Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
At 02:43 AM 5/31/2010, Charles Matthews wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
The Wikipedia community painted itself into a corner, and it's entirely unclear to me if it can find the exits, the paths to fix it.
As this discussion illustrates rather well, the argument "if you want to fix A, you'd have to start by fixing B (my pet gripe) first" is routinely deployed, making for an infinite regress in some cases, and in others the generation of suggestions that are rather clearly counterproductive for fixing A, whatever they may do for B. In the real world, if you want people to do thankless and time-consuming tasks for you for no money, and much criticism, you have to rely on something more than "be sure that you'll be told if we don't like you and what you do".
Eh? Is this coherent?
Who is the "you" who wants "people" to do thankless tasks?
What is the "pet gripe" in the discussion?
What is being discussed is "declining numbers of EN wiki admins," and how to address it. In that, surely it is appropriate and even necessary to examine the entire administrative structure, both how admin privileges are created and how they are removed.
So "A" here would be declining numbers. "B," then, must be the difficulty of removal, which leads to stronger standards for accepting admins in the first place, which leads to declining applications and denial of some applications that might have been just fine.
There is no evidence that there are declining applications because of fear of being criticized as an adminstrator, and the numbers of admin removals are trivial, so Charles is expressing a fear that is imaginary. If it were easier to gain tools and still difficult to lose them unless you disregard guidelines and consensus, there would be no loss of applications, there would be a gain. A large gain.
Actually, most people who don't apply as an admin just don't apply. They don't generate "evidence" one way or another. It is a perfectly sensible attitude for a well-adjusted Wikipedian getting on with article work not to want to be involved in admin work. There are editors on the site who make the lives of those who cross them miserable: and an admin has the choice of avoiding such editors, or getting in the way of abuse. My expressed fear is very far from "imaginary". You put your head above the parapet, you may get shot at, precisely for acting in good faith and according to your own judgement in awkward situations.
What follows that seems to be a non sequitur. It was not what I was arguing at all.
What I'm seeing here, indeed, is an illustration of the problem. The attitude that Charles expresses is clearly part of the problem, and Charles is suggesting no solutions but perhaps one of ridiculing and rejecting all the suggestions for change.
Ah, but this is in line: "Charles's attitude" becomes something that must be fixed before recruiting more people to stand for adminship. I was actually commenting on the thread, not the issue. We should examine this sort of solution, amongst others: identify WikiProjects with few admins relative to their activity, and suggest they should look for candidates.
Charles
These are issues that I've been thinking about for almost thirty years, and with Wikipedia, intensively, for almost three years specifically (and as to on-line process, for over twenty years). So my comments get long. If that's a problem for you, don't read it.
At 01:35 PM 5/31/2010, Charles Matthews wrote:
Actually, most people who don't apply as an admin just don't apply.
With ten million registered editors and a handful of RfAs, that's obvious.
They don't generate "evidence" one way or another. It is a perfectly sensible attitude for a well-adjusted Wikipedian getting on with article work not to want to be involved in admin work.
Sure. However, there is a minority who are *not* "well-adjusted" who would seek adminship for personal power. Some of these will have revealed this in their editing patterns, others will not. Some have been vanished editors who returned, knowing now how to behave so as to be approved. It's not at all difficult. And then there are others, probably the majority of problem admins, who started out with the best of intentions, but, quite naturally, developed their own idea of what is best for an "encyclopedia." That idea isn't the problem, it is when the admin starts using tools to enforce it and control others to that *personal* end. Definitely, it's hard to tell this apart from "enforcing" consensus. However, one difference is that genuine consensus doesn't need personal enforcement. When an admin starts to think of himself herself as the lone stopgap against a wave of POV-pushing and fancruft, for example, there is a sign that it's not consensus being enforced, but a personal view.
If the administrative community were not so ready to circle the wagons to defend individual administrators against charges of abuse, almost knee-jerk, just because they are administrators, and if "sactions" on administrators could be efficiently determined that would not toss out the baby with the bathwater, it wouldn't be such a problem. How many times has the community effectively told an administrator to avoid blocked a certain set of editors or using tools in a certain area? ArbComm does it, but that's a high-level remedy and unworkable, it should be reserved for cases where there is a genuine split in the community.
There are editors on the site who make the lives of those who cross them miserable: and an admin has the choice of avoiding such editors, or getting in the way of abuse.
And there are administrators who do this even more effectively. I find it difficult to understand how an "editor" or even an administrator on the site could make my life "miserable." An admin can block me, and that has no power over my "life." Genuine off-wiki harassment, sure, but often what has passed for that has been mere criticism. To "make the life of an administrator miserable," on-wiki, requires visible actions. Why would we assume that this would be invisible, but the complaints against the admin would be visible?
One of the problems is that issues get linked, instead of being resolved separately, even though separation is possible. Admin A blocks editor B abusively. B complains, and then what is considered is if B was violating guidelines, not whether or not the block was abusive. If editor B was violating behavioral guidelines, B's behavior should be examined through normal process for that, and blocking is only a temporarily protective measure. An abusive block is not an "incorrect" block, it is one that is done in a disruptive way, most commonly because the admin is actually involved in a dispute with the editor. For one side of a dispute to block the other side is disruptive and, indeed, it creates enemies, and sometimes causes whole factions to beging fighting. Incorrect blocks can be easily fixed. It's abusive blocks that are the problem.
My expressed fear is very far from "imaginary". You put your head above the parapet, you may get shot at, precisely for acting in good faith and according to your own judgement in awkward situations.
Sure. That's true everywhere in life. We expect administrators to understand how to use their tools without involvement. If they fail, they should be corrected. If they refuse to accept the correction, or show that they don't understand it, and are therefore likely to be disruptive in their use of tools, then the tools should be removed. General wiki principles would make this easy, with escalation to broader consideration when conflict persists.
One of the blatant manifestations of the problem is that there are administrators who have openly argued against recusal policy, and who have defended administrators who clearly violated it, and, even worse, who have attacked editors who challenged recusal failure. Those are administrators who are violating community consensus and ArbComm decisions, which have many times confirmed recusal policy, and they cannot be expected to voluntarily abstain from such violations. Therefore their tools should be subject to suspension until they assure the community that they will respect recusal policy, which is *essential* for a neutral project, and neutrality is a fundamental policy.
Some of these same administrators have also argued against neutrality policy and against the concept and value of consensus. Again, there is an obvious problem. These arguments and the position behind them is a minority position on Wikipedia, and it seems that the minority becomes smaller as a percentage with the size of the discussion (whereas I've seen it appear as a two-thirds majority or even higher in relatively isolated discussions). I.e., it's a position found preferentially among an active core, and I can suspect that Wikipedia process overall has been abusive enough that the active core has been filtered so that *actually neutral* editors have been leaving, frustrated.
Bad administrators isn't the essence of the Wikipedia problem. Poor process is. The adhocracy that was set up was misleading, because it was highly efficient at generating vast amounts of content that -- sort of -- seemed to improve itself. It did improve itself, but often not in areas where there is significant controversy in the real world. "Neutrality" is not "majority point of view," but even to recognise a majority point of view and to distinguish it from neutrality can require some sympathy for minority points of view. The only solution I see is full-blown consensus process, but most Wikipedia editors have no real experience with that, and it's not encouraged, because it requires a *lot* of discussion, in the real world.
I've suggested, then, that consensus be formed, tentatively, off-wiki, through voluntary participation, and then imported on-wiki for final confirmation that it really represents consensus (or it's rejected, goes back for more negotiation). That is like committee process. You'd think it might be done on-wiki, and, indeed it could, except that there are major elements that strongly oppose the kinds of discussion that are necessary. They can be voluminous, but key would be that they would take place in a deliberative environment, where actual decisions get made and are modified with the goal of increasing consensus. This isn't mere "discussion," and merely discussion can actually poison it. It generally takes some kind of facilitation by someone skilled at that.
What follows that seems to be a non sequitur. It was not what I was arguing at all.
What I'm seeing here, indeed, is an illustration of the problem. The attitude that Charles expresses is clearly part of the problem, and Charles is suggesting no solutions but perhaps one of ridiculing and rejecting all the suggestions for change.
That was a personal judgment, and the core of it was "suggesting no solutions." If Charles is suggesting solutions, fine. What are they? Now, I do see one below, so I was incorrect. I'll get to that.
Ah, but this is in line: "Charles's attitude" becomes something that must be fixed before recruiting more people to stand for adminship.
No, Charles is just one person. And it is not the province of Wikipedia, the Wikipedia community, nor myself, to "fix Charles's attitude. Charles does not need to change for more people to be recruited, unless, somehow, Charles is in charge of Wikipedia. Is he? (He isn't claiming to be, but there can be a subtle "we" vs "they" which arises, where "we" supposedly represents the community, in the mind of a writer, and the writer identifies with it, and "they" is the others, the outsiders, the interlopers, the people who don't understand, the disruptive.
But this attitude, shared by many, is part of the problem. Whose problem? Well, it's the community's problem and the foundation's problem, and it's up to those who have the problem to fix it. But the only one who can fix Charles's attitude is Charles. It cannot be coerced, period. One of the errors that ArbComm has made is to assume that it can modify an editor's attitude by sanctioning the editor. And it's shocked, shocked, when it doesn't work. Only someone seriously attached to editing Wikipedia can be coerced in that way. I.e, the very people that, in fact, might be harming the project. The attitude itself won't be changed, but the person will pretend compliance in order not to be blocked, so they can continue their "important work." It's important because they are attached. Sometimes, of course, their attachment is merely to creating things of beauty, and it's helpful. I'm not condemning these people!
I was actually commenting on the thread, not the issue. We should examine this sort of solution, amongst others: identify WikiProjects with few admins relative to their activity, and suggest they should look for candidates.
That's fine, and, in fact, I agree with it. But it is only part of the solution. Given this, I apoligize for the implication that Charles was not suggesting solutions. On the other hand, my observation is that many Wikiprojects are completely dead. They can't seem to get active participants, much less people willing to stand, under present conditions, for adminship.
I see many, many signs that the project is in serious decline. If flagged revisions is widely adopted and used for articles, it is possible that the encyclopedia can still be maintained with far fewer editors active. But, then, the possibility of these editors being biased increases.
Generally, I suggesting backing up and starting to look at the *whole problem.* How can a neutral and complete encyclopedia be created and maintained? We have much experience from what has come down. Rationally, this could allow us to come up with a much better design than came together like Topsy when Wikipedia was founded and grew. But not if those elements who are preferentially empowered under the present structure do what such elements always do in organizations like Wikipedia: act to preserve their own power. That isn't simply "power hunger," there is a genuine "good faith" belief behind much of it, a belief that, as the most active participants, they know best. It is a classic problem. Solutions to that problem have been my long-term interest, as some of you may know. There are solutions, but I've never seen them arise in a community that has become established. They either muddle along or they collapse, but, either way, they are routinely far less effective than they would be with better structure. Only if a community is founded by people who understand how to create structure that will function with genuine consensus in the long term, have I seen it accomplished. Those people are effectively creating something greater than their own individual opinions.
With Wikipedia, though, if the problem of efficiently finding consensus isn't resolved, it has failed in its primary goal. It may have an encyclopedia, all right, but it won't be neutral.
I'm completely unconvinced that the Wikipedia community is capable of addressing the problems. I differ from many others at Wikipedia Review, though, in that I'm willing to try, to describe the problem and advocate solutions. I don't do that on Wikipedia any more, because it is clearly unwelcome and the very effort leads to sanctions. If I thought, however, that advocacy would be effective there, I'd do it, because I don't care about sanctions at all. I just don't want to waste my time.