Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Fram/Evidence

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Case clerks: GoldenRing (Talk) & L235 (Talk) & Cthomas3 (Talk) Drafting arbitrator: Committee as a whole

Summary evidence

The following is a public summary of the community evidence passed to the arbitration committee by community members. In addition, we have received copies of emails sent between Trust and Safety and Fram, as well as another individual and Fram. Information which was significantly out of date has been removed, as has anything which has been significantly dealt with elsewhere.

Although the identity and related content of initial reports was redacted, we understood after review of the 70+ page Trust and Safety document that there were over a dozen reports to the Foundation. The report detailed long-term disputes with several community members, Arbcom as a body and its membership, and Foundation staff members. We did not see any evidence of off-wiki abuse.

Administrator actions

• Earlier this year, Fram blocked Martinevans123, which was then quickly reversed as "excessive" by Floquenbeam: Log: [1] AN/I: [2]
• August of last year, Fram's block of GorillaWarfare was criticized and then immediately reversed: [3]
• Block of Mathsci: [4]
• Fram threatens to block Martinevans for having YouTube links on his user page.[5]. He follows through. The block was seen as vindictive and transfer to ANI for a community discussion was recommended (Note past history with Martinevans)
• Excessive block length of Martinevans [6]

Incivility

• "Fuck off" in both edit summary and revision text. [7]
• "F off" in edit summary [8]
• Fram accuses Cwmhiraeth of using personal attacks, tells her to "fuck off". Fram remains confrontational, but shrugs it off.
• "I couldn't give a flying fuck about how I come across"

Harassment / Bullying

• Laura Hale retirement [9] (NB Nov 2012 Jan 2014)
• "I'm an admin, you are not. You may have your own stupid opinion". Fram causes Ybmlanter to resign
• Hounding Gatoclass [10][11][12]

Past attempt to be dealt with by the community

Arbcom declined

• The committee declined to hear a Fram case in October 2016 [13]
• Also in February 2018:[14] (including not asking for more evidence when told Fram often assumes bad faith here: [15] )
• More recently, an arbitration remedy against Fram was not passed by the Commitee: [16]

Noting also multiple cases raised by Fram, some of which considered his behaviour [17][18][19]

ANI threads

• Wikidata and fallout [20] (raised by Fram)
• User Fram and incivilty [21]
• Misuse of tools by Fram [22]

Individual editors

• Ritchie333 advising Fram to be more civil [23][24]

Disputes highlighted to look at

• Here's Fram's full interaction with Magioladitis and Izno from September 2017: [25]
• Signpost article (deleted content - [26])

Other notes

There's one instance where Fram undid his own mistakes, like one block on one editor: [27] [28]

Fram has a history of commentary on various software projects, which was not appreciated by a few WMF employees, who were ready to use their tools to block him for that reason: [29]

Evidence passed to us from over 3 years ago

• Rich Farmbrough case, Fram was prominent in pursuing the named party
• Nvvchar, Fram targeted, leading to him quitting - evidence at Nvvchar's talk page first copyvio discussion, DYK for Carrie A. Tuggle DYK for Anil de Silva, second copyvio discussion, Tracy Edser, discussion at WT:DTK, Good Articles review, immediate delisting of two just-passed GAs: [30] and [31], immediate delisting of another recently-passed GA

Fram's Response from Meta

• Martinevans (1.1, 1.4, and 1.5, which is identical to 1.1). The first block of Martinevans followed multiple warnings over a long period, with no improvements. After this block, they seemed to have stopped posting links to copyright violating youtube pages all over the place (to his own user page, but also to many other talk pages), and I left them alone. The second block happened when they reposted a page I had deleted as a copyvio (by another editor where Martinevans, as far as I know, had no history with). While my block was justified (they had been warned about copyvio often enough), the length was excessive.

• Gorillawarfare (1.2): blocked for a personal attack, but it was too harsh to block for this kind of comment which happens all the time all over the place. No prior or later negative interactions with Gorillawarfare as far as I know, and no hard feelings remain from either side (see [32]

• MathSci (1.3): no idea what this is evidence of; yes, it is an administrative action, that's what admins do.

• Fuck off and similar: yes, I sometimes use this, though not as often as it may seem from this section; 2.2 was a "F off" towards myself, as I was struggling to get the page right (both the edit before and after this one were mine as well). 2.3: the first diff[33] is hardly an example of me being incivil or using "fuck off" or so, is it? And the last diff[34] is me talking about the use of fuck off, and that it is uncivil but no a personal attack. For 2.4 I apologized the next day at the user talk page[35].

• 3.1 LauraHale diffs are from 2012/2014, so not in scope for this case. Statement on her page is not about her retirement at all.
• 3.2: see 4.2.2, diff is completely taken out of context and summarizes something said by Ymblanter, not by me!
• 3.3: What's the problem with these diffs? I went to the talk page of an admin who I thought was out of line, they didn't see a problem with their statements, so I posted it at ANI, which concluded that "Gatoclass should back down"[36]. I thought the lesson we were supposed to take from this whole Framban thing was that we shouldn't let "bad" behaviour by admins go unchecked for too long?

• 4.1 to 4.3: how are they evidence of problematic behaviour by me? If the cases were incorrectly declined, then that is an issue with the arbs then. The actual issues with me should be in the other sections here (e.g. some parts are about Gatoclass or Ymblanter, so things already raised elsewhere), but this part is just filler. That a statement by Ymblanter about me is removed as a clerk action[37] is supposedly a diff of problematic behaviour by me ... how?

In February 2019, two arbs supported an admonishment (or reminder) about my conduct, 8 others disagreed[38]. This is the most recent diff in this whole evidence page, as far as I have seen, yet 4 months later I was banned for one year and remain so two months later. It is clear from the evidence that my conduct has significantly improved and that my conduct in 2019 was in general not a problem (apart from the MartinEvans block of course). The reward for improving one's behaviour is banning?

• 4.2.2 (see also 3.2): [39] concluded with no action taken, and if you read the actual discussion, it looks as if every single commenter saw no merit in the section at all and agreed with my comments: "I entirely concur with Fram's 'interpretation'.", "Fram really didn't do anything wrong in this situation", "I would have interpreted the first two sentences of this diff exactly how Fram did", "it's clear that Fram has done nothing wrong", "what I'm seeing is Fram quoting you and offering their interpretation, most of which seem resonable.", "I'm not seeing any civility problems here. I think Fram's paraphrasing of what you've said is reasonable.", "I don't see any intentional incivility or gross misrepresentation on his part. " How such a section can be used as evidence of ArbCom-worthy misbehaviour by me is quite incomprehensible.

• 4.2.3; [40] basically the same problem as 4.2.2, i.e. a title included in the evidence against me which makes the list of problems longer and more impressive, but which in reality closed as "withdrawn" because again no one agreed with the original poster that any misuse of tools had happened.

• 4.3.1: the two diffs have nothing to do with "Ritchie333 advising Fram to be more civil" as far as I can see? No idea what this is doing here, the whole section 4 should probably be removed (or kept as evidence of the fact that many complaints are simply invalid)

• 5.1: isn't this the same as 2.1?

• 5.2: this was deleted as a BLP violation against me, and the two actual identifiable issues were exposed to be complete misrepresentations.

• 6.1: I mistakenly blocked, immediately self-reverted, and apologized. This is a good thing, no?

• 6.2: this is on another project, in 2014 (so out of scope anyway).

• 7: old stuff.

It would have been nice if ArbCom had used that week+ they took to summarize the "evidence" to actually weed out the wheat from the chaff, and remove duplicates, things out of scope, and things which are not evidence of anything problematic, so that this case could have focused on a fair, accurate summary of what I actually did wrong, and how this has improved (or not) more recently. ArbCom just reposting whatever nonsense accusations someone posted on the Internet without checking if the claims about me had any merit at all is disappointing.

I see that most of the above "evidence" (the actual evidence and the ridiculous bits) all appear on [41] so it seems as if whoever posted to the Arbs took it from there (and it also seems as if not too many people bothered to post evidence, which would have been obvious with an open case instead of this hopefully never repeated experiment). Fram (talk) 07:35, 19 August 2019 (UTC)