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

[jayjg]

On 1/4/06, Chris Jenkinson <chris at starglade.org> wrote:
>
> jayjg wrote:
> > I'm sure a small number of people who were aware of the specific
> incidents
> > knew which individual I was referring to, but that's hardly the
> point.  Most
> > of these discussions involve a lot of hand-waving arguments, people
> making
> > claims with no concrete examples.  Rather than doing the same, I
> provided a
> > live and relevant example of the issues I was raising.  And to remind
> > everyone, the issue raised was not about whether or not one particular
> admin
> > was behaving badly, but more broadly whether people are becoming
> involved in
> > Wikipedia (and even becoming admins) without any familiarity with its
> norms
> > or committment to its goals.  When one notices that an administrator is
> > behaving quite badly, and then realizes that fewer than 1/4 of his edits
> are
> > actually to articles, and that he has as many edits to his user page as
> he
> > has to all encyclopedia articles combined, these issues are highlighted
> > starkly.
>
> Maybe he's a bad admin, he certainly gets involved right in the thick of
> the latest and greatest controversy on Wikipedia, but he also received
> 53 support votes on his RFA, including a number of high-profile editors
> who do not normally vote or typically vote oppose. And despite all the
> controversy he's in recently, he still managed to become elected to one
> of Esperanza's positions with 19 votes. I don't want to get into some
> kind of psychological analysis of everyone's voting habits, but I
> believe if someone is unsuitable then they would never get as many votes
> as he has.
>
> Yes, maybe he hasn't been editing the article space enough. I probably
> don't edit the article namespace enough either. But if what he is doing
> is building friendships and welcoming people to Wikipedia, then I don't
> see what he is doing as a problem. People are more likely to contribute
> if they feel happy here and I believe his actions are helping in this
> area. He isn't directly building the encyclopaedia, but he's helping get
> others to build it.


You seem to know him well.  Since you've decided to defend him, tell me,
when he insists that "fair use" images can be used on Userboxes, and that
attempts to delete them are attempts by "the mob" to enforce "copyright
paranoia" and "wiki-law" that have "no basis in reality", and then edit wars
both the policy pages which forbid it, and those who delete the images from
the userboxes, is he helping others build the encyclopedia?

Jay.