Alex Schenck wrote:
It's about friggin' time that something was done about wheel warring.
I notice that Wikipedia goes through various "stages" in which the community will focus on one specific issue. A few months ago it was the term "fuckwit". Not all that long ago it was pedophilia (looks like it's back). Then it was the ever-lasting accusations of cabalism. Now it's wheel warring.
Alright, look. I came back from a two-week break to witness the explosion of the wheel warring crap. From what Jimbo has said to me, he is very tired of the lack of cooperation that used to exist. What ever happened to that sense of respect for each other, when people actually understood that Jimbo's word was final, that the ArbCom is in fact the judicary body that knew what they were talking about, and people would respect time on the project? I mean, come on. When people start giving out USER WARNINGS to people such as David Gerard, you can tell that the times have definitely changed, and some oldy-moldy (or at least somewhat oldy-moldy editors such as myself) are not liking what we see.
Mindspillage and I are on the same wavelength (I'll let her speak for herself beyond that): we miss the old community that was focused more on writing an encyclopedia instead of focusing on user pages and userboxes. What ever happened to writing FEATURED ARTICLES? Instead, we have people more focused on userboxes ("this user rebelled against the great userbox purge of 2006 [redirect to RFC:kelly martin] and would do it again"... wtf!) and arguing with others.
At this point, I'm afraid desysopping people would be like placing a band-aid on an artery wound. Why has the community changed instead of adapted? We're not myspace, we're Wikipedia. Can we keep it that way?
Here ends my long and horrible rant.
--Alex, aka Linuxbeak
I strongly second (or is it third?) this. UninvitedCompany has referenced the [[September That Never Ended]], which I think explains why this has happened. When I became an admin January 2004, I got about 20 votes of support -- today, any successful nomination with less than 40 supports would be an oddity. (It's also quite likely I would not pass now, what with editcountitis -- or its cousin, non-article-namespace-editcountitis -- running rampant.) Our community has expanded, and our decision-making mechanisms have not scaled along with it. When was the last time we had a major policy change? It was the 3RR, I think, and that was over a year ago. Pretty much everything since then has been tinkering around the edges (although things like [[WP:PROD]] haven't made me lose all hope yet). Consensus doesn't scale. With policy, this hinders change greatly, but it's unlikely to be a major problem in the near future. With wheel warring or serious edit wars, however, the fact that consensus doesn't scale is wasting a lot of our time here. It takes being hauled in front of the arbcom to get any results.
What I think should be done is (as I outlined in a recent post to the list) giving the 'crats power to desysop/block anyone at will. It's next to impossible to become a 'crat unless you're some sort of miracle worker, and abuse leads to swift retribution (i.e. Ed Poor). I've started a discussion on [[Wikipedia talk:Bureaucrats]] about giving 'crats the authority to step into a dispute and stop it before it gets worse. Jimbo used to do this a fair bit (albeit after the flame war had gone on for ages without showing any sign of stopping), i.e. the [[Gdansk]] naming problem and [[autofellatio]], but he can't put our fires all the time. The English Wikipedia is just one of many projects he has to tend to. We need someone who can tell wheel/edit warriors to just stop or face punitive action immediately.
John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]])