[WikiEN-l] Wheel warring

[The Cunctator]

On 2/7/06, Guettarda <guettarda at gmail.com> wrote:
> This whole mess has left me feeling bruised and shocked, and rethinking my
> role here.  If El C and Carbonite leave we have lost a lot more than can be
> counted in them just as individuals.  El C, for one, made this place fun,
> and if you aren't having fun there is not reason to stick around.
>
> Wheel warring is something that sensible people should not indulge in.  On
> the other hand, the ability of admins to undo each others' blocks is one of
> the things that make adminship "no big deal".  Piles of regulations, and
> people who live to interpret regulations and find loopholes in regulations
> do the project no good.  Rather than wheel-warring, clamp down on
> inappropriate blocks.  Blocking vandals is an easy decision.  Blocking
> people who say "Get the fuck away from me you fucking psycho" are easy to
> block.  But the onus needs to be on the first person doing the blocking,
> that they get it right, not on the other people involved.  We need to look
> at people's actions, look at the number of blocks you had overturned and the
> number of blocks you overturned...and if you have more than three blocks
> overturned in a fortnight, then someone needs to take you aside an talk to
> you.  If you regularly overturn blocks, then someone needs to talk to you.
> We are developing a culture where wheel warring is become acceptable.  We
> need to change to culture, not by creating new regulations, but by
> socialising people away from it.
>
> Page deletion and recreation is another issue.  We cannot fetishise process,
> and *fD needs serious reform.  We need to organise a Wikiproject to reform
> *fD.  Get people to throw in ideas, and get other people to repackage them.
> Do not impose a solution, and make sure that we come up with something so
> devoid of ego that no one feels ownership of the idea.  The standard
> "propose-and-argue" method has too much ego in it - you fight to defend
> "your view".  We need some people to generate ideas and write them up, other
> people to try to put together, and others to harmonise the final ideas. Be
> editors, not creators.  Or some crap like that.
>
> Despite my efforts to stay on the fringes, I find this whole thing sapping
> my energy.  I don't know what it does to people at the centre of it all.
> Give it a rest, try to preserve your sanity - and try to think about
> collaborative solutions.
>
You are exactly right, but history tells us that process-oriented,
rules-as-ritual, paranoid, vindictive bureaucracies generally win in
the long run. It's an incremental process, but each step is based in
the logic that security (or rather, the illusion of security) is more
important than individual freedoms, that there are enough bad people
and precious things in the world to ruin the happiness of the good.

I'm glad that there's still some culture of questioning rules and
trusting people.