The Cunctator wrote:
On 2/7/06, Guettarda guettarda@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.
Sadly, I agree. Real original progress comes from people who are willing to take risks, not from those obsessed with protecting what they believe they already have. My impression is that those who like this web of rules are not really interested in solutions. They can't say outright that they don't want the project infected with new ideas, but they have other techniques for intimidating the newcomer who may really have some good ideas. The newcomer doesn't yet know the players; they have no basis for distinguishing between the new sysop trying to exercise his new powers and the more mellow experienced user. He has no idea who can be safely offended.
I believe that sysops should be held to a higher standard, beginning with the ones who are too quick to impose blocks. There should be no presumption that the person who imposed a block is prima facie more correct than the one who undoes that same block. A review of an unblock should include a review of the block, and if the original block is determined to be improper, the blocking sysop should be subject to blocking for the same period of time that he sought to impose on the user. If he uses the block fairly and competently he will have nothing to worry about.
I don't always agree with Cunc and Ed Poor, and perhaps they can sometimes be annoying or outrageous. I have learned to live here with others whose opinions on a broad but complex variety of issues are diametrically opposed to mine. I don't think that I have been wrong to believe that this has been critical to a properly functioning wiki. I have never needed a tome of rules to teach me that.
I am more willing to pay attention to people like Cunc who speak from conscience than to those who have nothing better to offer than more rules. I won't always agree with him, but at least I'll listen ... and listening is the first step to any solution.
Ec