Fred wrote:
What is happening is the result of combat fatigue
(stress in less dramatic terms)
By being very demanding regarding actions by anyone in a leading position there
is more stress, and less satisfaction. Most people can be stressed in this way
only for a short period of time. Trial lawyers and combat veterans for a bit longer.
We are all part of the problem. The solution is to be much more forgiving of the
"mistakes" of others and being less quick to criticize. Another solution is to
get
rid of the attack dogs or at least not join in when they go into full cry.
Charles wrote:
"Todd Allen" wrote
If we can find some common threads as to
why it's happening, maybe we can slow the rate down.
People have to learn to pace themselves. People have to understand how negative
the effects can be if they try to force the pace on WP. I think people here may
believe that they are here for the long term, but may lack the patience that is
implied in saying that.
I'm just coming back from a weekend spent fighting a cold and avoiding
WP entirely (don't use the admin bit with a 4-deg-F fever). Pacing
onesself indeed.
Firstly, thanks to Newyorkbrad for starting the thread.
I wanted to comment on both Fred's and Charles' comments, and
indirectly on some others in-thread.
I've gotten in a bit of trouble for having gotten confrontational with
a couple of admins who burned out, in the few days before they blew.
I don't think I was a major or precipitating factor, but from one
viewpoint I didn't help.
In both cases, I saw little alarm bells going off in my head and was
pretty sure they were about to go. I've seen those several times
since and started leaning on people to take breaks.
In my viewpoint, there's an inherent problem with admins reaching the
endstate of burnout. One common pattern is that they completely lose
good faith regarding someone they've been arguing with for a while and
hit them with an admin tool grossly abusively, or start seriously
assuming bad faith for newbies.
This is not garden-variety admin mistake - I see those all the time.
This is not grumpy admin syndrome - There are less of those, but they
"feel" different than the ones I'm talking about who blew up. This is
not admin having a bad day. The ones who blew up and left made a very
sharp, escalating level of nastyness (doubling period 12-24 hrs) and
then lost it.
It's possible to see this as finally pushed too far by a troll. But I
think that's as a rule a mistake - the two where I pushed back, the
provocations had been garden-variety, IMHO, and the reactions out of
proportion.
One of the advantages of continuing to AGF even with the abusers is
that the admins about to blow up stand out clearly.
As I said, the last couple of times that I saw the signs, I asked
people to wikibreak, and they did. In one case they left and didn't
come back, in the other they returned with decreased participation.
My motivations for pushing in the earlier cases were that we do
sometimes have a legit problem with admin-BITE, and I was seeing it
there. We do need to stay aware and vigilant on that point. Admins
will make mistakes, have bad days, turn grumpy, burn out in a big
blowup, and on rare (unique?) occasion turn seriously rogue. I have
noticed that I've both made mistakes and had bad days. If we intend
to keep encouraging and attracting new talent, we need to minimize the
consequences and volume of BITEs.
I don't pretend to have the single right answer, but I think that
pushing people to take a break de-escalates situations and has
ancedotally led to less loss to the project (with a totally useless
statistical sample size). If you see someone suddenly become very
much more confrontational or angry or aggressive, I advise trying to
get them to take a break.
It might also make sense to create some sort of structure for an
organized effort on that account. Anything from a "Stressed admin
noticeboard" to a "This admin pledges to take a Wikibreak if 5 admins
or 10 users ask them to in any 24 hr period" pledge and template.
Those ideas occurred to me but I haven't had bandwidth to follow them
up.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com