Wikipedia:Community response to the Wikimedia Foundation's ban of Fram

Shortly before 18:00 UTC on 10 June 2019, the English Wikipedia administrator Fram was banned by the Wikimedia Foundation from editing the English Wikipedia for a period of 1 year, consistent with the Terms of Use (quote taken from the block log). A note was placed at the Bureaucrats' noticeboard, resulting in a large community discussion. In order to both centralize the discussion and remove it from the noticeboard two 'crats agreed that it should be moved to a new location. The original discussion (Special:PermaLink/901372387) was copied here at 12:55, 11 June 2019 (UTC) with this diff. Note that threading may have changed for readability.
There is a collection of prepared/official statements published by various stakeholders, for your convenience.
There are also different summaries of this page if you do not wish to read the entire page and its archives.

Please also see the two Arbitration cases that were opened in relation to this incident, Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Reversion of office actions (decided 5 July 2019) and Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Fram (Case closed on 19:16, 21 September 2019 (UTC)).

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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User:Fram banned for 1 year by WMF office

This section holds the original announcement of Fram's one-year ban on the bureaucrats' noticeboard, and the comments of many editors. Most of these comments were made prior to follow-up statements from Fram and the WMF and may be outdated. Further discussion probably belongs in a newer section of this page.

Fram (talk · contribs · logs · block log) Please note admin User:Fram has been banned for 1 year as per Office action policy by User:WMFOffice. - Pharaoh of the Wizards (talk) 17:56, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

What the hell? There had better be a damn good explanation; Fram is arguably the best admin in Wikipedia's history, and while I can imagine problems so bad they warrant an emergency WP:OFFICE ban without discussion, I find it hard to imagine problems that are simultaneously so bad they warrant an emergency ban without discussion but simultaneously so unproblematic that the ban will auto-expire in a year. ‑ Iridescent 18:01, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

And also only applicable to enwiki, meaning Fram can communicate on other wikis. I note that the WMF only recently gave themselves the power to do partial bans/temporary bans.. Galobtter (pingó mió) 18:09, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

Galobtter - Any clue about whether Fram's ban is the first exercise in implementing these or have other editors been subject to these P-bans, earlier? ∯WBG^converse 18:43, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

Winged Blades of Godric, first on enwiki at least per User:WMFOffice contributions, I checked de wiki and found some more de:Special:Contributions/WMFOffice; the timing of those dewiki bans suggests the policy was put into place to ban those two people. Galobtter (pingó mió) 18:47, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

@Winged Blades of Godric: It is not. The first WMF partial bans were done in German Wikipedia. The earliest that I know of is Judith Wahr in February. Policy regarding partial bans were added around the same time (about two hours prior to the bans' implementation). -★- PlyrStar93 _{→Message me. ←} 18:50, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

I don't want to import drama from other projects into here but is there any more public info (i.e. discussed on de.wikipedia in a public location and still available) on what went on there? As mentioned, the timing of the policy change suggests it was likely at least partly done to allow a block of that specific user. Given the way the WMF stepped in, I expected something similar to here, may be an experienced editor who was blocked. But they only seem to have around 900 edits. True the ban there was indef though unlike this one and it doesn't seem the editor is particularly interested in editing elsewhere however as others said, it was technically also only a partial ban since it didn't affect other projects suggesting whatever it is wasn't severe enough to prevent editing any WMF projects. Nil Einne (talk) 06:49, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

I suspect this isn't going anywhere further but for the benefit of others I had a quick look at machine translations of one of the discussions linked and think that possibly the account linked above was just one of the accounts the editor used which may explain the low edit count. Nil Einne (talk) 10:19, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

See #FYI: Similar incident in de.wp some months ago. Which reminded me of something I'd read about but completely forgot when replying. It sounds like the editor concerned was already either blocked or banned by the community so it probably wasn't quite like here where plenty feel any ban of the editor concerned is unjusitified. Of course concerns over WMF's over reach or getting unnecessarily involved in project governance as well as other issues like the WMF ban unlike the community block or ban being unappealable still arose. Nil Einne (talk) 22:02, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

I'm with you on this. Fram and I have butted heads a time or two (I think?) but I just am trying to wrap my mind around a decision like this with no real explanation. I understand the nature of WMFOffice blocks but I would think that anything egregious enough for an emergency decision like this would have had some indication prior to it happening, like a community discussion about bad behavior or abuse of tools which would reveal PII (os, cu), but Fram was neither of those. I can't seem to think of a single thing that would warrant such unilateral action that could also result in only a one year ban (as opposed to indefinite, if that makes sense) and so narrowly focused on one local project. Praxidicae (talk) 18:06, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

Going to echo this as well. This is a very cryptic block, which seems very hard to tie to any public behaviour. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:01, 10 June 2019 (UTC)

Yes, saying "email us" is not sufficient explanation for banning a well-known veteran editor and admin like this.--