The behaviour of three people in driving me out of adminship at en:wikisource has left me bitterly disappointed with and deeply offended by the length to which some will go to rid themselves of someone whom they personally dislike. I cannot but view their efforts as anything but a series of concerted personal attacks. The details can be found at http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Administrators/Archives/Eclecticol… The process began in the context of an annual confirmation at Wikisource. John Vandenberg began stirring the pot with a series of five claims which were all easily refuted. He later commented:"there is no expectation that evidence is provided here, nor is there a requirement to have attempted to "fix" the admin conduct prior to the vote of confidence." This is clear hostility to any peaceful resolution. Pathoschild did not hesitate to distort and exaggerate individual incidents to suit his purposes. If I call a certain type of edit "useless", it can hardly be construed as a comment about the person. When he went so far as to say that I was belittling others, that was a bald-faced lie. His comment, "Of course he can reapply at any time, but I'll likely object then for the same reasons," tells me that he is willing to hold on to his grudges indefinitely. Although, to his credit, Thomas V did not cast a vote because his en:wikisource activities have recently been sparse, that did not prevent him from dragging in old settled issues pre-dating the division of Wikisource into separate domains. He did not hesitate to attack two individuals who supported my continued adminship. For one he complained that his support was based entirely on the way I looked in a picture of me taken at a Portland meetup. There was no doubt more to the IRC conversation than that, but I am not privy to how those behind-the-scenes conversations may have influenced opinions. The grudges with the latter two individuals have been ongoing for a long time, and in the past year I have been more than happy to keep my contact with them to a minimum. I certainly have not had the energy to wantonly dig up dirt on them when their confirmations came up. The underlying issues for the complaints against me would be laughable in certain other projects. NPOV issues are fairly uncommon in Wikisource; persistent copyvios are not an issue; no questions of edit-warring are involved. Much of the problems had to do with cleaning up backlog, or differing views about how articles should be named, or banners on an author page to say that we had no works by that author even though that fact was already obvious because all the links were red. I have also had strong differences with the more technically minded people (including all three named above) over technical solutions and how we use templates. I happen to believe that an overuse of such techniques will drive away desperately needed help from non-technical people, and that some of the more rigid structures actually hinder our ability to become a value-added project. I have no compunctions about expressing my visions forcefully, or allowing for multiple solutions to a problem without feeling obliged to choose one as superior. If one is indeed superior it will eventually prevail without being forced. Being an admin should not prevent anyone from strongly arguing views that are different from those that currently prevail, and the fear that those tools may be taken away should not serve to intimidate admins away from taking unpopular actions. Proceeding with fairness and integrity is more important than popularity, and if it means that my actions will occasionally be reversed I'm not too worried about that I have participated in these communities for seven years already, and my loyalty to their success is beyond question. I was active on the original Wikisource from the day that it opened, and have always maintained a vision for that project that goes far beyond the current trends. In the course of the confirmations I did express my willingness to consider mediation, but that received no response at all. The Wikisource community is too small to have a regular arbitration or appeal process, and seeking a review from the same people who drove the tyranny of the majority is not likely to be successful. They are not in a position to take a fresh unbiased approach to the matter. I would appreciate it if someone could give a fresh look at this, and perhaps provide a degree of mediation. Ec _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l