Back at the start of the year, Kdarrow was given a serious global ban from Fandom for her part in an exchange with another user, JCB, where in there were some sketchy requirements tied to sharing personal information between the two. While there was all sorts of unrelated, pent-up drama which this unearthed, one of the biggest issues exacerbating the turmoil was a near complete lack of communication from Fandom. In all, we were originally told to trust the parties involved, namely Kdarrow and JCB, who stated nothing at all happened and not to trust Fandom. The gap in communication left Fandom telling us in effect to not trust Fandom.
We would like to avoid repeat of that, and the admin are marking it publicly, before the ban even goes live, that Kate is receiving a perma ban. If you have not seen it, Gunny and several contributors, put together a forum inquiry into Kate's behavior, requesting review and action be taken. You can read through the listing here.
J attempted to reach out to Kate, but last I heard, there was no updates back from her to defend against anything from Gunny's sandbox. Each of the active admin reviewed the material and concluded a ban was necessary, though not all for a uniform reason. As a result, bleep, cor, and I will give our rationales for the ban. We have not heard back from J since he tried reaching out to Kate, so no one knows what his stance is going to be.
bleep[]
Dyre covers many areas with more eloquent speech than I possibly can when it comes to issuing this action. I will attempt to provide my own perspective on several issues that I feel somewhat similar/different on.
I'll start with denying/damaging wiki resources. I, in one term or another, remain uncertain what has happened to the youtube channel and google account which Kate had the passwords and access to. Whilst the rights users who have now migrated off our wiki adamantly believe that the account was compromised and that Kate has fully lost access, recent privatization of all its videos, including many videos that were used on our pages, and had direct approval from Bethesda for us to use, have been lost or removed damaging our information presentation. I worked closely with Findabair to see if some sort of resolution could be reached, as he is manning the new wiki's direction and efforts. Our efforts yielded the same news as other efforts. These leaves me with two possible conclusions, neither of which are good, and both would require disciplinary action, though on different scales. Conclusion one is that Kate knowingly and deliberately decided to sabotage the Fandom wiki following her ban, changing the passwords on the google account/youtube account, and changing the recovery access to a phone number, likely her own. While initially I would have put very little stock into this theory, I noticed a trend starting around last year with Kate during the first incident wherein she got doxxed, and followed that trail back some. Kate seems to have a tendency when faced with serious contention/backlash/trouble to claim loss of access to accounts under her control as primarily frontward facing. A good example of this was the account which had ownership of the NP discord, and quickly turned it over to Ecks when Fandom initiated the ban and Kate got doxxed again. As I understand it, that account is either back under her control though it's name has been changed. She's done this a few times, and displays knowledge of how to work Discord alts. By this extension... I am left to wonder if this was a deliberate, perhaps spiteful, attempt to strike back at Fandom, but by extension it hurt those of us who remained. While I have nothing definitive to point to this being what has actually happened, given other more private information that has been relayed to me in recent months, I find myself questioning if Kate is not lying to everyone. I frankly don't know, but if any of this were true, it would warrant a permanent ban on its own merits.
Conclusion 2 Is not much better than conclusion 1. Through gross incompetence with account security Kate has effectively irreparably damaged one of our social media platforms. In the process this has removed or harmed presentation of information that no small amount of effort was made to have on the site. This alone to me would be worth a serious ban, perhaps a year long, and suspension from the ability to run for user rights anytime in the near future.
I concur with Dyre that while I find... the editing philosophy in play with Kate is not inherently worth action on its own. SEO is its own discussion, and as one of the largest and most visited wikis on Fandom, I supposed SEO is less important to us than it might be to other smaller wikis. Differences in content were simply a philosophy. Even though I strongly object to removal of lore, cut content, and other not-clearly spelled out aspects of the Fallout Universe and games, this is simply interpretation of editing philosophy and information presentation philosophy. It was, however, extreme and I do not believe, as an editor, a good practice and had I been fully aware I would have made this fact known. What; however, I cannot condone is the reckless editing practices. To a large extent that I am aware, Kate wholesale removed entire pages at once, intending through edit summaries or communication to move to other pages, or work on... These edits never materialized upon reviewing Gunny's sandboxes. This is unconscionable as a wiki editor. If we intend for major changes to happen to a page, we put together those changes in a sandbox and then make the edits once we have finished it. I'm left wondering why? Did nobody teach her? But that's surely not possible, given she was mentored in editing by Leon, and had input from Richie and other more experienced editors plenty before this began. Right? In either case, while I don't necessarily know if this requires disciplinary action, I do know this would be something that would require explicit removal from special rights positions until remedial instruction and understanding of good editing practices were enforced.
I categorically disagree with Dyre in regards to changes to policy and removal of special rights, as well as other things like debates over quorum, etc. At some point along the way, Kate began making unilateral changes to policy with minimal forums and discussion, changing what specific segments of policy said, or; otherwise, just straight moving policy to places where it was no longer accesible or visible. I believe this was a gross abuse of the "editing for clarity and meaning" guideline dictating who and how changes to policy can be made, and by extension, a gross abuse of the special rights that Kate was given. I believe this on it's own is serious enough given the magnitude of changes to warrant a long ban, and barring from special rights.
To be honest, over the past 3-4 months my entire perspective on the last year, year and a half of what the wiki was like and what was happening has been virtually upended by repeated revelations, some of which were quite disturbing, and a great deal of which I have personally dismissed as being biased or plainly false interpretations of what was happening. This is not speaking of Kate's personal behavior off wiki, and the way she engaged with some Fandom representatives and members of the wiki, and how she talked about others behind closed doors. To a large extent, I feel like I was personally deceived and misled on a number of issues, which have resulted in wrongful or unfair actions against some users.
For these reasons above, I find myself forced to conclude that the only acceptable action at this juncture is to permanently ban Kate from the wiki. This is not a reflection onto those other staffers who left with Kate to form their own community, I do not feel, unless they demonstrate in their own ways, that anyone but Kate is responsible for what has happened here. Despite the guidance and advice I tried to provide, in many respects I feel as though I personally failed to properly teach and hold to account other rights users during the period where most of these actions occurred. Whether that was due to being misled, lied to, or simply having not looked as closely as I should have, it is now my responsibility to ensure this can't happen again, and that starts with this action. ---bleep196- (talk) 16:52, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
Savior D.J's Perspective[]
This decision comes after a thorough investigation by both the administrative team and additional members of our community. The investigation revealed policy violations and rights abuses on a massive scale, which are partially detailed within this sandbox. Among the violations are the following: Arbitrary content removal from thousands of pages, 148 unratified changes to ratified wiki policies, 35 improper removals of user rights, improper deletions of image and page revisions, signing an unauthorized and illegal contract, refusing to surrender access to and further compromising our social media accounts, falsely accusing Sigmund Fraud of doxxing/death threats and fabricating evidence to accuse Tagaziel of sexual harassment with the former being arbitrarily banned from the Nukapedia Discord, and finally, the unjust and silent banning of LLxMysticSpectre from the Nukapedia Discord. I must make clear that in all of the following statements, I am speaking for myself and only myself as an administrator on Nukapedia.
Abusive Ban of LLxMysticSpectre[]
In the days following Kdarrow's global ban on April 1st, 2022, she still retained her bureaucrat rights and powers on our official discord server. What she did not retain, however, was ownership of the server. Allegedly fearful that her discord account would be banned for the same offense that led to her global ban on Fandom, she unilaterally transferred control of the server to technical moderator Eckserah without notifying the community or many other rights-holders. A member of our community, LLxMysticSpectre, used the public server command t!serverinfo, which revealed that Eckserah was now maintaining ownership of the server. This is not a restricted command, nor does it reveal any confidential or non-public information. Using it is not an offense. Nonetheless, Kdarrow decided to abuse her remaining rights and silently permanently banned Spectre from our discord without notifying him or the community as to why he was banned, only giving the reasoning of “Rule 4” which appeared in the audit log. According to the unratified rules under which the Nukapedia server was operating at the time, A Rule 4 violation is the following: “>>4 Do not reveal personally identifiable information about users, link to other users' social media accounts, or violate requests for confidentiality. Any form of harassment such as blackmailing, threats, facilitation of doxxing, inappropriate direct messages to other server members will result in an immediate and permanent ban.” Use of the public server command t!serverinfo does not meet any of the criteria for a Rule 4 violation. Within the secret “#new-channel” created in the aftermath of her ban, she admitted to banning Spectre for his use of the server command. Former chat moderator Rurin Gas commented, “Does show them that the keys are in Ecks's hands though, and given thats a controversial choice even among staff, I figured it was worth keeping a lid on” to which Kdarrow responded, “Not meant to be controversial, there are no rules about it. In any case, they chose their sacrifice. Not going to tolerate it.” Following this statement, LLxSpectre was silently banned from our discord. This action was an egregious abuse of rights and breach of trust done simply because a user revealed the publicly available truth without actually breaking any ratified or even unratified policies. The following morning, after several administrators and our bureaucrat Jspoelstra were questioned about the situation, The Dyre Wolf investigated and promptly unbanned Spectre from the Discord, whereupon Kdarrow publicly claimed that her banning of Spectre was an error, with no repudiation by other rights-holders who had access to the “#new-channel”. The quick undoing of this abusive action by another administrator does not lessen the magnitude of the abuse, and as such, it has been taken into account as part of the justification for her permanent ban.
Arbitrary and Unjust Removal of Content from Thousands of Pages[]
In the months since Kdarrow's global banning, I have had the opportunity to extensively review her editorial contributions and what I found was extremely alarming. Throughout the entirety of her edit history from April 2022 to at least May 2021 is the large scale unjustified removal of lore, gameplay, and behind the scenes content from thousands upon thousands of pages, including many of our flagship lore articles. These removals rarely had explanations, and when they did, they were often incomplete or invalid explanations that only justified removing a sentence even when multiple paragraphs had been arbitrarily removed. Several of the most jarring removals are the following: New California, Deathclaw, Sino-American War, Resource Wars, Forced Evolutionary Virus, New California Republic, Brotherhood of Steel, Free Economic Zone of New Vegas, and Mariposa Military Base. Alongside the mass removals of content from these flagship articles, hundreds of pages were turned into redirects entirely, with much of their content never being moved to other pages on the wiki. These articles particularly included content mentioned in developer statements, in the Fallout Bible, and in both the Official Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas Game Guides, all of which contained vast swaths of lore and story information that were, in many cases, entirely thrown to the wayside to the point that they were no longer covered anywhere on Nukapedia. One additional situation of note is related to the Sexuality page. On 01:02 5 January 2022, Kdarrow removed 2069 bytes of information related to LGBTQ+ representation, citing that it was "speculation based on assumed genders". on 22:53, 11 January 2022, Brane undid this removal, citing that the content had been "removed for no justifiable reason". At 23:58, 11 January 2022, about an hour later, Kdarrow deleted the entire page. She did hastily merge small amounts of information (about 3500 bytes out of 18300, none of which had anything to do with LGBTQ+ representation) before the deletion, but it's difficult to see this deletion as anything other than retaliation against Brane's disagreement with the previous removal. This is one example of many, and to attempt to chronicle the mass removals which span thousands of pages is almost impossible, but I encourage any interested editors to review Kdarrow's editorial contributions for themselves. As for myself, I have seen more than enough to conclude that these mass unjustified content removals should be included as part of the justification for her permanent ban.
Fabricating Evidence to falsely accuse Tagaziel of Sexual Harassment[]
In 2021, User:Tagaziel was made aware of allegations of sexual harassment made against him by Kdarrow. It was not until many months later, in March 2022, that he was actually shown the direct-message exchange that Kdarrow was circulating as evidence of Tagaziel sexually harassing her. As it turns out, the exchange that Kdarrow was spreading around on at least one other server was a complete forgery, and was a deliberate misrepresentation of the conversation that had actually taken place within their direct messages. This additional context is relevant because Kdarrow also made the allegations against Tagaziel on the official Nukapedia discord. In their real conversation, which has been verified through all available means, Tagaziel is simply offering a place to stay and for his wife to share her culinary talents should Kdarrow visit them. In their fabricated conversation, which Kdarrow circulated despite knowing that it wasn’t real, Tagaziel appears to be offering a sexual encounter between himself, his wife, and Kdarrow. Fabricating evidence of sexual harassment and falsely spreading that allegation on Nukapedia is a vile and serious violation of not just Nukapedia’s policies but basic human decency. Kdarrow intended to have Tagaziel ostracized from our community and fired from Fandom for something that he did not do, as the additional screenshots of her spreading the allegation show. This kind of behavior will not be tolerated and it has been included as part of the justification for her permanent ban on Nukapedia.
- Im so pissed off i fell for her lying about tag this way, im sorry to everyone that was affected. Mug/Fresh | Talk 22:12, 29 October 2022 (UTC)
Falsely Accusing Sigmund Fraud of Death Threats and Doxxing, as Well as Abusively Permanently Banning Him From the Nukapedia Discord[]
On November 28th, 2021, User:Sigmund Fraud was permanently banned from the official Nukapedia Discord by Kdarrow. Kdarrow claimed that Sigmund had sent her a threatening and doxxing message in their direct messages, and provided screenshot evidence of the supposed message in a private staff channel, though it was later deleted. Sigmund provided evidence proving his innocence and revealing that he could not have possibly sent the message that Kdarrow claimed he did, at least not without ghost-pinging more than twenty users to bury the exchange down into his DM history. Examination of the evidence and the lack of any ghost-ping reports from the users shown in his direct message history shows that this could not have been the case. The evidence proving his innocence was completely and utterly ignored by the administrative team at the time and so this abusive ban went unchallenged for more than 6 months, but upon an examination of Sigmund’s evidence in May 2022, our bureaucrat Jspoelstra finally lifted the ban. The screenshot that Kdarrow showed is currently unavailable and thus cannot be definitively verified as either real or fake, but it should be noted Kdarrow already has a history of message forgery and Sigmund’s evidence revealed that he could not have possibly sent the message. This ban was a flagrant abuse of rights and has been taken into account when issuing this permanent ban.
Unjustified and unratified revisions to policies as well as unjustified and unratified removals of user rights[]
As previously mentioned,this sandbox reveals evidence that Kdarrow made at least 148 unratified changes to ratified wiki policies and guidelines. These changes are well documented within this sandbox and constitute a massive abuse of rights on a scale that Nukapedia has never seen before. As one of the largest examples,, the ratified canon policy was completely shifted away to being the opposite of what our community originally voted for. Additionally, Kdarrow oversaw at least 35 improper removals of user rights prior to the ratification of the user rights activity policy, many of which have still not been corrected. As such, all of these abuses have been taken into account as part of the justification for her permanent ban.
In Summary[]
In her role as bureaucrat, Kdarrow perpetuated a culture of fear, character assassination, retaliation, harassment and fabricated allegations. She repeatedly abused her special user rights while also perpetuating unprecedented and unjustified levels of damage to our wiki's policies, our wiki's content, and our wiki's community. The evidence is widespread and it is likely that what I have shown here and what has been shown elsewhere only make up a small fraction of the abuses that took place. In my statements, I have not gone into detail about the unlawful contract into which Kdarrow entered, as the punishment for that has already been levied by Fandom and the lines are blurry when it comes to what we are allowed to discuss. I have also not gone into detail about Kdarrow's withholding and vandalizing of Nukapedia property, specifically the social media accounts which were entrusted to her in her role as bureaucrat, as I feel discussion of those has been adequately covered already, whereas many of the other issues I mentioned were not.
Dyre[]
Reading through the main points on Gunny's page, I believe a permanent ban would be in order and consistent with several previous bans issued against Staff members based on the withholding, deletion of, or otherwise damaging of wiki resources entrusted to them. Stealing away with various passwords after the Fandom ban, is entirely inappropriate. Multiple users made multiple attempts to reach out to Kate, with no success.
In regard to the rights removal before the policy was set to do so, I know Kate did so, but when it was brought up, she soon checked with Mr Pie, our Fandom rep at the time, to see if it was kosher to continue. Kate was told it's not an abnormal practice for wikis to have something similar in place, but that she should follow local (Nuka) policy by making a forum, which she did. I think that's covered under not ideal, but not intentionally bad, either. If she had not reached out or did not follow up, this could have been a check mark for the ban, but it was not the case.
For the policy complaints, there's some give and take there. Some of the complaints were about rearranging the order material is present in or the way links fed into one another. This is fine. The content of the message does not change, and I can easily chalk reordering up to differences in preferences between users, not altering the meaning behind the messages. This was not the case for every edit, and without Kate here to defend specific instances of why any given alteration to content was made, it would be next to impossible to defend or justify everything. Some? Yeah, sure. Just reworking confusing language. Some, like the Discord rules? Changed on a whim, sometimes at protest even. I could have totally listened if a justification was given, such as the fluid nature of discord or a lack of history with any solid foundations vs doing what folks feel like, long prior to her arrival, but with no communication back, that's not a point in her favor.
I was not convinced enough of Sig's ban either way to say who was in the wrong. Leave it as it sits, with him currently unbanned, unless something else surfaces, and it can pendulum back and forth as needed based on whose truth is more real at any given moment. Yay.
Edit wise, many of the complaints are a result of different content philosophies. Right off the bat, I know one of the things she did not care about was satisfying SEO over her desired layout or preference to content culling, and while our host Fandom is a business which very much cares about clicks and ad revenue, so far as I am aware, there is no local policy to make sure the wiki meets any sort of click quota for Fandom. There were many things removed, under her understanding that if it was not explicitly outlined in game, it did not happen or was not fit for the wiki. This would be counter to the previous understanding, which more or less, takes the total opposite approach to many inclusions, saying it did happen unless otherwise refuted. Weapons manufactures, historical figures, places, names, brands. Just about any topic on wiki. On the flip side, an unintended consequence of having more edits than the Pope knows what to do with, is that evaluating if any malicious culling occurred and to what extent, is going to be next to impossible to thoroughly measure without her participation. I know the upfront rationales she gave and justifications for many actions, which were shared by a large number of the staff and users who left with her. I would have a hard time believing all of them were acting in bad faith, versus making choices in content which might be so different as to be offensive to others. Had she reached out, specific instances of criticism could have been further evaluated. In her absence, it is a point I would only mildly protest being ban worthy, if only because so much of the complaints leading to the establishment of this point, were raised by users who had been tracking the culling of pages or the edits they found controversial for weeks, if not months. In that time, I can recall a small handful of /d posts where a few users visiting from outside our community wanted to see culls returned, in cases, where the information was reorganized or streamlined, but I do not remember a single, serious forum raised to address the issue from within the community. It was a bizarre case of sitting on the complaint waiting for what, I do not understand, and by sheer coincidence, she happened to be banned. If it was not enough of an issue for folks to disagree while she was here to defend herself, it would not be enough of one to raise when she cannot. The time to have taken action here would have been months and months ago, before her ban ever occurred.
I have no idea about the image edits. Could be a phenomenal reason which was lost when many users left, but I don't know it off hand. Could just as easily be no reason or a really terrible reason.
Similarly with page lockings, I do not feel strongly about them, nor do I know the full context of why it was done. If the others want to bundle it into their ban rationale, I am not opposed, but I do not know enough about why it was done. Could it have made sense at the time? Maybe. Don't know, hard to tell with just the provided links to the action and no backstory.
A final note that one of the issues raised was the outside activity, which is a slippery slope. Once that door is opened and activity offsite is free game with a laundry list of bans to follow, all occurring with this as the precedent set. I doubt that's what the intent is, but it is what will end up occurring here. Offsite activity bans are extraordinarily rare, but they do happen. In this instance, however, there is more than enough to cleanly ban based on withholding logins and keys to Nuka resources. The Dyre Wolf (talk) 16:01, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
Comments[]
Sorry, I'm a bit late with this. I did receive a reaction from Kate on her wiki's Discord. She's not interested in defending herself to the accusations, so we'll have to do without that. Jspoel 
16:05, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
I hope with this we can close a door. We do need to think about what sort of relationship we might be willing to have with her organisation; That said given the continued damage being done by the siezing (and later removal of video from) our Youtube Channel, and their hostile attitude to us on twitter, I don't have any appetite for a particularly positive one until/unless there's some recognition from them of the harm done. That said, I don't support any further reprisals to individuals in her organisation unless it can be shown that they were directly part of some action. Agent c (talk) 10:59, 27 August 2022 (UTC)