On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 4:34 PM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
Are you saying that a _declining_ number of administrators means a _growth_ in bureaucracy? It would normally mean the opposite, either a loss of control, or that the ordinary members were taking the function upon themselves. What I see is a greater degree of control and uniformity, not driven by those in formal positions of authority.
No, I don't think there is any direct correlation between number of administrators (which is quantifiable) and growth in 'bureaucracy' (which is not). I'm referring to a general cultural shift that has occurred in the past couple years in various places (I could go into detail). "IAR" and the philosophy behind it is most definitely losing ground on Wikipedia, almost completely gone, and to the great detriment of people who frankly want to get shit done. That can be enforced by admins and regular users alike: it makes no particular difference.
If something I said implied otherwise, I was quite wrong to do so.
On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 7:18 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax abd@lomaxdesign.com wrote:
At 12:56 AM 6/1/2010, Durova wrote:
Let's not mince words: Wikipedia administratorship can be a serious liability. The 'reward' for volunteering for this educational nonprofit
can
include getting one's real name Googlebombed, getting late night phone
calls
to one's home, and worse. The Wikimedia Foundation has never sent a cease and desist demand to the people who have made a years-long hobby of
driving
its administrators away.
Durova's history is a classic example. She was hounded by a screaming mob when she made a mistake, even though she recognized the error and undid it within an hour. She might have been desysopped had she not resigned, but that would have been a miscarriage of wikijustice. She should have been defended, but was not. And why? I've never really studied that.
While I've studied and have dealt with administrative abuse, the people who are most abused by the Wikipedia system are administrators, and that is probably a major source of abusive adminship.
I've argued for clear and strong rules for admin recusal, but what's often been missed is that this *protects* administrators from becoming over-involved in the mudslinging contests.
This is intensely problematic, and the current trend of strict (almost fanatical) adherence to the principle of administrator non-involvement is a serious barrier to the functioning of Wikipedia. We talk about how there is a lot of administrative work to be done, and I'll indicate to you that a reason there is so much work to be done is that administrators are regularly being prevented -- even punished! -- for doing it by these kinds of arbitrary rules. Smart administrators do not do the difficult work of wading into 'mudslinging contests' and trying to sort them out because the general community will *not* support them for their efforts, and as in my case, will actually consider them *responsible* for whatever further ugliness occurs after their involvement begins.
Administrator non-involvement is supposed to be advisable as a means to avoid possible conflicts of interest. Arbcom ruled that administrators should not use their sysop tools to further *their own position* in a content dispute. This was in my opinion a very wise choice of words, as it specifies exactly *what* is wrong with administrators using their sysop tools improperly.
But in fact, non-involvement is interpreted far more broadly by the community. Administrators are now applying the principle of non-involvement as a way of saving face -- and their necks, because even the appearance of impropriety can be fatal where the community in general tends to side against administrators and assumes that an actual conflict of interest is occurring whenever an administrator even appears to have one. The result is that the smart people don't get involved in the hard cases, which creates an atmosphere of peace, but causes article content to suffer dramatically -- and those admins who don't have that street sense, like me, run afoul of the rules and get disillusioned and quit. Witch-hunts that result out of conflict-of-interest complaints are only one of many issues where administrators have no support at all for what they are doing.
This is a cultural problem that we really could change by coming to defense of administrators who are the subject of witch-hunts. I'm equally to blame for this, because I fell to "first they came for the gypsies" syndrome -- I should have spoken up when it was Durova and others, but I didn't, and then they came for me. But I can tell you, and I hope you all take this feedback seriously because most disillusioned admins who lost interest in doing this hard work won't bother to tell you why they quietly left, or quietly stopped doing the hard ugly work that nobody wants to do, that there is no reason at all for an administrator to do the ugly work of dealing with the worst situations on Wikipedia if they cannot depend on community support.
I still strongly believe in this project and want to help. But only a fool would continue to work as an administrator in this climate, so I'm gone until I get some indication that the climate has changed.
- causa sui