[Foundation-l] [Wikipedia-l] One week later and I am still blocked, nobody is doing a fucking thing

[GerardM]

Hoi,
The notion of the sysops having too much power, is always seen from the
outside. From the inside you will notice that the more power you seem to
have the more careful you have to be when you wield it. One great strategy
with people who complain is to make them part of the "establishment", this
allows them to do "better". This is when the people still on the outside
start to say that "power corrupts ...". The Dutch Wikipedia has on occasion
added large groups of people to the rank of admin to prove that there is no
such thing as a cabal. With hind sight is it obvious that this does not
work.

With the removal of the possibility of the use of proxies, it becomes more
difficult to do nefarious deeds like sock puppetry. This is in and of itself
a good thing. It will hopefully calm down our community.

Where you say assume good faith, you definitely will find in the Dutch
community that people assume that with no indications to the contrary the
other party means well. There are however people who in word and deed
demonstrate that there are indications that they do not mean well. When
abuse has to be accepted because someone is "angry" and when this right of
being angry is reserved to them then this is to much to ask from me and from
many others.

Where Andre says that his opinion is irrelevant because he is no sysop, I do
disagree strongly. I know that many people will, and do listen when he makes
his point. I know that I do.. then again I am no nl.wikipedia sysop either.
I do know that I have my contacts in the Dutch community and I may make a
point and this occasionally does have its consequences.

There are many admins in the nl.wikipedia and as a group they are very
diverse. You can not assume that they all play the same role, you cannot
assume that one can be exchanged for another. There are people who are doing
loads of technical stuff, there are those who do more community stuff. They
all play their personal role. They are also all volunteers. When someone
wants to force his way by any means, you will find that people just turn
off. At such a moment, the relations are disturbed. For these relations to
improve they do need to heal and, this is a process that requires time.

In the past Waerth has threatened to do things that were incompatible with
the role that he played in the WMF. As a consequence he is no longer a
steward nor is he a sysop. This time he explicitly informed us that all his
edits are copyright violations in the assumption that we will believe him
and delete all he has ever done. This deletion of his work is something he
informed the Dutch community that he wanted before. So yes, the relations
are very much disturbed. Waerth made his bed, he can lie in it. It is his
choice to be abusive. It is his choice to move away from the Dutch wiki
community.

It is a shame, because when you know him, when you talk to him one to one,
he is not a bad person.

Thanks,
    GerardM


On 2/19/07, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 2007/2/18, Artur Fijałkowski <wiki.warx at gmail.com>:
>
> > > Well, I just got an explanation for that:
> > > 1. Official foundation policy is that open proxies are blocked
> >
> > * Why for logged in users?
>
>
> Because there was only one way of blocking when the policy was created.
>
> 2. Any change from that should work and have no negative consequences
> > > 3. This change does not work because people in countries with these IP
> > > still
> > > cannot work on WikipediaNL
> > > 4. This change has the negative side effect that people can create a
> > > sockpuppet and use an open IP to edit from their sock puppet, which
> > makes
> > > sock puppets less easy to detect.
> >
> > * where is 'Assume good faith' ?
>
>
> I don't think we have a rule 'assume good faith' on nl:. Apart from that,
> I
> cannot answer questions about the opinions of people I don't agree with...
>
> Do I agree with this? No. But I'm not a sysop, so my voice don't count.
> And
> > > if I were a sysop, probably anything I do would be considered wheel
> > > warring,
> > > with me voluntarily giving up sysop powers being the most likely
> > outcome.
> >
> >
> > * Always thought that  sysops are for helping Wikimedians not only
> banning
> > :(
>
>
> I guess that relationships are too much damaged on nl: to make that a
> valid
> option. There's quite a few people who feel it's "us vs. them", with them
> being the sysops. Or at least are of the opinion that the sysops have too
> much power.
>
> --
> Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
> ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>