UDWiki:Administration/Misconduct

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This page is for the reporting of administrator (sysop) misconduct within the Urban Dead wiki. Sysops are trusted with a considerable number of powers, many of which have the capacity to be abused. In many circumstances, it is possible for a sysop to cause considerable havoc. As such, users are provided this page to report misconduct from the System Operators. For consistency and accountability, sysops also adhere to the guidelines listed here.

Guidelines for System Operator Misconduct Reporting

The charge of Administrative Misconduct is a grave charge indeed. If misconduct occurs, it is important that the rest of the sysop team be able to review the charges as necessary. Any charge of administrative misconduct must be backed up with evidence. The clearest evidence that can be provided for administrative misconduct is a clear discrepancy between the relevant action log (deletion, block, or protection log) and the archives of the relevant administration service page, and this is a minimum standard of evidence admitted in such a tribunal.

Misconduct is primarily related to specific Administrator Services, not standards of behavior. As such, situations including verbal attacks by sysops, while frowned upon, do not constitute misconduct. Sysops on a wiki are in theory supposed to have no more authority than a regular user - they merely have a greater scope of power. Personality conflicts between sysops and regular users should be treated just as a personality conflict between two regular users. If, in the course of such a conflict, a sysop abuses their administrative powers by banning a user, blocking or deleting a page without due process, that is misconduct, and should be reported to this page.

There is, however, an exception to this rule - excessive bullying, or attempts to treat the status of sysop as a badge of authority to force a sysop's wishes on the wiki may also come under misconduct. Any accusations of this should come with just as clear evidence, and for such an action to be declared misconduct, there should be a clear pattern of behavior across a considerable period of time.

All discussion of misconduct should occur on this page, not the talk page - any discussion on the talk page will be merged into this page once discovered. Once a misconduct case has been declared closed, a member of the sysop team other than the sysop named in the case will mete out the punishment (if deemed necessary), and then move the case to the Archive.

Administrative Abilities

For future reference, the following are sysop specific abilities (ie things that sysops can do that regular users cannot):

  • Deletion (ie complete removal, as opposed to blanking) of pages (including Images and any other page-like construct on this wiki), through the delete tab on the top of any deletable construct.
  • Undeletion (ie returning a page, complete with page history) of pages (including any other page-like construct on this wiki (Images are not included as deletion of an image is not undoable), through the undelete tab on the top of any undeletable construct
  • Protection of pages (ie removing the ability of regular users to edit or move a particular page), through the protect tab on the top of any protectable construct.
  • Moving of pages (ie changing a page complete with the page's history to a different namespace).
  • Warning users reported in Vandal Banning.
  • Banning of Users (ie removing the ability of a specific user to edit the wiki), through the Block User page.
  • Editing of Protected pages by any means.
  • Research IP activity using the CheckUser extension.
  • (Bureaucrats Only) Promotion (providing the above abilities) of User to Sysop/Bureaucrat status.

If none of the above abilities were abused and the case doesn't apply for the exception mentioned above, then this is a case for UDWiki:Administration/Arbitration or UDWiki:Administration/Vandal Banning.

Example of Misconduct Proceedings

Sysop seems to have deleted Bad Page, but I can't find it in the Archives of either the Deletion or Speedy Deletion pages. The Logs show a deletion at 18:06, October 24th 2005 by a System Operator, but this does not seem to be backed up by a request for that deletion. I would like to know why this is the case -- Reporter 13:42, 28 Oct 2005 (BST)

The deletion was asked through my talk page. I give my Talk page as proof of this. -- Sysop 13:42, 28 Oct 2005 (BST)
It looks like the page that was deleted did not belong to the requesting user, so you were in no position to delete it on sight. -- Reporter 13:42, 28 Oct 2005 (BST)
You know the rules, Sysop. All deletion requests have to go through the Speedy Delete page. Next time, please inform the user where they should lodge the request. This is a clear violation, will you accept a one-day ban as punishment? -- Sysop2 13:42, 28 Oct 2005 (BST)
I'm not liking it, but I clearly broke the rules, I'll accept the ban. I'll certainly remember due process next time... Sysop 13:42, 28 Oct 2005 (BST)
As punishment for failing to follow due process, Sysop has been banned for a period of 24 hours. This will be moved to the Archive shortly. -- Sysop2 13:42, 28 Oct 2005 (BST)

Before Reporting Misconduct

Due to a the growing number of Non-Misconduct cases popping up on this page the Administration Staff has decided to compile a basic summary of what has been viewed as Not Misconduct in the past. Please read over UDWiki:Misconduct and make sure that what you are reporting is in fact misconduct before filing a report here.

Cases made to further personal disputes should never be made here, harassment of any user through administration pages may result in vandal escalations. Despite their unique status this basic protection does still apply to Sysops.

Misconduct Cases Currently Under Consideration

Axe Hack, Vapor, Karek, Revenant, Spiderzed

This misconduct case arises from the insane ruling reached in the Johnny Rotten case. In the case, the above five sysops decided to permaban Johnny Rotten for editing defamatory text in to the userpages of Carrie Cutter and Sister Rita. All five ruling sysops found the case to be vandalism, and, as Johnny Rotten had numerous edits before that point, he should have received a single warning, in line with the escalation system.

Instead, Vapor posted a permaban ruling, stating that he "got no tolerance for that shit". Vapor's ruling immediately begs the question; Do we now ban people because we can't tolerate them? When I asked the sysop team further why Johnny Rotten was permabanned, and specifically what rule or policy he was banned under, Vapor again replied by saying that "It's the "Text Rapists Don't Get Second Chances" rule." This rule does not exist. He also cited harassment, which has only ever been allowed as vandalism in the most severe cases of harassment over a long period of time (i.e. Iscariot case), and even then only gives a single escalation. Johnny Rotten only made a single edit to each of their pages, and as such there's no way this could qualify as harassment. Vapor also cites a Terms of Service violation. as Thad helpfully quoted on the case, a terms of service violation includes "unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, defamatory, vulgar, obscene (illegal pornography), libellous, invasive of another's privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable". The only terms of the above which could even be considered violated would be "abusive", "harassing" (although not by UDwiki standards) "vulgar", "invasive of another's privacy" and "hateful". UDwiki has always operated under a policy of free speech. If I want to use abusive language to somebody, as long as it isn't racially themed, it's always been allowed. As such, we really don't have rules against being abusive and hateful implemented. In terms of being vulgar and invading another's privacy, there clearly was an offence of invading the privacy of these user's wiki pages and posting vulgar comments there. However, this would only merit a single escalation, as has always been the case on UDwiki. If the sysop team wanted to stretch the rules, they could have treated each case as a separate instance, and given 2 warnings. They did not.

The second ruling came from Axe Hack, who gave no justification at all at any stage during the case. Next came Karek. Karek justifies the ban by saying that "it's got enough things going for it between multiple venues on and off wiki". As has always been the case, we do not punish activity which goes on outside the wiki. Just like we can't permaban zerging players from the wiki, we can't permaban text rapists, just because they're text rapists. Zerging, might I add, is specifically against the rules of the game, whereas we have no statement from Kevan saying it should be banned. This wiki itself voted against a civility policy. The short story is, simply, that we can't punish anything that goes on outside of the wiki. There are therefore no grounds to consider it a ToS violation, as noted above.

Spiderzed also votes to permaban, noting that "In crass cases like this, the TOS apply indeed." This is not the case. I refer to the infamous Goatse case where something very much "crass" occurred, and in a tight vote, the user was found to have vandalised, and was given a single escalation. It should be noted that Spiderzed voted Not vandalism in the above case. In "crass cases" as Spiderzed calls it, there is no deviation from the escalation system and no reason to do so. Likewise, the above case was ruled a ToS violation, and still there was no permaban. Revenant gives a final opinion, justifying his ruling with "I support this zero tolerance stance for text rapists". Once again, there is no justification whatsoever for banning somebody based on in-game actions.

Next I'll talk about Permaban votes in vandalism cases. The general rule states that "Any user reaching a fifth (or higher) ban faces the possibility of a permaban vote". There are only 3 exceptions to this rule:

  1. The user has only made 3 or less edits, and they are all vandalism (three edit rule)
  2. The user is a spam or ad bot
  3. Kevan has specifically approved of the banning, and his owner privilege was used as the basis for the banning.

None of these conditions was fulfilled. In the case of applying standard procedure for permaban votes, a two thirds majority of sysops is required. At the time of banning, only 2 sysops had supported the ruling. The case is very similar to the Iscariot permaban case where he was banned quickly so that he couldn't defend himself on his own case.

Ultimately, the sysop team had 2 legal options in this case. The first was to give the user one warning (two if they wanted to separately punish the offences). The second, as indicated in the case, was to contact Kevan and have him banned via legitimate means. If the sysop team had done so, and Kevan had agreed to ban the user, then the permaban would have been legitimate. As it stands, they did not seek approval. I would still advise them to do so, because personally I think Johnny Rotten is bottom-dwelling scum. However, they didn't do it, and it's already becoming apparent in subsequent cases that the sysop team is completely ignoring the entire system of escalations and just permabanning any vandals now. The sysop team needs to be held to account for their misconduct in this case, deterred from doing the same in the future, and advised to follow the correct routes of procedure. If they didn't like the current rules, they always had the opportunity to set up a policy discussion.

Sorry about the text-wall, but this is really unacceptable behaviour by the sysop team.--Yonnua Koponen Talk ! Contribs 12:19, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

I'm also pretty much stumped with the way this was handeld, seeing so many sysops, some of them experienced, going against the very fundementals of our years old vandal-system. I said most of what I wanted to say on the vandal case, which is on some points in line with what Yonn typed above. -- Cat Pic.png Thadeous Oakley Talk 12:31, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
Although I'd like to say that I do consider text-rape to be a ToS violation but I specifically repeat that every kind of ToS violation has arguably happened within the wiki and we've never handled it with a permaban. Otherwise a lot of longtimers here would be long gone. -- Cat Pic.png Thadeous Oakley Talk 12:37, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
again don't you guys have like homework you should be doing? move the fuck on losers.--User:Sexualharrison13:04, 23 November 2011 (bst)

I'll try to keep this short. No this has nothing to do with any assumed dislike of Johnny Rotten or his in-game actions. It has everything to do with keeping text-rape (or as I put it "this shit") off the wiki. Permanently. While we have allowed other forms of ToS violations in the past with only a slap on the wrist, text-rape simply lies in its own category. I honestly feel that even one infraction qualifies as harassment and it serves absolu-fucking-lutely no purpose. I'm sure that Carrie and Sister Rita probably feel the same, though I'd rather not drag them into this. Now I could have started a policy discussion to instate a zero-tolerance policy on wiki text-rape and waited the two + weeks to try to get it passed while Johnny got a stern scolding on his talk page. If I must, I will start that policy. However, and I quote The Adminstative Guidlines, that sysops are "... trusted users of the wiki, [and] are given the right to make judgment calls and use their best discretion on a case-by-case basis. Should the exact wording of the policies run contrary to a system operators' best good-faith judgment and/or the spirit of the policies, the exact wording may be ignored." I made a judgement call when I banned Mr. Rotten and given a second chance, I would do it again. The remaining ops can rule however they'd like on this case and it won't likely change my mind even one inch on this subject. I did what I felt was right and I'm disgusted that this Misconduct case exists. We did what was right and we'd be doing the user's of this wiki a huge disservice to allow it to continue even one more time. FFS, you two. Get your priorities straight. ~Vsig.png 14:46, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

Oh and I forgot to add that in the subsequent and completely unrelated vandal cases, very standard and established policies were followed when banning occurred and they have absolutely no merit in this Misconduct case. I'll ask you not to even bring them up here. I'm not even sure why you're concerned about them. ~Vsig.png 15:26, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
Probably because you banned the account as a vandal alt of nobody, but whatever.--Yonnua Koponen Talk ! Contribs 16:41, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
Please don't quote the discretion clause without any knowledge of the vast amounts of misconduct case law on it. It isn't a be all and end all clause allowing sysops to do whatever the fuck they want, because otherwise there wouldn't be misconduct. The clause exists to allow sysops to legislate in areas where there isn't any policy and where the community hasn't expressed an opinion in the past. This case is covered not only by some of the oldest guidelines on the wiki, it's also been judged by the community that civility and TOS aren't areas that they care about and aren't areas they want legislation in. You've blatantly violated the community here by deciding that the rules no longer apply. Hell, you might as well permanently ban me, because "my priorities aren't straight". Fuck you, vapor. You're a nice guy but you're way off the mark here. You and the other sysops are turning the wiki in to a shitty little "us club" where you can ban whoever you want with or without reasons backed up by policy. The fact of the matter is that you and axe hack decided to, without the backing of even a majority of sysops, ban a user who didn't know that what he was doing was against the rules (it isn't against the rules of the game and he has little experience of the wiki). Sure, this guy's a scumball, but if we can now ban new users because they commit a single offence to one of our in-game friends, or a member of a group that we've just joined, then suddenly we start banning arbitrary people. Take a fucking step back and look at this objectively. If you can't find a legitimate area of policy backing your actions, you really shouldn't be doing it. Actually read all of the pages I've linked and talked about, and you'll see that you can't just ban this, and that this is an area the community's looked at before. If you think they need to look at it again, set up a policy discussion. This isn't Vaporwiki, you have no fucking right to start banning random people.--Yonnua Koponen Talk ! Contribs 16:41, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

Concluded Misconduct Cases

Check the Archive for concluded Misconduct cases.