Message: 4 Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2005 07:42:52 EDT From: Bruynsf@cs.com Subject: [WikiEN-l] Zoe's Abuse of Power as a Sysop To: wikien-l@wikipedia.org Message-ID: 216.871626d.304edabc@cs.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Zoe, a Sysop on Wikipedia, has seriously abused her position of authority and responsibility at my expense. ... In clear violation of the "assume good faith" Wikipedia policy, however,
That's right. There are a long trail of contributors who have found that autocratic admins never assume good faith, they assume the axiomatic bad of whatever you are doing in an article and axiomatic good of their view against it. Even when they punish only one side of a 2-sided fight over links, for "link spam", when both sides have behaved identically. It's only their own good faith that they demand to have assumed.
Zoe sent me an official warning accusing me of deliberate vandalism. I responded by telling her that I would seek arbitration if she continued to lodge such accusations against me. She, in turn, blocked me from Wikipedia and claimed that my editing problems could not possibly have been accidental (Again, See: User Talk: Moriori). Her official reasons for blocking me were the vandalism that I never committed and my warnings that I would seek arbitration, which she termed "threats". Furthermore, finding that I could not reach the administrative noticeboard to plead my case and not having an individual e-mail address, I resorted to attempting to start new accounts,
That's right, you weren't spamming or trying to break rules, you were trying to get around an unfairness to access a page that in name you are entitled to use!! You are frustrated by the extreme corruption that a block imposed arbitrarily by 1 person blocks your access to the community issues pages where you could contest it and whatever issue caused it.
"I have a very low opinion of spammers. Besides, I'm in the middle of several brush fires and am quite irritable right now." (User talk: Dragons flight). This clearly indicates that her abusive behavior towards me is unprofessional and irresponsible and that she allows her moods to determine her decisions in her very important role as a sysop, which I assert to be unacceptable.
Yes, it does.
Message: 8 Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2005 12:51:31 -0500 From: Guettarda guettarda@gmail.com Subject: [WikiEN-l] Zoe's Abuse of Power as a Sysop To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@wikipedia.org Message-ID: 47683e9605090610511e5acbf5@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Felix
You really need to look at how you address people and address conflict. Your complaint about Moriori was posted, verbatim, in dozens of separate places. Posting the same message in a whole lot of places is considered spamming.
Isn't it also considered doing his best to resolve his issue by maximising its reach in the community and the feedback it can get?
Other users do not constitute "official channels",
That proves it unfair that blocks block use of the various types of dispute-res page.
This is a community, not a structured bureacracy. Yelling at people never helps. You say that when you told Zoe that you would "seek arbitration" she called it a "threat". It is a threat.
Now, this is key. If you announce you are going to try to stand up for yourself, in terms of the rules indeed, in any way at all, - that counts as a threat. But when an admin threatens you with ban unless you kowtow to his POV over an article, that doesn't count as a threat. That is this project exploded, once and for all.
Creating new accounts to bypass a block is strictly forbidden. What's the point of blocking someone for misconduct if they can just come back under a new name? You have asked that "punitive action" be taken against Zoe, but Inserting hard returns into people's comments is considered vandalism.
What are "hard returns"?
If you had come here and pleaded your case,
PLEADED!! PLEADED!!!! Listen to this.
accepted responsibility for what you had done wrong,
He didn't think he had done anything wrong. In the real world you don't confess unproved guilt as the first round of "pleading" to make anything happen at all.
Your actions met the definitions of "vandalism" and "spamming", even if you did not intend them to.
So did he know they did? The definitions aren't made obvious on a level plane to everyone, as per the open policy that all rules are warpable in the project's interests.
And a word to the wise - people who want to get into vendettas should really start with an easier target than Raul/Mark. Other than Jimbo and the Stewards, I dount there is anyone more powerful/influential in En.
This is a clear statement that differences of personal influence affect the outcomes of cases. Is that any basis for presenting the public with written information?
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Maurice - please go back and look through the whole issue, if you are interested in what really went on. Read some of the posts - not just between Felix and Zoe, but also Moriori, Raul, Dunc, Dmcdevit, Flcelloguy, WP:AN... Felix may or may not have had a point, but he went about it in such a way that if Zoe didn't block him, someone else would have. The purpose of the project is to write an encyclopaedia. We are all volunteers here. No one is getting paid. If someone's main purpose is to get recompense for a past wrong, to extract apologies from Moriori and Raul, to tell El_C that his poem on his user page is obscene... and to get upset when Dunc fails to address his complaint about DESpeigel's post to his (Felix's) user page... We have (foolishly?) donated thousands of hours to this project. With any troublesome user, you need to consider two things - does the user's value to the project outweigh the trouble of dealing with them, and does the cost (to the community) of an admin acting in the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law outweigh the benefit of a "simple" solution. Dictatorship would kill Wikipedia. Having every problem wind its way sloooooooowly through a hidebound bureaucracy would do so too.
Anyway, creating sockpuppets to evade a block is forbidden. That should be apparent to anyone. Otherwise a block is meaningless.
Ian