On 11/23/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
I have to correct a fundamental misconception here. The cabal (TINC) has no vendetta. The admin community has a job to do, and that job includes protecting editors from being harassed and threatened, protecting Wikipedia form being vandalised and protecting the content from being biased by people aggressively pushing an agenda.
All of those are more or less noble goals, but it can be argued as to how they interact with the ultimate intent of the project. The point that Dan T. and I have made over and over is that the zeal in pursuing these people is itself disruptive and has resulted in a string of incidents where the admins have acted contrary to the interests of the *encyclopedia* in their deference to (some, maybe most) of its contributors.
What you call a misconception, I call a failure on your part to see some parts of the picture. Indeed, a great deal of the heat produced whenever someone tries to reintroduce BADSITES comes from two inevitable responses from the adminstrator/Cabal faction. Inevitably ED and WR are brought up, and inevitably someone in The Cabal insinuates if not states that one of the opponents is working for those sites. For those of us who came in after the original MONGO case, it seems absurdly disproportionate. Stomping out Jon Aubrey's accounts is one thing. A quick tour through some of them leads me to the conclusion that one needs to rule against multiple identities to justify banning them. What is more striking is what appears to me to be an inability or refusal to distinguish between "erroneous" positions and the way they are presented. Anyone who appears and argues against BADSITES is presumed by The Cabal of having a *political* relationship to the WR/ED people and is thus attacked for who they are presumed to be. My feeling is that if the WR people appear in disguise and present reasonable arguments, I don't care who they are; and if the admins make dubious arguments, I don't care that they are admins. Heck, if Joe Freshman makes a good argument on his first edit in Wikipedia, that's fine with me too. But instead, the perniciousness with which the assumption of association with Certain Bad Guys leads me to conclude that there is a vendetta, even if those pursuing it don't believe it.
Nobody held a gun to JB196's head and forced him to create over 500 sockpuppets, vandalise hundreds of articles, subvert an admin and pursue a vendetta against Wikipedia in general.
Well, and nobody put a gun to WIll Beback's head and made him vandalize every article using TNH as a reference either. Either way, the phrase "put a gun to his head" is excessive; and besides, as long as it's phrased in these "us vs. the lawless them", every kind of excess or for that matter self-serving abuse by admins is authorized. There are a lot of "thin blue line" dramas, and there are a lot of "cop gone bad" dramas too. If we can bring this back to earth and accept the possibility that Admins are tempted to be overzealous, and that groups of admins are tempted to informally form into a faction tempted into valuing self-defense over proportionality, I think the drama could be brought to an end.
Part of my perspective on this is that in being active on the internet back before it even existed as such, I've been put through a lot of invective. I accept that posting in public makes one a target, and I don't accept guarantees to anonymity to the degree that BADSITES proposed because they are promises that cannot be kept. It's already annoying enough to have POV-pushers and random jerks damaging the articles, that I also have to ride herd on the policy-cops damaging articles and discussions too.