[WikiEN-l] To: Jimmy Wales - Admin-driven death of Wikipedia

Sun Jun 4 22:14:03 UTC 2006

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>I think it would be reasonable to have some sort 
>of process other than ArbCom whereby admins are 
>from time to time or upon particular 
>circumstances renominated for adminship.  
>The danger, of course, is that such a process 
>could be used by trolls as a hammer against some 
>of our more active admins.

This is right in both parts. It is very easy for an
admin (I speak as one myself) to feel somewhat special
and elevated. Admins are, after all, only human like
everyone else. And human beings are an intensely
hierarchical species - I speak as a Brit, the most
hierarchical of all subgroups of Homo Sapiens in the
western hemisphere.

And, of course, that feeling of being "somewhat
special" will have its effects. We dislike WP:OWN of
articles, but admins and long-term users all suffer
from "ownership" of the project as a whole. As a
general rule, this is a Very Good Thing. Without
people feeling ownership of Wikipedia, the project
would be doomed. 

But the same problems that exist in editors owning
articles exist in editors owning Wikipedia. We don't.
The public, the users, the readers - they own
Wikipedia. The person who drops in, reads a single
article and goes away better informed, or with
something to put in her high school essay or something
new to add to his mate's point of view... they own
Wikipedia. They are the customers. We - the editors
and admins - are the burger-flippers, serving the
customers what they want when they want it. We know
more about how the burgers are made and what goes into
the making of them than do the customers on the other
side of the window. But that doesn't mean we have any
authority over the customers. That's not what we're
(not) paid for.

(BTW, the Wikipedia critics forget that point more
than the real editors and admins do - as a hint to
them: that ol' interweb thing, it doesn't exist just
for you. Honestly.)

However (and there had to be one), however: the first
call for me to be desysoped was just 12 hours after I
was given the admin buttons. I deleted an article that
someone else had tagged CSD-A7; it was a recreation of
a CSD-A7, which was a recreation of a CSD-A7. Three
editors, two admins and me all agreed that this chap's
high school career didn't need to be in an
encyclopedia.

The chap in question contacted my talk page, emailed
me and even emailed someone else asking them to
contact me, all with the same message: I had been
wrongly "promoted" and should go immediately.

A day later, a similar thing happened. Since then, a
week on Wikipedia isn't complete without someone
somewhere telling me that I should be desysoped for
enforcing Wikipedia rules... or writing to a talk page
asking someone for their opinion on a rule(!)

Any method of evaluating admins needs to remove these
people from the process. They have nothing to add to
it. If they could create a de-admin process with a
single click, they would. And once created that
process would attract every nutjob, troll and person
who skim-reads a page into voting an admin out of the
extra buttons. QED: no more admins in about 12 days.

Nevertheless, there should be a way of allowing
comment on admin actions and behaviour. Writing to
admins' talk pages and email doesn't satisfy the
critics, even if they even bother. They tend to go to
Esperanza or AIV first. Or to RfA to try to become an
admin. Or even directly to the Anti-Wikipedia Forum
for Obsessive Nutters or whatever it's called.

A route where they could vent would be useful to the
complainant, the community and even the admin
themselves. We can rely on the community to spot a
malicious or ill-informed editor making a complaint,
as a rule, and thus reject them (although the critics
say *all* complaints are valid... mind you, they're
busy ringing people up at work, writing to employers
and calling the police over *interweb content
disputes*, so they've already somewhat blotted their
copybooks in the scale and sanity departments).

There's a clear, easy and unabusable "Request for
Comment on Administration Actions" system that must
exist somewhere. Soemthing that would give everyone
useful feedback, help decide policy and would be
non-judgmental unless an admin had gone mad with
her/his buttons and a 'crat hadn't spotted it.

What this system is, I don't know. But there must be
one. Simple, easy to use, hard to abuse... surely the
internet allows for that somewhere? A system that
could recognise that admins are human and therefore
are not perfect, but that there's a difference between
falability and maliciousness? Above all, a system that
ensures that mistakes are learnt from, rather than
punished (Lar, MSK, do you hear me? Enough with the
punishment fetish, please...) and thus that we grow
and develop from it.

But I'm at a loss as to what that system is. There
*must* be one. Somewhere.

-> REDVERS

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