Post
by Abd » Wed Apr 08, 2020 11:47 pm
This is largely incoherent. On Reddit, by a throwaway account and then by the ViliGnat, of approving of Bbb23, which was simply not true. Bbb23 had clearly burned out, became over-attached to his activity and not responsive to the policy-based supervision of ArbCom. (I have pointed out that the structure creates that, which was interpreted as "excusing" Bbb23. No, we are all responsible for what we do, even if we had abusive parents, etc.)
What he removed from his talk page, however, was a link to a discussion supporting him -- which demonstrated that Tony Ballioni really didn't understand the issue. Ballioni has a point, but missed the point. ArbCom had not sanctioned him for checkuser errors. Ballioni is correct, a very active checkuser might well make some mistakes, but . . . why was this checkuser so active? It could indicate sua sponte checkuser, when the policy was against that, in general. Even if he was "right."
His removal of that content does not indicate any desire to hide anything. Many users want a clean talk page. Removing comment like that is disapproved, but relatively normal. And he was under attack, very common for admins, so there was revision deletion in the logs. Meaningless. I'd see the real remaining problem here as being Tony Ballioni, a checkuser who doesn't get it. But that's not likely to be considered serious enough to sanction him, and I've seen admins openly defy policy as wrong, in ArbCom cases, and it's blown off as meaningless.
Wikipedia is effed up in many ways, but pinning this as the result of Bad People is barking up the wrong tree and will never generate results worth working for.