[WikiEN-l] Open letter to Ed Poor: On heavy-handed sysops

Mon Nov 17 18:15:10 UTC 2003

Dear Ed,

I hope you had a nice weekend.

About the Mother Teresa article.

I got involved in that article not out profound interest in the subject
but because I was distressed to see that Adam Carr withdrew (figuratively
speaking!)  from Mother Teresa because of his frustration at the stubborn
insistence of an indignant Catholic user, Aplank (now known as
Alexandros), that all criticisms of her be removed from the article.  As
you may know, Adam Carr, who only joined Wikipedia in early September, has
proven to be an outstanding historian.  He prepared an alternative version
of the MT article at the end of October to resolve a contentious debate
over the existing one (and whose version it later replaced).  As you also
know, Aplank, for reasons now well understood, has had a lot of trouble
understanding Wikipedia collaborative editing conventions and accepting
alternate, critical points of view.

At the beginning of last week, it was protected by a brand new sysop,
Secretlondon (duly anointed just a day or two before) for the third time
in several weeks after yet again an edit war involving Aplank broke out.

We began the slow, arduous process of trying to find a way out of the
impasse.  We tried to define some ground rules. Aplank slowly began to
appreciate that he  was out of line and, crucially, we had finally
impressed on him that changes to the article *must be* discussed on the
Talk page first.  Another Catholic user, Pfortuny, agreed to restoring the
now heavily mutilated article to Adam's original, and Adam -- much my
pleasure -- took an interest in becoming involved again, only he refused
to do so unless Aplank was banned from the article.  I pointed out that
there is no precedent for "banning" a user from an article and made an
alternative proposal, which didn't work out.  But nonetheless, we were
working on a solution and we were *just* about at the point of restarting
the article when "Uncle Ed" arrived on Friday afternoon.

You unilaterally decided to unprotect that article.  You decided to RENAME
it (!!!)  Teresa of Calcutta.  You dismissed all the proceeding discussion
sight  unseen as as "unproductive talk" and "bickering" and simply ignored
it.  (I am not neutral because I was involved but I thought the percentage
of "bickering was modest.)  You made a dozen or so substantial edits to
article.  Pfortuny and Secretlondon both expressed their polite surprise
at all this.  I was less polite.

When Adam asked whether the situation with Aplank clarified, you
responded:

  Aplank has a clean slate. Why? Because I said so, and no one objected
:-)

  He doesn't need clearance from anyone to edit the article; it's been
unprotected. 

(In a similar way, several days before you arbitrarily removed the
discussion of Aplank from Problem users -- a page whose usefulness I have
already questioned here -- without resolving in any way the underlying
problem. But that is also a general problem with that page:  it offers no
way of resolving issues.)

Ed, please, what *were* you thinking Friday afternoon? Did you need to
tick off  a couple more Good Deeds on your To Do list before you left for
the weekend?  Where you trying to rescue Aplank the "persecuted Christian"
from the hands of infidels???

Now the reason I am posting this is a open letter is to make the following
points and raise a question:

There are a lot of problems on Wikipedia right now and I think this is
because there are so few established procedures for dealing with conflict.
 At one end of the spectrum, one can IP-block an anonymous vandal.  At the
other, an abusive user can be hard-banned by Jimbo.  In between that,
there is nothing, except hunkering down in an edit war or slinging mud on
the Problem users page. For better or worse, a kind of anarchy reins, and
since there is so little precedence for what we are trying to build, we
have have to stumble along, experimenting as we go.

Ideally, a perfectly formed system for dealing with conflict would spring
from the brain of Jimbo Wales like Athena from the head of Zeus.  However,
in the absence of such a miracle happening, I see two alternatives:

1) a coterie of super-syops -- like yourself  -- solve problems based
personal authority and boldness of action.  Obviously useful for "putting
out fires".

2) strategies for dealing with conflict evolve organically and spread
through the Wikipedia community like Khronus's memes (!). This obviously
take time and patience and forbearance on the part of trigger-happy
sysops.

So, which way forward?

I personally would prefer the second option, even though it means a lot
more work. The first lacks transparency and lends itself to arbitrary
decisions.  It means also that Wikipedia does not evolve in a structured
way as an environment but simply relies on a few strong personalities to
impose solutions, thereby glossing over weaknesses in the system.  But
perhaps it is naive of me to think that it can be any other way.  I hope
that others here will share their viewpoints on this.

Adam Carr has since abandoned Mother Teresa, which is his choice, but I
think it is a great pity. In our slow, stumbling way, we *might* have been
able to reach  a compromise agreement with him had you not interfered. Had
we been able to, those of us involved -- Secretlondon, Pfortuny, Aplank,
myself and others -- might have learned from the experience and used it to
help resolve  similar such conflicts in the future. How else will useful
precedents for dealing with conflict evolve?

None of my comments above diminishes my respect for you as someone who is
gifted at articulating and implementing WP's NPOV philosophy.  It is just
that I don't believe that that moral authority should be construed as --
for the lack of a better term -- political power.  In the long run, it is
simply counterproductive.

-- Viajero