On 1/3/06, Ben Emmel bratsche1@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/3/06, jayjg jayjg99@gmail.com wrote:
This is an increasing problem. Some of the users who cause most trouble do very little editing of articles, and trying to deal with their trolling on talk pages can be soul-destroying. Yet block one of them and their friends scream blue murder, aided and abetted by certain admins who should know better. It's something we need to get a grip on because it's going to keep getting worse, and eventually they'll start affecting policy.
Unfortunately, some of these admins *don't* know better. Recently I've seen people become admins with thousands of edits, but under a hundred Talk: page comments, and others who became admins with as few as 16 people voting
for
them. People who have had so little interaction with other Wikipedians, or who are so unknown that there aren't even 20 Wikipedians willing to
vouch
for them, are simply not members of the Wikipedia community in any meaningful way. It is not surprising, then, when they act in ways which display an ignorance of, or go against Wikipedia norms (e.g. unblocking blocked users without even first discussing the block with the blocking admin). The purpose of Wikipedia is not to create a website where
people
can set up really cool user pages, or engage in wheel wars. Nor is its purpose to create a website where one can endlessly pontificate on the actions of other editors, and devise more and more policies to control their actions in increasingly bizarre ways. Rather, the purpose of Wikipedia
is
to create a great encyclopedia.
Jay.
I am noticing some of the same issues: Users are slipping through RfA without much opposition, but without much community support either. They seem to be decent editors, mostly doing work in a small area of Wikipedia, and when (self)nominated for adminship, they get their "Wikifriends" to support them, and boom! admin tools. Inevitably, wheel warring (large or small) will happen from these admins, because they actually don't understand or generally support the long-standing policies that we have here.
I almost hate to say this, but with the growing size and popularity of Wikipedia, we might need to start treating adminship truly as a big deal.
Here's an example of what I mean. I noticed that a specific administrator, in the last 12 hours, managed to get into a delete wheel war with another admin, get himself blocked for 3RR, and then unblocked himself. He then unblocked an obvious troll, without informing the blocking admin, and blocked another editor permanently, accusing him of being a sockpuppet, with no evidence that I am aware of. My curiousity piqued, I looked at his recent edits, and discovered that *none* of his past 600 edits have been to an article, but do find a comment he has posted today saying that Jimbo is "too busy asking for money" to deal with Wikipedia issues. I then do an editcount, and discover that of his 8700 edits, only 1800 are to articles, the *exact same number* of edits he has made to his User page. I look at his User page, and discover *86* user boxes on it.
What is going on here?
Jay.