted articles involving cities that has passed resolutions calling for a ceasefire as well as celebrities calling for a ceasefire; for example, Samer provided a list of celebrities who signed a letter urging then-President Joe Biden “to push for a ceasefire” in the Israel-Hamas war and instructed channel members to add text using the following template: “In October 2023, [last name] signed an open letter for the ‘[[Artists4Ceasefire]] campaign alongside other artists, to push for a ceasefire and an end to the killing of civilians amid the [[2023 Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip]].”
Contributions were made by one editor and an editor with a Toronto IP address (both believed to have been involved in the Discord channel) inserting the template into the Wikipedia articles for the various celebrities on Samer’s list; these were their only edits to Wikipedia. While many of these instances were later removed, some iteration of the text can still be seen in the articles for Alyssa Milano, Andrew Garfield, Anoushka Shankar and Hasan Minhaj. “Discourseofcourse” added the template to various celebrities’ articles before getting blocked on Wikipedia; the additions were later removed.
On his Samisawtak talk page, Samer created a “tfp Wikipedia collaboration” table listing articles in need of work and the editor working on it; Ïvana was listed as the editor working on the Wikipedia pages for America Ferrera, Bradley Cooper, Bella Hadid, Gigi Hadid, Jessica Chastain, Macklemore, Mohammed Amer, Rizwan Ahmed and Yara Shahidi; her contributions show that she added the template to all of these pages. As of publication time, the text still appears in the pages for Cooper, Chastain, Macklemore, Amer, and Shahidi.
“There really isn’t a good reason to talk about someone’s ceasefire view on their page unless that’s really relevant to their life,” an editor told me, saying that that they would understand why that information would be added to, say, a member of the British Parliament’s Wikipedia page, but for celebrities, “who cares … that just seems like fluffy bulls— to me. But you can tell that this is like an astroturf campaign, they’re going out of their way to build up, promote this.”
Samer started a thread on TFP’s Discord channel calling for five volunteers to review a list of cities that passed resolutions calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war and then update the cities’ respective Wikipedia pages. Samer then thanked the editor who added the information to the Wikipedia pages for the Long Beach City Council, Montebello,Newburgh, N.Y., and Oakland, among others; that editor has only made a handful of edits to Wikipedia. Another editor added the info to the Wikipedia page for Albany, Calif. and Albany, N.Y. and Athens, Ohio, though the text no longer appears today in the latter two articles. (The editor who completed the task for those respective cities remains an active editor today.)
An editor told me that it seems “totally arbitrary” to add to these cities’ Wikipedia pages that they passed ceasefire resolutions when they have “tons of resolutions every day, every year.”
“They’re just trying to promote their own group, you’re not really supposed to do that … if any other group was doing that, I’m pretty sure people would be up in arms about it,” an editor told me. “And you can see that with the encampments, where the majority of the country and the majority of the people don’t support these things.” But “the very woke, ultra-online type of leftist movement, to them it’s really important to get the word out to promote this cause. But you’re not supposed to do that,” the editor added. “Wikipedia is supposed to be stuff that has relevance from like a 10-year perspective … some people would even argue a 20-year perspective … the encampments were all the rage for like, a good five or six news cycles or whatever, and then that story has faded.” The editor pointed out that the current front pages of major news outlets focus on issues such as Trump officials, the Department of Justice and perhaps far-right European political parties, but nothing really about the ongoing war in Gaza. They added that the purpose of astroturfing “is to create a support for a movement so it appears more important and relevant than it really is and that’s what they’re doing by trying to promote this as a task force.”
An editor who grew disillusioned with Wikipedia after making thousands of edits told me that these activities are all “canvassing and meatpuppetry” — meatpuppetry means when someone edits on behalf of someone else — “and should be treated very severely indeed as it goes against the whole idea that Wikipedia is made by individual independent editors.” The editor added that these edits could fall under the category of WP:NOTNEWS, referencing the Wikipedia policy about how “most newsworthy events do not qualify for inclusion,” but the editor acknowledged that such policies are a “numbers-based tool.”
The Wikipedia page for Lidl, the German global retail chain, states in part at the end: “In 2023, amid a widespread boycott movement against Israeli businesses and products, Lidl stores faced criticism after several customers in France and Belgium complained that the store mislabeled products of Israeli origin as originating from other countries, such as Morocco. The Lidl group attributed the issue to a display error.” The text was drafted in the channel after deliberation from its members, and then Samer announced he had put it into the article. “Does a retailer’s page need to talk about how they mislabeled some products? That seems very minor; if it needs to be mentioned at all, maybe it’s one sentence,” an editor told me, though they acknowledged that it’s not uncommon for editors try and insert the controversial issue of the day into Wikipedia articles.
In August, a Discord user posted a story about how the Creative Community for Peace organized a letter signed by 150 celebrities calling on the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) to rescind its nomination for Palestinian journalist Bisan Atef Owda’s Al Jazeera + series “I’m Bisan From Gaza And I’m Still Alive”; CCFP alleged that Owda has ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terror organization. The user noted with a smirk emoji that NATAS rebuffed the CCFP letter, claiming they were unable to corroborate the organization’s claims and that it saw no reason to revoke the nomination. On Aug. 26, another user in the Discord channel announced that the information had been added to Wikipedia.
Samer also instructed channel members on June 3 to create a Wikipedia page for the 2012 book “Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism” by Judith Butler, a book that completely repudiates Zionism. On June 10, an editor authored a first draft of an article about the book; Ïvana also added material to the article before it officially went live. According to the screenshots from the Discord channel, that editor volunteered to start researching sources on Butler’s book on June 7, prompting Samer to thank them. That editor has only made a handful of edits to Wikipedia.
What about Tashmetu, who had their ECP privileges revoked by ArbCom? The dossier shows that Samer’s table had listed “AgentNa” from the Discord channel as working on a Wikipedia article on Ilan Pappe’s 2017 book “The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty: The Husaynis, 1700–1948.” The original author of that Wikipedia page: Tashmetu, with the page going live on July 2. AgentN had posted a link to the page in the channel on July 3, according to screenshots in the dossier. Additionally, AgentN posted in the channel on July 20 that they are “new to Wikipedia editing, just started editing yesterday.” Tashmetu’s first edit was on July 20. Tashmetu continues to be an active editor on Wikipedia today.
As I’ve previously reported, one of the targeted articles in the TFP channel was the formerly named “2024 Nuseirat rescue operation” article, since renamed to “Nuseirat rescue and massacre.” Samer’s June alert about Nuseirat also referenced “the same blitz team we had when we tackled Lilly Greenberg Call,” referencing the Interior Department official who resigned, criticizing the Biden administration’s “disastrous, continued support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.” One of the editors heavily involved in Call’s Wikipedia article was Ïvana.
Not only English Wikipedia was affected by TFP. I have previously reported how screenshots show a user in the channel named “baderdean” announced in the channel that “we have a French Wikipedia team” and that “we just updated ‘Red triangle’ ‘rouge triangle’ in french [sic] because we thought it’s important to enhance the resistance point of view” and called for people to make the same changes to the English Wikipedia article on the matter.
Zei_Squirrel
Screenshots obtained further note that “Zei_Squirrel,” which Pirate Wires described as being “a radical, Hamas-aligned account on X (272,000 followers), Discord, Reddit and Instagram,” put out a call on X for Wikipedia editors to combat “the ‘mass rape’ hoax” on the Wikipedia pages for “Screams Without Words” — The New York Times investigation on the Hamas rapes during the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre — as well as Anat Schwartz, one of the authors of the Times investigation and the Wikipedia page “Sexual and gender based violence against Palestinians during the Gaza war.” “Zionist propagandists are swarming [the pages] like crazy,” Zei_Squirrel wrote. The X account listed the names of three editors — “Coretheapple,” “Bobfrombrockley” and “Salemofjudea”––and called on other editors to “focus on reversing and challenging everything they do on these pages.” Zei_Squirrel’s X posts were shared in the TFP channel.
After Zei_Squirrel’s call to action, Ïvana reverted an edit that changed a sentence on Schwartz’ Wikipedia page stating that “The Intercept wrote: ‘Schwartz said she then began a series of extensive conversations with Israeli officials from ZAKA, a private ultra-Orthodox rescue organization that has been documented to have mishandled evidence and spread multiple false stories about the events of Oct. 7, including debunked allegations of Hamas operatives beheading babies and cutting the fetus from a pregnant woman’s body’” to “The Intercept wrote: ‘Schwartz said she then began a series of extensive conversations with Israeli officials from ZAKA, a private ultra-Orthodox rescue organization’ whose own reporting about Oct. 7 has been questioned.” It was the first time Ïvana had edited the article. Coretheapple subsequently reinstated Bobfrombrockley’s edit, only to be undone by “Flounder fillet.” The edit from Flounder fillet reverting Coretheapple was the editor’s only edit to the Schwartz article as of press time, though there has been no established link between Flounder fillet and the TFP channel, nor any established record of communication with Zei_Squirrel.
On the talk page of Schwartz’s article, Bobfrombrockley contended that the material about Zaka might be “noteworthy in the article about Zaka, or possibly in the article about ‘Screams without words,’ but not in this biography.” Ivana argued that it was necessary to show “context about Zaka’s credibility issues, which sheds light on potential biases or misinformation that may have influenced Schwartz’s research.”
Today, the section of the article reflects that suggestion: “The Intercept wrote that Schwartz ‘said she then began a series of extensive conversations with Israeli officials from ZAKA,’ a private ultra-Orthodox rescue organization whose testimony has subsequently been scrutinized and found to be unreliable.”
An editor told me that while this instance was canvassing, “in such cases the editor just says something like ‘I saw it online and decided on my own to act’ and then the admins do nothing … there’s also obvious tag teaming but they hardly ever do anything about that, either.”
Interestingly, Zei_Squirrel recently claimed on X that she has “never been active in the ‘Tech For Palestine’ or Palestine Discord, have never had a Wikipedia account or have been involved in ‘manipulation efforts.’” But screenshots in the dossier purportedly show that Zei_Squirrel joined the TFP channel on May 20, where she announced: “I’m also working on a Wikipedia group to work on countering propaganda, and it’s now getting into that next phase. I’ll be in here as well and follow what’s going on in case there’s any overlap, but it’s important to keep this as decentralized and organic as possible to avoid it being used against us, but again this should all be familiar to those who know how wiki works.” The dossier appears to show Zei_Squirrel asking if anyone in the channel can make an edit that is “not particularly controversial” and telling a member of the channel who asked if they can help an editor despite not having 500 edits, “sure you can help out, though it would be good to keep working on edits on non-political neutral pages to build it up so you can also contribute there. You can DM me your editor name so I can add you to the list, and also send you an invite to the channel here as well as on telegram.” That would seem to track with when Zei_Squirrel posted on X in April that “Zionists are organizing on Wikipedia to launder their genocidal atrocity propaganda lies. If you want to help counter that with facts and are an editor and know how Wikipedia works, email me. I will ensure your anonymity.”
Bloomberg reported in a March 7 piece on Wikipedia: “Asked for comment in October, a person who responded to the Zei Squirrel account, which has 272,000 followers, said those [Wikipedia] efforts had ‘zero effect.’”
The dossier claims that Zei_Squirrel operated a separate private Discord channel dedicated to Wikipedia, and links to Zei_Squirrel’s X account that has a link to her general public Telegram account.
Alleged ECP Gaming
ArbCom does not appear to provide any sort of explanation as to what exactly they were referring to when they said that the sanctions were in part over ECP gaming. But the dossier does provide a link to Samisatawk’s sandbox that was referenced in a case from November at Arbitration Enforcement (AE), a wiki-equivalent of a lower court of sorts where administrators deliberate on if a reported editor should be sanctioned or not, which likely provides the answer. The case involved the editor “Chess” reporting CoolAndUniqueUsername to AE, accusing them of gaming to reach ECP-status and thus edit Israel-Palestine articles. Chess pointed out that CoolAndUniqueUsername immediately started editing such articles after reaching 500 edits and contended that CoolAndUniqueUsername had been following a guide that Samisatawk had posted on his talk page that stated: “From Ïvana: This category contains almost 150k articles with small css errors that anyone can fix. If you click on a specific subcategory it tells you exactly what is wrong and how to fix it.” The CS1 errors are a reference to citation reference errors. Chess alleged that most of CoolAndUniqueUsername’s edits to reach the ECP threshold was fixing these citation errors and thus gaming. After some deliberation, the case was closed with no action after it was determined that this is something of a gray area and that CoolAndUniqueUsername had made some substantial edits in addition to the technical ones.
The conversation subsequently continued at the “Arbitration/Requests/Clarification and Amendment” (ARCA) page (the wiki-equivalent of a Supreme Court hearing session where ArbCom hears arguments on if it should take a case), where Chess questioned Ïvana if she had been giving “guidance to editors to boost their edit counts by fixing CS1 errors in order to get extended confirmed” and if she had been coordinating with CoolAndUniqueUsername, citing overlapping activity between the two. Ïvana flatly denied both allegations. She also claimed not to know if CoolAndUniqueUsername was part of the Discord channel (and so far no evidence directly links the editor to it) and denied engaging in canvassing. Ultimately, ArbCom did revoke CoolAndUniqueUsername’s ECP privileges after concluding that the editor had gamed the restriction, though the committee did not specify what led them to conclude this.
One editor told me that they agreed that there is a “gray area” but “there does seem to be a trigger finger to say that pro-Israel editors are gaming while other gamers might get away with it. The idea that making small edits is gaming is kind of bulls— anyway to be honest. The rule isn’t ‘you are EC if you make 500 good big edits.’ The decision to revoke EC from gamers who are pro-Israel is arbitrary in my view. But, them’s the breaks I guess.”
“EC-gaming is a surprisingly amorphous concept,” Kelly told me, adding that “when we tell people they can’t edit certain things till they hit 500 edits, logically, they’re going to try to hit 500 edits. There’s a sense in the community that if they try to cheat the definition of ‘500 edits’ to make that happen, that’s a problem. A straightforward example would be someone who writes an article one character at a time. For more complex situations, we get more into ‘I know it when I see it’ territory. Making 500 low-effort technical edits, including CS1 fixes, might be seen as EC-gaming, especially in combination with other factors like a sudden pivot to partisan editing upon attaining EC — or, in this case, the evidence that it was part of a concerted, organized attempt to skew the topic area.” Kelly made clear that her thoughts here were general and not specifically about CoolAndUniqueUsername.
But another editor told me that “gaming comes down to intent. In this case, the intent was clear, and in most cases, it’s usually clear too. Those are the blatant editors who get sanctioned and their EC permissions revoked: when they rush up non-controversial edits and pivot too quickly.”
API and Data Scraping
There was a thread in the TFP channel from May called “Querying Wiki through API”; as one editor described it to me, this references “a system for programmatically searching edits and other info … Basically it would allow people to write a script to process a bunch of edits at once and do some kind of logic on them, e.g. for an alert system or a bot something like that.” As an example, Samer discussed using API to determine if the celebrities who signed the letter had the word “ceasefire” in their respective Wikipedia pages and if so, put it into a table and review the text. It was also purportedly discussed in the thread about the possibility of developing a bot monitoring edits to articles on “particular topics and phrases” as well as contributions from editors that, in their view, “spread misinformation based edits.” They also appeared to discuss creating a bot that would make semiautomated edits, which I am told is not allowed on Wikipedia without prior approval. It does not appear that these developments came to fruition.
A separate thread in the channel discussed using what’s known as a data scraping tool to extract information on members of parliament (MPs) and lords in Britain who visited Israel and the Palestinian territories and who covered the cost of the trips and put all the information into a Wikipedia article. In the thread, the Discord user “Heba” mentioned that the goal was to “inform voters to put pressure ahead of the next elections.” It’s not clear that this end goal ever came about.
Ïvana’s Deleted Messages
Even though Ïvana appeared to have removed her messages from the Discord channel, I was able to obtain screenshots of some of her purported messages before they were deleted; these screenshots are not included in the dossier. In one message from June she announced that the ADL’s reliability had been downgraded on Wikipedia, which she called “a small win” and that “it’s obvious they are aware that this hurts their credibility.” Samer replied: “Great news. Well done you and others who have been working hard on this front.”
I have obtained a screenshot from a source who says it came from Zei_Squirrel’s Telegram channel. In the screenshot, on March 26, Ïvana purportedly states that “it would be great to get organized to combat Zionist disinformation on Wikipedia.” She also said that she has met the threshold of needing to be an editor for 30 days and made at least 500 edits to be able to in the Israel-Palestine topic area “and am somehow familiar with the content policies so whenever Zei highlights an issue I try to fix it whenever I have the time. But it’s easy to get discouraged when you have Zionist freaks reverting you all the time.” When someone suggested that she “could make a telegram for this,” a person in the Telegram channel named “Asem” then provided a link to the TFP channel, which Asem described as “a group trying to coordinate efforts for the same purpose.”
“This System Is Fundamentally Broken”
One editor surmised that “ArbCom probably didn’t bother sanctioning editors who only made a few edits and aren’t actively editing in a disruptive way,” referencing editors who didn’t make a lot of edits. “They will be handled normally i.e., AE reports if they reappear.” The editor further posited that while various screenshots from the dossier presented to ArbCom do appear to show coordination amongst those involved with TFP, “I imagine ArbCom’s little trick of pseudo-plausible deniability is to say that we don’t know for sure if the screenshots are real or fake or some kind of Joe job, or if the screenshots are depicting someone else impersonating those editors somehow, and unless they admit it’s them like Ivana did, they may not be nailed for it.”
But another editor maintained that “the arbitrators were notified of the Tech for Palestine discussion by numerous parties when the channel was still active and accessible, and were encouraged to visit the page and witness it for themselves. The edit activity on the Discord channel and what ended up on Wikipedia is one for one. If they had any doubts as to the veracity of the screenshots, they most definitely didn’t express it … Most of the edits discussed on the Discord channel were tracked via a wiki-hosted sandbox chart. And that cannot be falsified. So any attempt to claim deniability (or manufacture) is fundamentally moot.” The editor also contended that even editors who made only a handful of edits should still have been sanctioned by ArbCom because “they took orders from a command structure and executed biased and propagandistic edits” and that their inactivity at the time of discovery shouldn’t allow “them to evade sanction and get another opportunity to resume disruptive editing at a later time.”
This editor proceeded to excoriate Wikipedia’s system of governance. “At some point the blind faith we keep on having in the Wikipedia administration needs to be backed up by pure, raw evidence that they are performing the duties we expect of them,” the editor told me. “We keep on being disappointed in the temerity and lack of scope of their actions and its finally time to say, ‘enough is enough.’ This system is fundamentally broken and there is no procedural change admins or the Arbitration Committee can undertake to fix these problems themselves. It is now clear that the admin/arbitrator institution itself is constitutionally broken, as well as composed of individuals not suited to the task of policing Wikipedia, most especially in its most contentious of sections.”
The editor recalled one of the members of ArbCom “proudly boasting as to the ‘sensitivity and understanding’ of the punishments handed out, as if they were proud that they were able to find some upside-down justification for ‘mercy’ when they fully knew what the appropriate punishment here was. There is no higher crime on Wikipedia than organizing off-site.” The editor added that “some may say that the on-wiki sandboxes the editors in question maintained bely that assertion, except that the editors attempted to destroy all evidence of their coordination operation once they realized it was public. They knew exactly what they were doing.”
The editor concluded: “Any attempt to derive a logical analysis of the situation only lands at the conclusion that we no longer have appropriately qualified individuals running the ship here (if we ever did in the first place). Even worse so, that Wikipedia effectively does not have a checks-and-balances system, so there is no avenue for appeal here. There is no second circuit court. There is no Supreme Court. We must now sit in silence as editors like these are further emboldened to expand their coordination operations, if only a little smarter this time around (and far more private and guarded in their conspiracy).”
“Any attempt to derive a logical analysis of the situation only lands at the conclusion that we no longer have appropriately qualified individuals running the ship here (if we ever did in the first place).” – Wikipedia editor
Asked to comment on the article, a member of ArbCom replied that it does not discuss actions based on private evidence.
Read the full TFP dossier here:
