On 5/23/07, Philippe Beaudette philippebeaudette@gmail.com wrote:
My thoughts (as a regular user - I'm not an admin) -
I'm gravely disturbed by this whole process (or lack thereof). Through my eyes, I see a political vendetta that was pursued within the ranks of the admins, who I would wish that I could trust implicitly, and my confidence in that is shaken. There's nothing scary than a mob of villagers pursuing someone with torches. My natural instinct is to jump into the fray on the side of the "wronged" party, but obviously, that's not appropriate here.
A vendetta? I see nothing personal in how the admins have been acting, with the exception of Zsinj who *possibly* could have done it out of some personal opinion about Jeff.
I have no opinion about Jeff - I think he probably serves a good purpose, as
the agitator, and agitators often have detractors, but I hurt for him in this. Further, I hurt for the people who made this decision; it's so difficult to be put in a position where you feel like you're driven to drastic action. I wonder what it was that made them decide that our ordinary dispute resolution steps wouldn't work here? Where is the consensus model in this? Where did we, as a community fail? DID we, as a community fail? And, more importantly, how do we fix it to prevent it from happening again?
Jeff was wronged, there's no question in my mind. I won't cry out for blood, but I'll ask for accountability, and I'll ask for the decision tree, so that we can figure out where our systems broke down, if they did.
I wonder about how we repair the damage that was done here - obviously, Jeff's unblocked, and that's A Good Thing. But, what about the users like myself who see this action and worry about the unity and spirit of our admin corps? How do we repair the shaken trust? I know these are people - flawed, like myself, but I expect a higher standard from admins. Obviously, ArbComm's involved, and I think that's good. I'd like to see users (not just the one who made the block, but including him/her) come forward and say "I was wrong, and I apologize".
The first thing to do is to rid yourself of the notion of a united admin corps, because there isn't such a thing. Admins are basically ordinary editors with some extra tools; it shouldn't surprise us that they fuck up anymore than it should surprise us that a few idiots can get into edit wars listed on [[WP:LAME]]. The only issue is sanctioning those responsible for such fuck-ups.
Placing admins on such a pedestal is a bad idea - and even if you want to do it, please don't refer to admins as a united collective, because we hardly ever agree on anything (except possibly a few core ideas like [[WP:NPOV]]). Treating us as a collective is like worrying about the unity and spirit of our editing corps - it's pointless, because there's no such thing.
The Arbcom isn't literally involved just yet, per se. A new case has been filed, but only one arbitrator has agreed to accept it, with two others rejecting - but that was prior to the blocking incident. Let's see how this goes.
More than anything, this makes me sad.
Philippe [[User:Philippe]]
Johnleemk