On 12 September 2012 16:50, Matthew Jacobs sxeptomaniac@gmail.com wrote:
Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2012 17:34:26 +0100 From: Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] VIP Treatment
On 11 September 2012 17:29, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:
It seems I have not posed this as a question. The question is how could we better handle VIP subjects who give us feedback, attempt to edit either themselves or through an agent, or contact OTRS?
For example, could we assign some diplomatic people to handle such situations, I've noticed CBS does that. It's a skill.
We have assigned diplomatic people to handle such situations - they're the OTRS volunteers. The problem is how we make sure people get directed to OTRS.
One problem with that approach is that OTRS is not seen as representative of WP; the administrators are. If the admins are widely perceived as being dicks (probably because way to many of them behave like dicks a large portion of the time), then OTRS is going to continue to be ineffective at changing the perception of WP as unfriendly and more concerned with protecting territory than having accurate information.
It's certainly easy to draw conclusions if you include them in the premises of the argument.
Even more fundamentally, WP admins are not accountable for doing a good job, only avoiding doing a bad one. Until that changes, most admins have little incentive to be anything beyond mediocre. Sure, I believe they generally mean well, but if they think they're right, why shouldn't they be rude and drive off the annoying editor who says they're wrong, rather than waste a bunch of time trying to be helpful and diplomatic. They can be as rude and territorial as they want, provided they don't cross the line into "abusing the tools", and no-one will punish them, so why should they bother politely pointing someone to OTRS, much less spend time and effort trying to be diplomatic themselves?
Ditto.
Charles