On Tue, 12 Dec 2006 13:24:39 -0500, Rob gamaliel8@gmail.com wrote:
many in Mongo's corner are just as bad if not worse than the 9/11 truth crowd, and so it looks more like a troll gang fight than a bunch of trolls attacking a bunch of saintly editors.
I don't think either side comes out of these wars smelling of roses.
It is true, though, that Wikipedia is now almost certainly the single most attractive venue for pushers of lunatic theories, and the amount of this crap is only going to increase. Look at the months we spent arguing on whether Steve Jones could be called a conspiracy theorist. Sometimes there is no sanity clause...
This is not an "ArbCom is broken" kind of thing, I suspect that ArbCom have not enjoyed desysopping MONGO any more than he has enjoyed being the Aunt Sally for every fuckwit in Christendom these last six months, but *something* is broken, and it's most likely the internal support and balance mechanism for admins.
I was running for ArbCom, but Cryptic pointed out that I am going down this path myself - I think "deals poorly with trolls" was his comment - and he's absolutely right, so I withdrew. Anyone *can* deal with trolls, but doing that, and little else, albeit by one's own choice, for months at a time, and then having it intrude on one's private life as happened to MONGO - that is not a good place to be. The MONGO situation should never have got to this point. Never. The only problem is, the Truthers and other such lowlifes thrive on drama and the oxygen of publicity. It is almost impossible to quietly get rid of them because they won't go quietly, and as soon as our backs are turned they are back because they need us every bit as much as we don't need them. They are malicious and vile, and one cannot blame anybody who chooses to give them a wide berth. Having decided to do so, we need to decide how we are going to help the brave few who defend the breach.
It seems to me that a fairly small proportion of admins do the lion's share of the work defending the project against lunatic fringes. That work can be utterly destructive to the individual's ability to maintain perspective. I wish I had some idea how to fix it. We are well set up for dealing with cluelessness and brainless vandalism, but we are much less sure I think of how to deal with determined, well-organised and intelligent groups determined to use the project for their own ends. And when they are also both malicious and resourceful, we have a real problem.
Guy (JzG)