[WikiEN-l] Voting is evil (was CheckUser policy)

[Kelly Martin]

On 11/8/05, JAY JG <jayjg at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Mediation is intermittent at best, and (from what I can tell) almost never
> achieves a positive outcome, but that's nothing compared to RfC.

Mediation is more successful than you may realize, in part because
successful mediations often occur in relative obscurity.  A problem
that once existed went away, without an RfC or RfAr being filed; as a
result, only the editors involved in the dispute know about the
mediation or the resolution, and they often don't talk much about it.

Note that I'm specifically not referring to mediation under the
auspices of the Mediation Committee, which has, indeed, been
notoriously unreliable.  I'm referring more to informal mediations
conducted by a variety of informal mediators who get involved via talk
pages, IRC, IM, email, and any number of other methods to settle
disagreements between editors amicably.  I've done at least a dozen
such mediations (only one since being appointed to ArbCom, though) and
most of them have been at least moderately successful.  The more
public ones are the ones that have failed, usually because by the time
the dispute is loud enough to be noticeable generally, the parties are
too pissed at one another to ever settle their dispute.  Many
mediations merely consist of discovering an edit war and, instead of
doling out punitive blocks (as so many admins on Wikipedia are wont to
do), diagnosing the problem, talking to the users in question, and
resolving the dispute.  Often it's not hard to do this, but most of
our admins never try.  It's so much easier just to go "3RR, block
block block".

> Article RfCs are numerous, and rarely attract the attention of more than one
> or two outside editors.  Frequently they attract no outside interest at all.

Indeed.  I've only rarely seen article RfCs attract significant
attention.  Shameful, since articles are what Wikipedia is supposed to
be all about.  There are too many people who are part of Wikipedia for
the community, instead of for the encyclopedia.

> User RfCs are a mess - in theory they are a platform for addressing and
> solving community issues.  In practice, they are often venues for warring
> camps to air grievances, and for certain notorious individuals (who feel
> they don't get enough attention) to use as soapboxes for their own
> speechifying (i.e. yet another "outside view").  Obvious trolling is rarely
> addressed - the complainants outline their case, and a dozen or so regular
> editors vote in support.  The troll provides a lengthy response, and three
> or four troll buddies/generall trolls/people with grievances against the
> complainant line up and vote in support of him, or add another "outside
> view" that has little to do with the case at hand, and is mostly about their
> own issues with the complainants.  Nothing changes, and everyone goes away
> bitter.

This definitely describes several of the RfC's I've been involved in
in some way lately.  I agree that this serves no purpose.  I'm also
tired of hearing editors state "In my RfC my opinion got more
endorsements than yours did, therefore I won and you must shut up." 
(Yes, I've heard things like this said.  It's stupid.)  RfC is
emphatically not supposed to be a popularity contest, although I must
admit it has turned into one.  Of course, the same can be said of
RfA/RfB.

Kelly