This particular situation is now the subject of a pending request for arbitration, so I'll comment on that on-wiki (probably in the morning), but my comments there may have some relevance to the broader issue being raised here. Newyorkbrad On Sun, Jul 11, 2010 at 8:50 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Ideally, Wikipedia is a life-long avocation. Fred

On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 1:38 PM, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net> wrote: ___________________________________________________________________ tl;dr version of the below ~ possibly, but perhaps a shower of wikilove is adequate. ___________________________________________________________________ No doubt *some* form of group could be set up to address such issues, the big question is whether it would be staffed. At Wikimania a chap from .de gave a talk on mentoring schemes. They appear to have quite a successful one. Our "adopt a user" programme [1] is much less so. Without care and diligence being given to the HR idea it may well lay fallow. What would probably be better is for people to just be more encouraging of each other in general, more supportive and more recognition given to editors (which was another point raised at Wikimania). In this way at least when someone is getting frustrated there's a counter-balancing atmosphere of positivity. I find that I spend hardly any time feeling part of a social atmosphere on Wikipedia. This will be in part because the community is so vast that I don't bump into the same people very often. Joining a Wikiproject would help, but I change my interests all the time and won't commit to a subject area. My editing activities often feel like floating on a vast ocean in a raft without companionship. For me, that's OK, I'm a misanthrope anyway and I get my social buzz from another site. It is easy to make enemies on Wikipedia and far less easy to make friends. It appears to me that most Wikipedia friendships arise in the real world with meet-ups and 'Manias. But I was one of the people writing proposals for the strategy wiki about adding social features [2] which, one would hope, could bond people together a bit more. It is correct to be concerned, however, that people might start spending too much time socialising and not enough time doing work :O) I read something recently about Facebook using our articles as some kind of seeding facility for their groups structure. I can't find any stories about this now (anyone?) [3]. Perhaps if we were to embrace that, and actively collaborate with Facebook, people who have accounts on each could socialise on the Facebook/Wikipedia mash-up leaving WP much as it is; ie work-focused. I'm digressing a little; to return to cases where long-term, valued users reach the end of their tether perhaps something quite simple like a page for people to log that they have left the project and asking them to give their reason would give us an opportunity to get in touch with them and try to persuade them to return (perhaps after a wikibreak). There was a survey done recently though (also covered at Wikimania), sent to users who had left the project and it turned out most of them described themselves as not having left, despite not having edited for 3 months. The idea of a survey of former admins, to establish reasons for leaving the project, appears to have started up in May and looks like it's still in the planning stage [4]. Perhaps we can return to these issues when the results are in? In this specific case I suggest anyone that knows the user to go and show some Wikilove. _________________________________________ [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ADOPT [2] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Social_features [3] ??? [4] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Task_force/Community_Health/Former_admin… _________________________________________ en.User:Bodnotbod

On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 11:33 PM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com> wrote: I concur with this. In particular, some areas of Wikipedia are corrosive on those who participate there... new pages and recent changes patrols, and (particularly, and particularly badly in terms of effects) WP:ANI. I think I've been able to tolerate ANI pretty much all the time, though my activity level there has its ups and downs. It's clearly true that ANI has caused a bunch of people to end up in siege mentality mode. I have had to walk away from recent changes repeatedly. The saving grace there is that there are hundreds more backing you up there and plenty of smart bots. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 12:25 AM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com>wrote;wrote: I don't think this can be regarded as any kind of permanent solution. Walking away would have done nothing in my case because I was the one being hounded. - causa sui

On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 9:14 AM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com>wrote;wrote: I don't intend to constantly redirect attention back to myself and my problem(s), but it's my only direct frame of reference and as it was my last real on-wiki experience, it's a bit fresh in my mind. So to speak more generally, what I'm trying to draw your attention to is the idea that there are much more profound cultural problems on Wikipedia than that "we need to make it more fun" or "People who are getting angry need to take a break and cool off." David Goodman did a rough-and-dirty diagnosis of the problems with what is going on at WP:AN/I, which now that I take a look at it is just as bad as ever. In general, I found the widespread assumptions of bad faith combined with mob justice appalling to say the least and it thoroughly erased whatever belief I had that I could depend on community support. I don't see why any other administrator discussed in this thread, or any of the others who find themselves subjected to ad-hoc firing squads on AN/I, should feel any differently. - causa sui

On 14 July 2010 02:07, FT2 <ft2.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote: Well to start with you could chuck your requirements out of the window. Your requirements like most at RFA are selecting for 3 things 1)some degree of editing skill 2)Not appearing to cause trouble 3)A decent set of wikipolitics skill It's two and three that cause the problem. Anyone whith a decent set of wikipolitics skills is going to archive 2 by playing safe going along with the flow and not challenging things. Almost anyone actually passing RFA is going to have got into the habit of going along with the ah "bad faith combined with mob justice". The people who might actually try to challenge such things are unlikely to pass RFA because either they lack the wikipolitics skills needed in order to pass (you would tend to fail them under the "nor into politicking" clause among others) or because they are not prepared to use them in a way that would let them pass. Upshot is that we have for some years now been promoting a bunch of admins who will go with the flow rather than challenge low level bad behavior by admins and long standing users. The tiny number of rebels and iconoclasts left are from years ago and have little to day to day stuff. -- geni

Hi Mr. Goodman, I think you are talking about me when you mention the genius that sometimes accompanies valuable and important people who unfortunately tend to put on displays of individualistic irascibility that are unacceptable. As Manhattan Samurai, I was one of the best at this. I'm fortunate that I was eventually kicked off the English Wikipedia and most of my work progressively deleted. You'll now find my bibliography of William Monahan much improved at Squidoo, along with a web page about Dining Late with Claude La Badarian: http://www.squidoo.com/William_Monahan_Bibliography http://www.squidoo.com/Claude-La-Badarian I even have a blog: http://nypress-studies.blogspot.com/ Keep on truckin' Bill ________________________________ From: David Goodman <dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Sent: Wed, July 14, 2010 2:06:03 AM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Admin / experienced user flameout - how do we talk people down off the ledge? Frankly, I see that as unwarranted pessimism. The sets of people who want to change things and people who want to cause trouble are not identical, though there is a substantial intersection. Admins who have the lack of judgement to try to force their desired change into policy by using their arbitrary power of their ability to bully people, are at least as much a problem as the over-conformist. Indeed, I think it my role as an admin to be a conformist, and do only what is generally supported. When I want to work to get something different, that has to be done without the presumed immunities and special power of an administrator. To a certain extent the role does require tolerated the other admins, but that is just analogous to the requirement that an editor tolerate other editors. In both cases, the difficulty is that we have no usable sanctions until things become outrageous. Mild disapproval over the distance of the internet is very easy for someone to ignore entirely, until they have gotten themselves into an impossible position. My personal view remains that we should not tolerate insult even from the best and most established editors or administrators. A more civilized environment in these respects will help us get many addition new good editors and administrators to replace the ones who can not work in an acceptable fashion. Joining in a collective work is not the place for displace of individualistic irascibility, even when accompanied by genius--such people are very important and very valuable, but they should be working creatively-- and independently. On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 9:54 PM, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 7:58 PM, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net> wrote: I failed my first try, and could have failed my second if I hadn't made a serious effort to ameliorate a negative perception from taking a stand earlier. The edge of the knife that we must balance on is both being willing to take stands, and be open to feedback from the community and from other admins if we take the wrong stand. Balancing there all the time is very hard. Being willing to admit you're wrong on something and still come back the next day willing and ready to make a hard call on its merits is not easy. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

Ryan Delaney wrote: True. We seem to be missing the point that the trouble with the Administrators Noticeboard is at least in part that it is a "noticeboard", i.e. not a process for which there is a charter, but an unchartered discussion forum. Any claims that "AN has the authority" to do anything are complete nonsense, and admins act entirely as independent, responsible agents whatever thread they are pivoting off from. I don't see why this has to be the case, and have not done so for around three years. The community can require more. In fact it should require more. AN has long been something that should have been the subject of an RfC. Charles

On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 2:15 AM, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net> wrote: This is good stuff and I think it's a good thing for people to learn how to cope with adversity in general. Mistakes and stressful situations are inevitable, and working in an administrative capacity is inherently more likely to attract "flak" when people don't like the decisions you make. I developed a pretty thick skin doing RCP, for example. I was harassed and received death threats as a result of blocking vandals or protecting pages on The Wrong Version during a content dispute. It happens all the time. Some people don't deal with that well, especially when they're also getting second-guessed by the community, and the project would be well served if administrators had psychological tools available to them to handle the inner conflict. The other side of that coin is that when there are systemic problems that necessarily reduce in stress or even abusive treatment of administrators, you ought to be identifying and correcting that. Right now, you have exactly such a situation. Working toward identifying and correcting whatever cultural aspects of Wikipedia community compound rather than relieve the stress and suffering caused to administrators doing their jobs is an important priority not to be "crowded out" by the thinking that we need to learn to deal with oppressive bureaucracy or a culture of mob justice. With that in mind, there is a diplomatic pitfall to the approach you suggest. In same cases, focusing on helping administrators learn to "cope with the pressure" inherent to the jobs they've volunteered to do is going to come off patronizing. I certainly heard it that way when people made this kind of suggestion in real-time, because it was another example of someone telling me what *I* needed to be doing differently. I didn't feel like the problem was that I needed to learn to accept that I was being treated badly; it may well have been better for my peace of mind if I had, but that is not a solution that is going to help the project. So from a strategic perspective (retaining human resources) it's perilous, but also it might lead you to develop blind spots to real and solvable problems. You don't want to get into a situation where any time a problem comes up you recall that "Stressful situations are inevitable, we need to [take a break and cool down / come back later / apply whatever other therapeutic technique we've prescribed]" because then you'll not do what you need to do to fix a serious cultural problem that necessarily gives rise to administrator "flame out". My skin was already plenty thick. A lot of the people who have burned out or resigned as a result of this were experienced editors who knew what it was like to be under pressure for making a decision someone didn't like. You can't do everything right, but you can recognize problems and take steps toward addressing them. Helping people learn to cope with stress may be one prong of your attack, but it can't be the only one -- not here. - causa sui

On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 1:04 PM, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net> wrote: What do you propose?

On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 1:47 PM, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net> wrote: Good luck to you, then. I hope you can help turn it around.