geni wrote:
Of course. However AFD structure limits it to a degree since the person is at most your oponent for 5 days.
Hence the observable lack of a concerted effort to get rid of Tony Sidaway. Oh, wait ...
- d.
On 11/8/05, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Hence the observable lack of a concerted effort to get rid of Tony Sidaway. Oh, wait ...
- d.
It doesn't appear to have worked and he appears to have made it to admin so it can't have been that sucessful. Anyway most of the issues raised in the RFC have to do with him failing to follow AFD practice rather than any individual cases.
-- geni
From: geni geniice@gmail.com
On 11/8/05, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Hence the observable lack of a concerted effort to get rid of Tony Sidaway. Oh, wait ...
- d.
It doesn't appear to have worked and he appears to have made it to admin so it can't have been that sucessful. Anyway most of the issues raised in the RFC have to do with him failing to follow AFD practice rather than any individual cases.
As much as I'm sure we'd all like to have another debate about just how completely broken/absolutely perfect AfD is, I think there are far more serious issues that are generally ignored. In particular, Wikipedia's dispute resolution processes are in sorry shape.
Mediation is intermittent at best, and (from what I can tell) almost never achieves a positive outcome, but that's nothing compared to RfC.
Article RfCs are numerous, and rarely attract the attention of more than one or two outside editors. Frequently they attract no outside interest at all.
User RfCs are a mess - in theory they are a platform for addressing and solving community issues. In practice, they are often venues for warring camps to air grievances, and for certain notorious individuals (who feel they don't get enough attention) to use as soapboxes for their own speechifying (i.e. yet another "outside view"). Obvious trolling is rarely addressed - the complainants outline their case, and a dozen or so regular editors vote in support. The troll provides a lengthy response, and three or four troll buddies/generall trolls/people with grievances against the complainant line up and vote in support of him, or add another "outside view" that has little to do with the case at hand, and is mostly about their own issues with the complainants. Nothing changes, and everyone goes away bitter.
The "toxicity" of AfD is nothing compared to what you find at RfC, and in the end it's often only a precursor to RfAR, just a perfunctory "tick-box" on the "attempted previous dispute resolution" form.
Jay.
On 11/8/05, JAY JG jayjg@hotmail.com wrote:
Mediation is intermittent at best, and (from what I can tell) almost never achieves a positive outcome, but that's nothing compared to RfC.
Mediation is more successful than you may realize, in part because successful mediations often occur in relative obscurity. A problem that once existed went away, without an RfC or RfAr being filed; as a result, only the editors involved in the dispute know about the mediation or the resolution, and they often don't talk much about it.
Note that I'm specifically not referring to mediation under the auspices of the Mediation Committee, which has, indeed, been notoriously unreliable. I'm referring more to informal mediations conducted by a variety of informal mediators who get involved via talk pages, IRC, IM, email, and any number of other methods to settle disagreements between editors amicably. I've done at least a dozen such mediations (only one since being appointed to ArbCom, though) and most of them have been at least moderately successful. The more public ones are the ones that have failed, usually because by the time the dispute is loud enough to be noticeable generally, the parties are too pissed at one another to ever settle their dispute. Many mediations merely consist of discovering an edit war and, instead of doling out punitive blocks (as so many admins on Wikipedia are wont to do), diagnosing the problem, talking to the users in question, and resolving the dispute. Often it's not hard to do this, but most of our admins never try. It's so much easier just to go "3RR, block block block".
Article RfCs are numerous, and rarely attract the attention of more than one or two outside editors. Frequently they attract no outside interest at all.
Indeed. I've only rarely seen article RfCs attract significant attention. Shameful, since articles are what Wikipedia is supposed to be all about. There are too many people who are part of Wikipedia for the community, instead of for the encyclopedia.
User RfCs are a mess - in theory they are a platform for addressing and solving community issues. In practice, they are often venues for warring camps to air grievances, and for certain notorious individuals (who feel they don't get enough attention) to use as soapboxes for their own speechifying (i.e. yet another "outside view"). Obvious trolling is rarely addressed - the complainants outline their case, and a dozen or so regular editors vote in support. The troll provides a lengthy response, and three or four troll buddies/generall trolls/people with grievances against the complainant line up and vote in support of him, or add another "outside view" that has little to do with the case at hand, and is mostly about their own issues with the complainants. Nothing changes, and everyone goes away bitter.
This definitely describes several of the RfC's I've been involved in in some way lately. I agree that this serves no purpose. I'm also tired of hearing editors state "In my RfC my opinion got more endorsements than yours did, therefore I won and you must shut up." (Yes, I've heard things like this said. It's stupid.) RfC is emphatically not supposed to be a popularity contest, although I must admit it has turned into one. Of course, the same can be said of RfA/RfB.
Kelly
On 11/8/05, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
Indeed. I've only rarely seen article RfCs attract significant attention. Shameful, since articles are what Wikipedia is supposed to be all about. There are too many people who are part of Wikipedia for the community, instead of for the encyclopedia.
Part of the problem is that many of the subjects under disspute are somewhat specialised. I cheack out the science section from time to time but most of the time I don't really know enough about the subject to say anything.
-- geni
I just want to mention that while I usually do not, in this case I find myself agreeing w the 2 above arbiters, altho regarding mediation I feel Kelly is spot on, that informal mediation works far better than Mediation Commitee mediation, which often, in my experience, involves nothing more than a link to a page where the 2 users are expected to sort things out on their own, w no formal structure or assistance from the mediation commitee.
We need MC reform as well as RFA reform as well as RFC reform as well as AFD reform... pretty much all of the wikipedia name space process's need work. Not to give too many pats on the back, but the system that currently seems to be working best is ArbCom...
Jack (Sam Spade)
On 11/8/05, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/8/05, JAY JG jayjg@hotmail.com wrote:
Mediation is intermittent at best, and (from what I can tell) almost never achieves a positive outcome, but that's nothing compared to RfC.
Mediation is more successful than you may realize, in part because successful mediations often occur in relative obscurity. A problem that once existed went away, without an RfC or RfAr being filed; as a result, only the editors involved in the dispute know about the mediation or the resolution, and they often don't talk much about it.
Note that I'm specifically not referring to mediation under the auspices of the Mediation Committee, which has, indeed, been notoriously unreliable. I'm referring more to informal mediations conducted by a variety of informal mediators who get involved via talk pages, IRC, IM, email, and any number of other methods to settle disagreements between editors amicably. I've done at least a dozen such mediations (only one since being appointed to ArbCom, though) and most of them have been at least moderately successful. The more public ones are the ones that have failed, usually because by the time the dispute is loud enough to be noticeable generally, the parties are too pissed at one another to ever settle their dispute. Many mediations merely consist of discovering an edit war and, instead of doling out punitive blocks (as so many admins on Wikipedia are wont to do), diagnosing the problem, talking to the users in question, and resolving the dispute. Often it's not hard to do this, but most of our admins never try. It's so much easier just to go "3RR, block block block".
Article RfCs are numerous, and rarely attract the attention of more than one or two outside editors. Frequently they attract no outside interest at all.
Indeed. I've only rarely seen article RfCs attract significant attention. Shameful, since articles are what Wikipedia is supposed to be all about. There are too many people who are part of Wikipedia for the community, instead of for the encyclopedia.
User RfCs are a mess - in theory they are a platform for addressing and solving community issues. In practice, they are often venues for warring camps to air grievances, and for certain notorious individuals (who feel they don't get enough attention) to use as soapboxes for their own speechifying (i.e. yet another "outside view"). Obvious trolling is rarely addressed - the complainants outline their case, and a dozen or so regular editors vote in support. The troll provides a lengthy response, and three or four troll buddies/generall trolls/people with grievances against the complainant line up and vote in support of him, or add another "outside view" that has little to do with the case at hand, and is mostly about their own issues with the complainants. Nothing changes, and everyone goes away bitter.
This definitely describes several of the RfC's I've been involved in in some way lately. I agree that this serves no purpose. I'm also tired of hearing editors state "In my RfC my opinion got more endorsements than yours did, therefore I won and you must shut up." (Yes, I've heard things like this said. It's stupid.) RfC is emphatically not supposed to be a popularity contest, although I must admit it has turned into one. Of course, the same can be said of RfA/RfB.
Kelly _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 11/8/05, Jack Lynch jack.i.lynch@gmail.com wrote:
We need MC reform as well as RFA reform as well as RFC reform as well as AFD reform... pretty much all of the wikipedia name space process's need work. Not to give too many pats on the back, but the system that currently seems to be working best is ArbCom...
Jack (Sam Spade)
Then again look at the speed with which both RFC and RFA delt with the Stevertigo issue compared to arcom. On the other can lack of speed has never really been given as a downside of mob justice.
-- geni
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geni wrote:
On 11/8/05, Jack Lynch jack.i.lynch@gmail.com wrote:
We need MC reform as well as RFA reform as well as RFC reform as well as AFD reform... pretty much all of the wikipedia name space process's need work. Not to give too many pats on the back, but the system that currently seems to be working best is ArbCom...
Jack (Sam Spade)
Then again look at the speed with which both RFC and RFA delt with the Stevertigo issue compared to arcom. On the other can lack of speed has never really been given as a downside of mob justice.
I hereby propose renaming [[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion]] to [[Wikipedia:Article mobbing]].
- -- Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia "We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
On 11/9/05, Alphax alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
I hereby propose renaming [[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion]] to [[Wikipedia:Article mobbing]].
Lynching might be more correct. Certianly we could rename CSD to [[wikipedia:Vigilante code]]
-- geni
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JAY JG wrote: <snip>
User RfCs are a mess - in theory they are a platform for addressing and solving community issues. In practice, they are often venues for warring camps to air grievances, and for certain notorious individuals (who feel they don't get enough attention) to use as soapboxes for their own speechifying (i.e. yet another "outside view"). Obvious trolling is rarely addressed - the complainants outline their case, and a dozen or so regular editors vote in support. The troll provides a lengthy response, and three or four troll buddies/generall trolls/people with grievances against the complainant line up and vote in support of him, or add another "outside view" that has little to do with the case at hand, and is mostly about their own issues with the complainants. Nothing changes, and everyone goes away bitter.
The "toxicity" of AfD is nothing compared to what you find at RfC, and in the end it's often only a precursor to RfAR, just a perfunctory "tick-box" on the "attempted previous dispute resolution" form.
Having tried to cross AfD with RFC, I can only agree with you. Someone should take all the previous RFCs and publish an essay on Wikisource entitled "A study on groupthink in online communities".
- -- Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia "We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
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Chris Jenkinson wrote:
Alphax wrote:
Having tried to cross AfD with RFC, I can only agree with you. Someone should take all the previous RFCs and publish an essay on Wikisource entitled "A study on groupthink in online communities".
I'm filing an RFC against Alphax unless he does it!
Hey, I'm an engineer(ing student), not a sociologist! :)
- -- Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia "We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales