On 11/12/2010 17:21, Daniel R. Tobias wrote:
On Fri, 10 Dec 2010 08:17:36 -0500, Anthony wrote:
On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 12:02 AM, Steve
Bennett<stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 10:15 PM, David
Gerard<dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Ensure that (administrators|wardens|whatever we
decide to call them) feel no qualms
about>kicking out clearly disruptive people.
If it was clear to everyone who
the disruptive people were, there
would never be any problems. But one person's troll is another
person's misunderstood genius.
It doesn't have to be clear to everyone,
just to the people in charge.
...if you favor a top-down authoritarian model in
which nobody
outside a small ruling clique has any say in things. And if any of
the rabble object to that, just call them trolls too and kick them
out as well.
Interestingly (for some of us) that authoritarian model has had a bad
couple of years, in some senses. Or perhaps not, depending on your
perspective.
Two or three years ago I was much more in the thick of things, and I
remember telling a rather bemused American at dinner at the Alexandria
Wikimania about the four political parties on enWP. With that as my
baseline, things have shifted somewhat. ArbCom itself is "doing a Jimbo"
- holding itself in reserve from acting more in public than it has to,
and dealing with much mail in private. This is no bad thing in itself,
and I of course having been there understand the reason. (Not many
people know that I once posted to the arbwiki an analysis of incoming
mail into 11 types - well ahead of my time there.) Leaving the field
open for AN/I to be the main centre of overt authority, with serious
disadvantages in some cases. Of course AN/I is not a "cabal", but an
unchartered process and free-for-all.
What of those "parties"? Naming no names, except perhaps Dan's since he
belongs to party D in my book, and Tony's since he at least belonged to
party B, there were parties A and B of the (authoritarian) right, and
parties C (my natural home, surprisingly to some), and D (extreme free
speechers) on the (permissive) left. For a while the main conflicts were
A with D, B with C, and A and B were at daggers drawn. In other words in
the so-called authoritarian or pre-Obama era up to the 2008 ArbCom
elections, the right was split. Parties A and B emerged somewhat
battered, but basically A has rebuilt and B hasn't. Party C is going
strong but turns out not to have any real reforming ideas. The Ds were
always a noisy fringe not doing much but take WR way, way too seriously.
So that's everyone card marked, then. I notice that people on enWP talk
at the top of their rhetorical voices still, making themselves
ridiculous just for effect, in my view. Reactivity and ranting in the
world according to AN/I, and random decisions can be taken.
I'm no longer interested in the police work, as I told David Gerard
early in 2009. Other stuff to do.
Charles