[WikiEN-l] Worthy admins? (was "The userbox fad")

Tue Jan 3 19:02:52 UTC 2006

On 1/3/06, Ben Emmel <bratsche1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 1/3/06, jayjg <jayjg99 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > > This is an increasing problem. Some of the users who cause most
> > > trouble do very little editing of articles, and trying to deal with
> > > their trolling on talk pages can be soul-destroying. Yet block one of
> > > them and their friends scream blue murder, aided and abetted by
> > > certain admins who should know better. It's something we need to get a
> > > grip on because it's going to keep getting worse, and eventually
> > > they'll start affecting policy.
> > Unfortunately, some of these admins *don't* know better.  Recently I've
> > seen
> > people become admins with thousands of edits, but under a hundred Talk:
> > page
> > comments, and others who became admins with as few as 16 people voting
> for
> > them.  People who have had so little interaction with other Wikipedians,
> > or
> > who are so unknown that there aren't even 20 Wikipedians willing to
> vouch
> > for them, are simply not members of the Wikipedia community in any
> > meaningful way.  It is not surprising, then, when they act in ways which
> > display an ignorance of, or go against Wikipedia norms (e.g. unblocking
> > blocked users without even first discussing the block with the blocking
> > admin).  The purpose of Wikipedia is not to create a website where
> people
> > can set up really cool user pages, or engage in wheel wars.  Nor is its
> > purpose to create a website where one can endlessly pontificate on the
> > actions of other editors, and devise more and more policies to control
> > their
> > actions in increasingly bizarre ways.  Rather, the purpose of Wikipedia
> is
> > to create a great encyclopedia.
> >
> > Jay.
>
>
> I am noticing some of the same issues: Users are slipping through RfA
> without much opposition, but without much community support either. They
> seem to be decent editors, mostly doing work in a small area of Wikipedia,
> and when (self)nominated for adminship, they get their "Wikifriends" to
> support them, and boom! admin tools. Inevitably, wheel warring (large or
> small) will happen from these admins, because they actually don't
> understand
> or generally support the long-standing policies that we have here.
>
> I almost hate to say this, but with the growing size and popularity of
> Wikipedia, we might need to start treating adminship truly as a big deal.

Here's an example of what I mean.  I noticed that a specific administrator,
in the last 12 hours, managed to get into a delete wheel war with another
admin, get himself blocked for 3RR, and then unblocked himself.  He then
unblocked an obvious troll, without informing the blocking admin, and
blocked another editor permanently, accusing him of being a sockpuppet, with
no evidence that I am aware of.  My curiousity piqued, I looked at his
recent edits, and discovered that *none* of his past 600 edits have been to
an article, but do find a comment he has posted today saying that Jimbo is
"too busy asking for money" to deal with Wikipedia issues.  I then do an
editcount, and discover that of his 8700 edits, only 1800 are to articles,
the *exact same number* of edits he has made to his User page.  I look at
his User page, and discover *86* user boxes on it.

What is going on here?

Jay.