Daniel,
Thanks. This was the most heartening post I've read in relation to
anything to do with Wikipedia in a good while. We chuckled, and it was balm
on my wife's bruised heart -- it made her say, "It makes you think there is
hope for this thing after all."
I am reminded of what Sydney said earlier, that behaviours that are normal
in real life -- e.g. that you talk to friends when a situation has upset
you -- are not normal in Wikipedia. The assumption in Wikipedia is that any
such conversation would serve a nefarious Machiavellian purpose, rather than
the simple human need for emotional support.
You can't let your hair down in Wikipedia, because anything you say on
a talk page can and will be taken down and used in evidence against you.
I agree with Sydney that new users find this hard to adjust to. Women in
particular are likely to miss this type of relating, and be upset when it
is used against them. Sometimes we are incivil in the name of civility.
Best,
Andreas
--- On Sun, 6/2/11, Daniel and Elizabeth Case <dancase(a)frontiernet.net> wrote:
It isn't just *her* eyes. Based on the
information
provided, I found the
user in question. He *is* ridiculous. No, scratch that. He
would be
ridiculous only if he didn't hurt anybody, and if he had
that effect on your
wife imagine how many other people out there gave up as
well.
As I would have suspected, he's a heavy Twinkle user. He
has been on
Wikipedia a little less longer than I have; he has
rollbacker and reviewer
rights but is (thankfully) not an admin. He has, in
addition to all the
self-applied barnstars (a practice that should be
forbidden), two userboxes
near the top of his page proclaiming his use of Twinkle
(only one is needed,
really, if that's something you want to brag about). *And*,
near the top of
the page, links to both WP:VANISPAM (which I haven't seen
invoked in
deletion discussions or anywhere for that matter in a long
time) and a short
essay of his own where he complains about some
inconsistencies in the speedy
deletion criteria (OK, somewhat rightly) and other aspects
of the deletion
policies. The solution he advocates is (surprise!) more
admins invoking
WP:IAR to resolve those conflicts in favor of ...
deletion!
Elsewhere on his userpage, his boxes indicate interests in
energy, classical
music, piano, various Google apps and aspects of computer
programming. I
hate to say it, but the whole thing just adds up to
"extremely socially
awkward geek". I'm not at all sure I want to meet him in
person.
And looking over his user history, his recent contribs
show, indeed, a lot
of AfD nominations, talk pages, and very little actual
content editing.
Nothing on his userpage indicates any interest in content;
he doesn't point
you to any GAs or FAs or anything else he's had a hand in,
or suggest he's a
member of any WikiProject save the one on infobox creation.
He's, frankly,
the stereotypical deletionist (and makes me not doubt the
wisdom of taking
that box off my own userpage a long time ago). Reading his
page and thinking
about it, I wish there was some reality to the old "In
Soviet Wikipedia,
article delete YOU!!" joke.
Frankly, this guy isn't an editor. He's a [[griefer]]. This
is a prime
example of someone for whom Wikipedia has become a video
game where he tries
to rack up points by getting as many articles as possible
deleted. What else
can you say about someone who so clearly brags about this
sort of thing and
says he enjoys it? This guy screams "referral to the school
psychologist
needed".
Of course, here I am trashing him out, in a forum he'll
likely never read
and wouldn't care to know whether it exists or not.
The question is what can we do to prevent people from
becoming this sort of
user.
I do have some ideas. I have long said we could benefit
from making the
block function page specific, so that editors could either
be allowed to
work on a set of pages and those pages alone, or otherwise
more effectively
topic-banned by being blocked from a certain set of pages,
but free to edit
anything else (The current setup would be a bit like if,
instead of issuing
a restraining order that says "don't go within 150
yds/meters of X", the
judge had only the option of forcibly excluding the
individual from the
city, state or country for the time period in question).
This would be an
extreme option, but better than blocking them wholesale
(and might cut down
on socking as well).
It could be used to enforce a policy whereby editors are
watched via a
filter/bot for patterns that suggest this sort of behavior
(i.e. X large
percentage of deletion-initiating edits vs. Y really small
percentage of
namespace edits) and then it would be suggested to them
that they take a
break and do something constructive instead for a while,
with the
possibility of a page-specific block on AfD etc. and
temporary suspension
of, say, rollbacker rights, to make sure they do, beyond a
certain point.
Yes, some editors might consider this heavy-handed and just
leave. But look
at what they become without this kind of shepherding ... I
think the
community and the encyclopedia would, on the whole,
benefit.
Daniel Case
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