On 1/3/06, jayjg <jayjg99(a)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.