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Fram (talk · contribs) – Hi, I'm Fram, a Dutch-speaking editor from Belgium, editor since 2005 and admin from 2007 until 2019. For those of you unaware of what happened since, all the details can be found at WP:FRAM and Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Fram.
Summary: WMF warned me for unspecified behavioural problems, then warned me again because I should leave alone one specific editor (who we since learned has an undisclosed very close assocation with the Head of the Board of Trustees of the WMF, who has protected that editor at enwiki in the past already), and finally made an unprecedented move in banning me from enwiki (only) for 1 year, with a desysop added to it, because I said "Fuck ArbCom" when the arbs sent out a circular to all admins where they tried to give themselves some powers or authority they didn't have in policy.
After a lot of complaints on enwiki about this WMF move, they finally transferred the handling of the situation over to ArbCom. They eventually started a highly irregular case, and kept me banned until the case was all but wrapped (even though they agreed that the ban was invalid ("not required"). No public evidence was allowed (not even from people who wanted to associate their name to their evidence, as is standard and good), all evidence had to be sent secretly to the arbs, who would summarize it and keep the names hidden.
The result of this was a very, very limited set of evidence, where after scrutiny the arbs found 4 pieces of relevant evidence from the past 18 (!) months, two of them showing incivility, and two admin actions:
When confronted with this, the arbs claimed that their votes for a desysop were based on the secret evidence they received from the WMF, even though they admitted that all of this evidence was available onwiki. Apparently, despite three months of scrutiny and an invitation to send the evidence in secret, no one either found this evidence, or thought it serious enough to raise it or to send it to ArbCom again. Even so, the Arbs felt they needed to desysop because there were "concerns" from some enwiki contributors.
Which sets an extremely low bar for desysops, and makes it impossible to actually know what leads to desysop, and hence to avoid such actions or people in the future.
Basically, this paves the way for the WMF and ArbCom to desysop anyone they don't like, based on evidence no one may see, and no one is able to find even though it is supposedly all available from checking contributions. Instead of an open, wiki-based system of checks and balances, where the arbs decide but everyone can check the evidence, comment on it, offer context and back history, we now have a travesty pretending to be a case but with the outcome decided from the start, independent of the evidence people sent in and the time people invested in this. That this happened to someone openly critical of the WMF and of some ArbCom actions is of course a coincidence.
And we shouldn't accept this. There are mechanisms to deal with problematic admins, I used these in the past. No failure of these mechanisms has been shown; what has been shown is that people have tried to use a different, secret mechanism to get a result without the annoying distraction of people actually checking that the complaints are valid and not distorted or unfounded.
If you think I'm unfit to remain an admin, please start a regular ArbCom case, with an open evidence, workshop and proposed decision phase, where everyone can see what's it all about and judge all the evidence.
But let this RfA stand as a clear message to WMF and ArbCom that no desysop should ever happen in this way again.
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