Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2006/Vote/Will Beback

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--I hadn't had a great deal of experience with Will before summer, and when that sustained experience did happen I found we were in three-quarter opposition over the matter and differed on what the appropriate outcome should be, but in the resulting flurry of emails and on the talks, he had an impressive command of the facts and answered points courteously and cogently up and down the gamet of the discussions with ever present patience courtesy and diplomacy.
   His investigative abilities and capabilities of organizing a case supporting his points, frankly, began to awe me. The detective work he'd done to unmask a fairly problematic internet troll, and the masterful aggregation of evidence he found to support his charges against the party (Ste4k, subsequently permanently banned), left me feeling very impressed.
   Overall, I found him quite easy to work with despite the differences we had in interpretation given our divergent starting points and he was quite willing to listen to a different opinion, interpretation, hypothesis, or alternate take on the issues and inferences and hammer through them item by item until we'd fully explored each, and he was always rational in his thinking, demonstrated great logic and was professional in demeanor and language. Keep in mind, I was mediating directly (advocating) for another, and opposing Will in that affair, and he won that in the RFC and before the ArbCom with an impressive array of facts and links, and never once showed an animosity—but 'presented' during the whole period as being professional, and so as someone just doing his job as best he could. It is hard to ask for anything more than that, and I found myself concluding his best is very good indeed. On several occasions I had to tease him for his lengthy responses came back so fast sometimes that I was amazed and found myself 'quite hard pressed' to keep up the flow of the dialog.
   The next couple months we touched base here and there and I found him to be extremely helpful. If he comes on strong against problem users, well, we need that, and the breadth and depth of his edit experience, including the devotion exhibited in giving so much descretionary time to the project makes him an eminently qualified candidate to my eyes. The reasons and rationales he gave me on every topic were level headed and seemed beyond bias— save perhaps I get a small sense he may have a disdain for those that get their kicks out of disrupting the project or other websites, which I gather he developed in many years on usenet and other internet discussion and news forums before joining wikipedia as an editor.
   My sole reservation is that I know we need skills like his to ferret out the bad guys hiding under aliases, and we may really miss his skills in monitoring and 'outing' those undesirables if his candidacy succeeds, for it is a valuable skill. Not everyone is good or suited to detective work. We need to be firm with problem users, and I believe he will make as good a judge as he has been as an anti-troll crusader. I doubt he would do any less than he always has--played by the rules, and enforced the same. So good luck Will, whichever way this goes.FrankB 05:33, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Threaded commenting from oppose section

1. Strongest possible oppose, unrepentant POV-pusher. —freak(talk) 01:13, Dec. 10, 2006 (UTC)

   Could you please elaborate? Perhaps give some diff links? -- Heptor _talk 22:48, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

   Will Beback focuses largely on controversial articles. In this diff, and this diff, he admitted that he strongly believes in censoring offensive material on Wikipedia. He had nominated that same article for deletion here, claiming that it should be deleted because it was "unsourced." However, it became clear later after the two comments above that he really just doesn't like material that he finds offensive. There's no such thing as an incorrect slur, anyway. I can make up a slur right now, and the fact that I used it to offend someone makes it one. He later deleted many of the sourced entries anyway because they were sourced by a "banned user"^[1] (at his urging!) or because they aren't English, or because they aren't ethnic, etc. He also has semi-protected the page to prevent new entries, although most of the people who edit the page wish to remain anonymous due to the subject matter. He claims the protection is due to vandalism, although there never was any sort of vandal storm that hit the entry.^[2] Other administrators have had to later unprotect the entry, because Will Beback refused to do so.

   Will Beback is active on many other battleground pages, including the "Lolicon" and "List of sexual slurs" entries. The latter two have been areas of strong debate about sourcing, images, and external links. He later invited the edit warriors from the list of sexual slurs to the list of ethnic slurs so that they could gut the list and two accepted the invitation, one still being very active.

   Although he is by far the most prolific stalker I have ever encountered on Wikipedia (see <www.encyclopediadramatica.com/index.php/Wikistalk>), he is still way too trigger-happy in blocking people (e.g., [3], [4], and many, many, many other mistakes that he hasn't undone--e.g., [5]). He thinks that he's really good at finding sock puppets, I guess, but he's actually really bad at it. He also claimed on his old User2004 userpage to have created entries that he actually didn't. I guess I've gone a bit off topic, but to answer your question, he is not only biased, he's an ideological crusader. I'm not an expert on Will Beback, and I have never examined his edits history in detail, so this I'm sure is just the tip of an iceburg.--A New User 08:48, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

This appears to have been written by Primetime (talk • contribs). -Will Beback · † · 21:54, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

I probably should not jump in here, but I'd just like to say that in my experience, Will insists on articles being well-sourced with reliable sources per WP:RS - period. This may be especially true of controversial edits. Sometimes I have personally been annoyed by his fairly strict standard for what is considered "reliable" (see for example history on the article Disemvoweling), but over time I've come to realize that a) it is per Wikipolicy, b) there are good reasons for such policy, and c) although there are thousands of pages that do not yet meet that standard, the trend is toward upgrading them with good citations. Will should not be distrusted for being just a little ahead of the curve on this trend, or accused of POV on the basis of trying to apply policies with wide consensus to controversial articles. They are the ones that need it most - and they are also the ones most likely to generate resentment from editors who are pushed to find reliable sources for what they want to say. Karen | Talk | contribs 01:34, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

[6], [7].--A New User 12:46, 13 December 2006 (UTC)