User talk:Yngvadottir#Goodbye statement

The second round of the 2025 WikiCup ended on 28 April at 23:59 UTC. To reiterate what we said in the previous newsletter, we are no longer disqualifying contestants based on how many points (now known as round points) they received. Instead, the contestants with the highest round-point totals now receive tournament points at the end of each round. These tournament points are carried over between rounds, and can only be earned if a competitor is among the top 16 round-point scorers at the end of each round. This table shows all competitors who have received tournament points so far. Everyone who competed in round 2 will advance to round 3 unless they have withdrawn or been banned.

Round 2 was quite competitive. Four contestants scored more than 1,000 round points, and eight scored more than 500 points (including one who has withdrawn). The following competitors scored at least 800 points:

• {{Wikipedia:WikiCup/Participant16|BeanieFan11}} with 1,233 round points from 24 good articles, 28 Did you know articles, and one In the news nomination, mainly about athletes and politicians
• {{Wikipedia:WikiCup/Participant16|Thebiguglyalien}} with 1,127 round points, almost entirely from two high-multiplier featured articles on Black Widow (Natasha Romanova) and Grace Coolidge, in addition to two GAs and two reviews
• {{Wikipedia:WikiCup/Participant16|History6042}} with 1,088 round points from four featured lists about Michelin-starred restaurants, nine good articles and a good topic mostly on Olympic-related subjects, seven ITN articles, and dozens of reviews
• {{Wikipedia:WikiCup/Participant16|Gog the Mild}} with 1,085 round points from three FAs, one GA, and four DYKs on military history, as well as 18 reviews
• {{Wikipedia:WikiCup/Participant16|Arconning}} with 887 round points, mostly from four FLs, six GAs, and seven DYKs on Olympic topics, along with more than two dozen reviews

In addition, we would like to recognize {{Wikipedia:WikiCup/Participant16|Generalissima}} for her efforts; she scored 801 round points but withdrew before the end of the round.

The full scores for round 2 can be seen here. During this round, contestants have claimed 13 featured articles, 20 featured lists, 4 featured-topic articles, 138 good articles, 7 good-topic articles, and more than 100 Did You Know articles. In addition, competitors have worked on 19 In the News articles, and they have conducted nearly 300 reviews.

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I'm happy to discuss here or at my talk, but I'm not thrilled with continuing at WPO where I'm literally getting threats and being told those threats are my fault. Are we talking about the arbcom case from 2021, or something else?

Happy also to discuss the current case. For purposes of being on the same page, here's how it looked to me.

The editor was brought to AE, where I did my damnedest to try to explain what the problem was with their edits, and they kept saying they understood and would avoid it in future. I took them at their word and recommended an informal warning, which is what happened.

Literally during that AE case, they went into Killings and massacres during the 1948 Palestine war and made this edit. I blocked them from that single article and not even its talk page for disruptive editing. They came to my talk and asked why, and I did my damndest to try to explain what the problem was, in a lengthy conversation during which they kept trying to argue why that edit was okay, and during which I said, {{xt|My advice is never make a major change of any kind, or a possibly controversial minor change, at a CTOP without opening a section on the talk page first. Only clearly noncontroversial changes should be made without discussion first at a CTOP}}. Which still seems to me like good advice to give to a fairly new editor who is repeatedly getting themselves into trouble at a CTOP. After several exchanges, they finally asked what they should have done. I gave an example, which was that they could have opened a section at talk, cited their sources, and suggested a change. I used lorem ipsum as a spaceholder. They made this edit to the talk, which looked like intentional disruptive editing, and I indeffed.

They were flabbergasted and asked why at their talk. I was flabbergasted myself by this point; this had to be either disingenuousness or incompetence, and I said so. After discussing, I decided to give this editor another chance and offered a pretty mild conditional unblock: a tban appealable after 3 months and 500 non-gaming edits, intended to force them to go learn some policy before they stepped into PIA again. They said they guessed they didn't have a choice, and I said they did, and that they could take it to XRV for review, and I unblocked them from Wikipedia space to allow them to do that, which they did, calling the conditional unblock offer an abuse of power and the 3mo/500 punitive.

It was clear the trend was going to be endorse, but another editor had suggested bumping to a simple tban, and IMO the editor was going to end up worse off than when they came in, so I advised them to seek advice from any experienced editor they trusted about whether they should withdraw before the discussion was closed. Within minutes, another admin, apparently in agreement that was a danger, closed the case endorsed and unactioned, for which I thanked them.

I'm happy to discuss how you saw it. It's apparent that at least some participants at WPO saw blocking an editor for mistaking lorem ipsum for advice to add a quote from Cicero as the opening sentence to a section about wartime massacres as "for following her instructions too literally", saw the advice to not make major or controversial changes at a CTOP without opening a talk section first as "just making shit up on the fly", and saw the whole situation as worthy of what eventually rose to threatening to take me to a place where very bad people do terrible things.

Valereee (talk) 12:23, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

Okay, someone has confirmed to me privately that what people are asking about at WPO is indeed that arbcom case.

So, this was a case about incivility by Flyer. On the Evidence phase, I argued that incivility needed to be looked at proportionally. That is, a small number of uncivil remarks in a large number of total edits might not constitute an incivility problrm, and so as background information, arbitrators should consider the frequency with which it was occurring.

On the talk page for evidence, I said to another editor that their interpretation of a warning from an arb was probably not a great interpretation. When the filing party asked for an extension to gather evidence, I asked why they’d filed if they didn’t expect to have time to participate.

In the Workshop phase, I opined that I was uncomfortable discussing someone who couldn’t participate. The editor who had brought that info in objected to that, an arb said it was okay to discuss it generally but not by name. I also proposed a principle that proportionality should be considered.

It doesn’t look like I commented at the Proposed decision talk.

So, I would say that I do feel proportionality matters. I’m not actually sure it mattered in this case, though, and at any rate arbs don’t seem to have specifically taken it into account.

I think my warning to the editor who was interpreting the arb warning was good advice.

I think my question to the filing party about the timing in a case they’d filed was a bit pointy, I'd probably just let that go in retrospect, but it wasn’t an unreasonable question.

I still would be uncomfortable discussing someone by name who couldn’t respond.

What I’m specifically being accused of at WPO is “Arb threats, which Valereee encouraged, were part of the enabling.” And “participated in the minimization and enabling of what was over a decade of abuse by Flyer22, a clearly unwell and antisocial individual, and encouraged silencing her victims who had the courage to come forward.”

I'm having a hard time seeing anything I did there as encouraging arb threats, but I guess my request to consider proportionality could reasonably be interpreted as minimizing/dismissing incivility. So, yeah, fair cop, I could have handled that better. {{u|WanderingWanda}}, I apologize, I could have made that point at minimum in a way that didn't feel dismissive of your concerns or like I was favoring the other party. Valereee (talk) 15:40, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

Hi {{U|Valereee}}, sorry to be so slow. Thanks for the rundown of the boutboul saga. I am not even remotely an expert on the ins and outs of Israel–Palestine edits and CTOP enforcement standards, and that was helpful to me. I think you're right about how it's been taken by many at WPO (notably the OP of the now non-public thread), and having (finally) responded here, I'll post there. But I'm only a representative of WPO to the extent that I'm a member there—and an illustrative case of how opinions do vary over there, as you will have noted. I hope to see you posting over there again (and I assume you'll keep reading). The one thing I will say is that I appreciate your trying to explain things to the editor. I think that's important for admins to do. But ... text communication has its limits, not helped by the temptation to use PAG shortcuts that may go over the other person's head, or that they may badly misconstrue. (French wiki has surprisingly different rules on some matters, and of course metaphors don't always translate well.)

Thanks for revisiting the arb case and re-evaluating, and for the apology to {{U|WanderingWanda}} (second ping to make sure the notification doesn't get swallowed). (I still have a lot of reading to do on that, including over at WPO, where you now know how large the archives are.) I'm going to flag that paragraph over there. Yngvadottir (talk) 04:25, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

:No worries, I wasn't expecting you to speak for WPO, and (obviously) remove this from your talk if you don't want it here, with my apologies if that's the case. I picked on you only because you'd asked for my response, and this allowed me to respond somewhere I wasn't getting threatened. Valereee (talk) 13:09, 1 May 2025 (UTC)