On 1/4/06, Chris Jenkinson chris@starglade.org wrote:
jayjg wrote:
I'm sure a small number of people who were aware of the specific
incidents
knew which individual I was referring to, but that's hardly the
point. Most
of these discussions involve a lot of hand-waving arguments, people
making
claims with no concrete examples. Rather than doing the same, I
provided a
live and relevant example of the issues I was raising. And to remind everyone, the issue raised was not about whether or not one particular
admin
was behaving badly, but more broadly whether people are becoming
involved in
Wikipedia (and even becoming admins) without any familiarity with its
norms
or committment to its goals. When one notices that an administrator is behaving quite badly, and then realizes that fewer than 1/4 of his edits
are
actually to articles, and that he has as many edits to his user page as
he
has to all encyclopedia articles combined, these issues are highlighted starkly.
Maybe he's a bad admin, he certainly gets involved right in the thick of the latest and greatest controversy on Wikipedia, but he also received 53 support votes on his RFA, including a number of high-profile editors who do not normally vote or typically vote oppose. And despite all the controversy he's in recently, he still managed to become elected to one of Esperanza's positions with 19 votes. I don't want to get into some kind of psychological analysis of everyone's voting habits, but I believe if someone is unsuitable then they would never get as many votes as he has.
Yes, maybe he hasn't been editing the article space enough. I probably don't edit the article namespace enough either. But if what he is doing is building friendships and welcoming people to Wikipedia, then I don't see what he is doing as a problem. People are more likely to contribute if they feel happy here and I believe his actions are helping in this area. He isn't directly building the encyclopaedia, but he's helping get others to build it.
You seem to know him well. Since you've decided to defend him, tell me, when he insists that "fair use" images can be used on Userboxes, and that attempts to delete them are attempts by "the mob" to enforce "copyright paranoia" and "wiki-law" that have "no basis in reality", and then edit wars both the policy pages which forbid it, and those who delete the images from the userboxes, is he helping others build the encyclopedia?
Jay.