There were three cases. In the first, I was attempting to repair a problem with the GA Bot and blocked an editor called
racepacket when he attempted to interfere. As what I was doing was purely administrative, I did not consider myself
WP:INVOLVED; but
Ironholds, reviewing the case at my request, disagreed, and felt that I had been far too lenient on racepacket as a result, in view of his long block record. Later racepacket attempted to get an editor fired from her job, resulting in an ArbCom case. I was then listed as a party to the case for reasons never made clear, and ArbCom admonished me for a bad block. ArbCom chose to treat the harasser and his victim as morally equal, and issued a mutual interaction ban, which they have never seen fit to lift. I didn't feel treated unfairly personally, but I felt that the way that ArbCom's handled the harassment case was very poor. (The outcome might have been even worse, but for the intervention on our behalf of a skilled wiki-lawyer called
Chester Markel, who was subsequently blocked as a sock of a banned user.)
In the second case, racepacket mentioned my name (I do not know whether it was my real name or my user name) in connection with two other wikimedians. I inferred that one was his original harassment victim; the other, not on the English Wikipedia, remains unknown to me to this day. What comments he made were revdelled, and ArbCom did not share them with me. (Being on another project, I could not read them myself.) It was a clear violation of racepacket's interaction ban, and triggered another ArbCom case. Emails from ArbCom said that serious allegations had been made against me, but they were not shared with me. I felt that my treatment in this case was unfair and unjust.
IIn the third case, I blocked an editor called
Malleus Fatuorum for
this personal attack. This stirred up a hornet's nest. Not surprising to anyone acquainted with his history, but at the time I had never encountered him before, and was completely unfamiliar with his case history. (ArbCom expects everyone reads all the drama boards.) In an appeal for assistance to another admin, I described Malleus as "apparently some sort of koala" - an Australian Army term meaning a protected species - one that cannot be shot or exported. In any case, I was in deep trouble. One editor posted a woodcut from
Alice in Wonderland with the inscription: "Having agreed on the sentence, ArbCom now retires to decide what the editor is guilty of." They decided on wheel-warring. The definition was expanded during the case to include lifting a block without consulting with the originator of the block; but I hadn't done this either. They never published their reasoning. So the final verdict was: "for wheel warring [the third case] and conduct unbecoming of an administrator [the second case], in the face of previous admonishments regarding administrative conduct [the first case]". (That there was in fact only one admonishment was not overlooked.) The case was very poorly handled, damaged the encyclopaedia and solved nothing. But you try and do the right thing, and you put your editor rights on the line every time you make a decision. Lots of people have been treated worse than me.