Parker Peters wrote:
On 2/21/07, Ron Ritzman ritzman@gmail.com wrote:
On 2/21/07, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
When you (or anybody) write like this, I have to grit my teeth and make a strong effort to find the useful content that lies behind the contempt and acid words. If your goal is to get people to take your concerns seriously, there are more effective ways to go about things.
I think this essay on meta is relevant...
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_a_dick
From the essay...
"Being right about an issue does not mean you're not being a dick yourself! Dicks can be right — but they're still dicks; if there's something in what they say that is worth hearing, it goes unheard, because no one likes listening to dicks, no matter how right they are."
If more administrators would pay attention to this in the first place, then we wouldn't have problems with abusive administrators.
The problem is, way too many administrators feel they are free to be dicks because of their position, and then kick other people around for responding in kind.
Peter,
I think that you're over-stating the problem...not just in this post but in most of your posts. Yes, the ranks of the admins are not free from "dickism", and in a sense, any dickism is too much. But I am convinced that the vast majority of the admins are well-meaning, reasonable, conscientious contributors.
However, the more I think about the way interactions take place on Wikipedia, the more I am convinced that the asymmetry in power and experience between an admin and a typical editor results in vastly different perspectives on the same actions. What seems (and in fact is) reasonable to an admin or an experienced user, can seem to be (and in fact is) a demonstration of admin "dickism" to a newbie.
Without abandoning the effort to find and appropriately deal with the admins who have (for whatever reason) run amuck, let's admit that those admins are the minority.