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A note from your candidate: I'm assuming this page is mostly for people to talk about me. I'll do my best to let you do that without intervening. If you have questions, it would be natural to add them to thhe "questions" page William M. Connolley (talk) 18:49, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

William M. Connolley

Assuming I am just allowed to add comments here, allow me to remark that I think that good arbitration is about being fair, being conscientious and perhaps being logical. There should be no requirement to be well liked or popular. We should not vote for or against WMC based on our like or dislike of him but out of respect for his fairness. The greatest strength of WMC as an Arbcom candidate is that as well as being eye-wateringly fair, and careful with details he does not much seek the approval of other people. The huge percentage of "grunt work" he has done on WP:3RR reflects fairness and not seeking approval. He takes on things in the knowledge that someone will dislike him for it but because it needs to be done. I do not think he would be a very good emperor but he would be excellent sitting as one of a set of judges. As I understand the proper role of Arbcom (arbitration) it is very hard to think of anyone better suited to the role. As with the mop, Arbcom membership is a duty not an honour and perhaps we should regard him serving a term there as community service in penance for being just a little bit too polemic over faults with the current Arbcom. --BozMo talk 10:56, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

• Sorry. Ignoring appeals for help with edit warring until it is stale and then shifting blame is not a sign of fairness or good judgement. Ikip has listed some examples of what has been characterized as poor judgement here. Quite frankly this user should be before Arbcom, not sitting on it. Unomi (talk) 14:09, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

  For full disclosure, a number of these issues of "poor judgement" were blocks of confirmed sockpuppets... maybe they hadn't been chekusered at the time of their blocks, but if one lives in the cesspool of Wiki-climate, Scibaby socks are often very easy to spot. Also, User:Spotfixer, who is quoted as talking about Connolley's bad behavior, is has been indefed for some time now... I can't speak to the other issues that Unomi brought up as I don't know about those, but I feel it's necessary to point out that this is far from black-and-white. I happen to agree with BozMo, for the record. Awickert (talk) 18:29, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

"Eye-wateringly fair" is not the first phrase that comes to mind with respect to WMC. The ArbCom case that closed in September found that he "misused his administrator tools by acting while involved...on a number of occasions." This finding added credence to longstanding (as in years long) complaints by numerous editors (including many fellow admins) that WMC regularly used the tools improperly, e.g. blocking editors with whom he was edit warring, editing pages after protecting them, etc. As a result of the finding in the ArbCom case WMC was of course desysopped and also admonished not to edit war. WMC clearly did a lot of great work as an admin, but he also apparently had significant difficulty at times determining whether or not he was too involved to take administrative action, and in general exhibited rather poor judgment on a number of occasions. Obviously those are major concerns with respect to a prospective arbitrator. Being "a little bit too polemic over faults with the current Arbcom" may or may not be an issue, but questions about WMC's judgment and fairness clearly are, at least for many editors (and obviously WMC has a number of strong supporters as well). I only point all this out in reply to BozMo's comment which, while certainly expressing a perfectly valid opinion, rather screamed for a counterpoint in my view. --Bigtimepeace | talk | contribs 20:03, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

• Re Unomi: Apparently all administrators on Misplaced Pages have ignored your edit warring report. Picking on the one (unpaid volunteer) who eventually did process it seems not particularly fair. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 22:33, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

  It is certainly true that no other admin did intervene, but at the time WMC was quite active on the 3rr board and would have been hard pressed to not have seen it, it could be that due to the fact that OM and verbal were downplaying it WMC thought it best to leave it alone. Regardless, closing it with 'Fault is with U, who is lucky that this report is now stale' etc to a new editor without any attempt at pointing in the right direction does nothing to help the project. Unomi (talk) 01:34, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

  As I said, eye-wateringly fair. --BozMo talk 06:38, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

• Comment I must admit, the prospect of an ArbCom member who has previously been sanctioned by ArbCom appeals to my sense of mischief, and one who lists as his principal credential editing frequently on a subject while holding strong viewpoints and an arguably professional conflict of interest is particularly noteworthy. I think WMC will need to explain, at length, why he considers these strengths rather than weaknesses to his candidacy. Ray 20:54, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

I guess we do not want to turn this into a referendum on the rather shoddy treatment of WMC by Arbcom. I suspect if we did, he might get elected rather easily... at least if people could be bothered to read through the history properly. Not that he was without blame too of course, being right and being seen to be right are two different things and he should have cared more about the latter. However the professional conflict of interest you mention is very hard to argue. Aside from having previously been a tenured academic (and therefore de facto neutral) AFAIK WMC currently works for a software house with no relationship at all to the subjects where he has the highest number of edits? --BozMo talk 21:45, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Oh, I don't regard these as insurmountable. His Arbcom issues were long ago, and I'm willing to listen to any argument he wants to make about actions by Arbcoms long before I joined that may be inappropriate in the light of time. Conflict of interest is a tricky thing - it raises a flag, but the flag is not red for me, but yellow - I need to know what was going on. Especially on academic matters, the distinctions can be very fine, and depend very much on the case - we should most definitely welcome academics writing on research in their area (and, in some cases, even their own). But if they're writing about academic controversies where they have a stake, then things start becoming murkier (for instance, to use a completely counterfactual hypothetical, if Misplaced Pages existed in the 1920s-1930s, everybody should welcome having Niels Bohr writing about the hydrogen atom and quantum mechanics. But things become a lot murkier if he starts addressing philosophical discussions against his preferred interpretation of quantum mechanics, or anything in what was a grade-A dispute in the science of the day). Since WMC chose to raise it, I think I need to hear his position on what he was doing, and why, and where he thinks he might have brushed up against the line, and what he learned from the experience. Ray 23:01, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

I agree on getting WMC to provide some answers at some point. But I am looking forward to the vote cos I do not know how it will go. On Bohr I thought WP existed to represent consensus rather than be correct? Correct as an aim would invite any amount of OR but consensus has to bow to experts even though (as with the millenium bug) many of them turn out to be jokers. --BozMo talk 23:24, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm happy to answer questions, though not at length, but if you think that His Arbcom issues were long ago you need to do your research properly William M. Connolley (talk) 23:00, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

• CommentI would like to raise my concerns about this candidate: Whilst Mr Connolley, is a very enthusiastic editor and has made valuable contributions particularly on climate articles, he simply cannot see "the another side"... that people can quite legitimately differ in their views and that both sides of a public debate must be documented in Misplaced Pages. To be blunt, he has no concept of "NPOV" and having seen his antics over a number of years there is no doubt in my mind that he will abuse any position of authority to push his own POV. (Sorry William, it has to be said, the world is a better place because of single-minded enthusiasm like yours, but that single mindedness makes you the wrong person for this role). (I would also like to point out that this statement was removed from his candidate statement with absolutely no communication - I admit that I was mistaken to put it there - I misunderstood what "via" that site meant - this kind of unwikipedia behaviour just encapsulates my concern about this candidate.)Isonomia (talk) 19:06, 23 November 2009 (UTC)
• Sometimes comments about other editors tell you more about the commentator than the editor they are commenting on. Verbal chat 19:17, 23 November 2009 (UTC)
  • Verbal, it does me no credit to say these things, and if I had the time and enthusiasm of William, I've no doubt it would carry much more weight and to be honest I've been lazy, and not put in the effort to help William tackle his problem, however dispite my own failings which are many and despite my dislike of personal attacks, in this case it had to be said. Isonomia (talk) 21:30, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Edit Analysis

A detailed analysis of this candidate's edits in article, user and project space can be found at User:Franamax/Ucontribs-2009/William_M._Connolley. Franamax (talk) 07:18, 24 November 2009 (UTC)