[WikiEN-l] SHOWCASING Abuses of Admin Power

Sun Jul 3 23:33:13 UTC 2005

>Sorry, I appear to have forgotten to send this reply to Anonymouse to
>the actual mailing list, and instead sent it to Anonymouse alone. I
>note that I haven't received a reply to it in the 16 hours since I
>sent it to him or her.

Yeah, it's not like it's the biggest holiday weekend of the summer or 
anything.

Wait. It's the 4th of July weekend? WHOOPS!

>First off, who is Marmot? Who is Kurita77? I don't know. I'm the list
>administrator; I make sure it is used appropriately. I'm not here to
>make judgments about the actions of people on Wikipedia; I'm here to
>facilitate meaningful and constructive discussion.

Marmot is a user wrongfully banned from Wikipedia for the "crime" of 
dissenting and pointing out when Admins were abusing their powers.

Kurita77 I know you knew about; he was a recent new user who came to this 
list to ask why someone had PERMANENTLY BLOCKED his account from Wikipedia, 
and instead of treating him respectfully the Admins around here treated him 
like complete crap, made fun of him, sent him nasty emails laced with racial 
slurs, and sat around slapping each other on the back congratulating 
themselves for driving him into enough anger that he started swearing, at 
which point the admins on THIS LIST used that as an excuse to block him 
(oops, sorry, "moderating" him which means you'll just let all his emails 
sit and expire without even bothering to read them) for getting upset at 
wrongfully being blocked.

>You were incredibly rude. As a result, you were moderated, but not
>banned. You are still free to send emails to the list, and, like I
>said, if they are civil then they will fairly quickly reach the list.

Let's test that shall we? Hmm?

>It's not what you say
>that's important to me, it's how you say it.

We'll see.

>You claim that your alleged personal attacks were the truth. So you're
>saying it's the absolute truth that one Wikipedian is a fat hag who
>constantly fellates another Wikipedian? I'm sorry, but that is so out
>of line that I do not accept any arguments of censorship or freedom of
>speech or anything like that as persuasive. If you have a point to
>make, it is more than possible to make it without personally attacking
>people in that manner.

If you think those were over the line, fine.
I stand by my categorization of Ambi as being Wikipedia's version of the Red 
Queen. Her constant agitation for harsher and harsher punishments by ArbCom, 
combined with her absolute refusal to show ANY effort to communicate with 
the users in question, is the equivalent of the Queen sitting around 
screaming "Orf Wiv 'Is 'Ead" at anything that got near her.

In general, the Ambi/Gerard theory of Wikipedia has sucked. Instead of a 
Wikipedia based on encouraging civil discourse and where temporary blocks 
are for the purpose of encouraging users to behave within policy (and NEVER 
supposed to be punitive) we have admins like Bauder, Gerard, Ambi, Sidaway, 
and others I can name running around like the Wikipedian Inquisition.

They make up new policy as they go, they enforce things that aren't in 
policy, they REFUSE to enforce policy against each other or against their 
"favorite" users.

This needs to stop. But anytime it gets brought up, they instantly go off 
the deep end looking for any reason, no matter how minor, to block accounts 
and attack those who are calling their behavior into question.

>As for your worries of people hunting you down and blocking you on
>Wikipedia for what is said here, you shouldn't worry about that. As
>far as I am concerned, although WikiEN-l is expressly *about*
>Wikipedia, it is entirely separate *from* Wikipedia, and anything
>which goes on one should not have a bearing on the user's
>participation in the other.

Unfortunately, your IDEAL of how they should act and the REALITY of how they 
act are two completely different things.

The fact remains that if they knew my Wikipedia account name, they wouldn't 
hesitate for a nanosecond to slap a block on it.

>In this way, a user who gets blocked on
>Wikipedia proper is not automatically banned from the Mailing List,
>and vice-versa.

No, but they quickly get ignored or derided for daring to come here for 
redress of the regular abuses of power we see from Wikipedian admins.

Rather than this place being where new users who have been bitten by 
overzealous, power-hungry admins can come to get redress it's become a place 
where the users come so that the rest of the admins can have a good laugh at 
their expense.

>Having said that, the fact that the mailing list is
>independent means that in *extreme* cases action must be taken in
>order to stop spam, abuse or inane repetition. In my view, yours is
>the second most extreme case I have seen in the last year of being the
>administrator of this mailing list. However, since that last case I
>have taken a more liberal approach and instead moderated you instead
>of banning you from subscribing to the mailing list outright. This is
>because I see considerable value in what you say, and want you to help
>thresh out the discussion, just not without abusively kicking other
>people in the guts in the process.

Right. Like I said, we'll see if this goes through or not.

>So if you would please get over the accusations of thuggery and
>censorship on my part, and back on topic in a civil manner, hopefully
>we can actually get somewhere and maybe even lift the veil of
>moderation.

I'm giving you a chance to behave in good faith here. We'll see what 
happens. So far I have four cases of abuse by Wikipedia admins, and ZERO 
indication that they - especially as 90% of your list adminship are also 
Wikipedia admins - are inclined to act in good faith.

A. Nony Mouse

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