[WikiEN-l] Abuse of admin powers by David Gerard and Snowspinner

Thu Jul 7 13:33:01 UTC 2005

> Regardless of whether a block was within policy or not, creating
> another account to circumvent it is against policy. This is especially
> what the list was made for and if you asked to be unblocked while
> citing relevant sections of policy, I'm sure you could get a lot more
> admins to unblock you if you contacted them privately, than when you
> go straight to accusations of abuse.

It wasn't an account created to circumvent it.  From what I understand
is that it's an account used by multiple people (a role account) and
in this case the person using it was someone else asking questions
about the block on their behalf.

David Gerard cited a non-existent ban on role accounts as the basis
for the block and since it was demonstrated that there is no such
thing, he hasn't bothered responding.  Furthermore, snowspinner has
now justified it by openly saying that admins can block for whatever
they wish, even if it's not in policy.

It seems to be standard policy on this list that if an admins claims
are refuted, they just stop responding completely so as to avoid
making themselves look worse.  When I asked Fred Bauer (sp?) that he
present an actual link of evidence of where I refused to cite sources
in regards to my arb case (it was used as evidence against me even
though it was fabricated out of thin air), he just completely ignored
it and only focused on the part about personal attacks.  The thing
about personal attacks was dropped when he realized that his theory
wasn't followed by most wikipedia users, including admins (no
consensus).

I came across something interesting recently (a comment from David
Gerard):
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion/Proposal/13&diff=18218110&oldid=18212788

Apparently when it comes to speedy deletions simply specifying a
personal attack is too ambiguous, but when it comes to the personal
attacks policy, it's something that "any reasonable person" (his idea
of what admins are supposed to be) would know.  Complete
disconfirmation bias.

I think a lot of this could be solved if the admins actually tried to
see what the actual consensus on their actions was.  A lot of the
things done by the more abusive admins would fail basic tests of
consensus and they know this very well, which is why they refuse to
ever poll on the matter.   The best most recent example is
snowspinner's "we don't need policy to block people" theory which was
used to censor someone on Wikipedia asking about blocks.

I think the solution is to create a Wikipedia: space page to watch
admin abuse (like an admin abuse notice board or somesuch) that
compiled wonderful examples of what they had done.  It could also hold
votes regarding self-invented policy by admins that, even if
unofficial, could at least demonstrate that they are clearly doing
things outside of consensus.  I have no doubt that when that was
demonstrated they'd start trying to invalidate all the various votes
for asinine reasons (especially as per the self-invented "lets remove
blank oppose votes" policy).

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Nathan J. Yoder
http://www.gummibears.nu/
http://www.gummibears.nu/files/njyoder_pgp.key
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