On 11/23/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman(a)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.