jayjg wrote:
I'm sure a small number of people who were
aware of the specific
incidents
knew which individual I was referring to, but
that's hardly the
point. Most
of these discussions involve a lot of hand-waving
arguments, people
making
claims with no concrete examples. Rather than
doing the same, I
provided a
live and relevant example of the issues I was
raising. And to remind
everyone, the issue raised was not about whether or not one particular
admin
was behaving badly, but more broadly whether
people are becoming
involved in
Wikipedia (and even becoming admins) without any
familiarity with its
norms
or committment to its goals. When one notices
that an administrator is
behaving quite badly, and then realizes that fewer than 1/4 of his edits
are
actually to articles, and that he has as many
edits to his user page as
he
has to all encyclopedia articles combined, these
issues are highlighted
starkly.
Maybe he's a bad admin, he certainly gets involved right in the thick of
the latest and greatest controversy on Wikipedia, but he also received
53 support votes on his RFA, including a number of high-profile editors
who do not normally vote or typically vote oppose. And despite all the
controversy he's in recently, he still managed to become elected to one
of Esperanza's positions with 19 votes. I don't want to get into some
kind of psychological analysis of everyone's voting habits, but I
believe if someone is unsuitable then they would never get as many votes
as he has.
Yes, maybe he hasn't been editing the article space enough. I probably
don't edit the article namespace enough either. But if what he is doing
is building friendships and welcoming people to Wikipedia, then I don't
see what he is doing as a problem. People are more likely to contribute
if they feel happy here and I believe his actions are helping in this
area. He isn't directly building the encyclopaedia, but he's helping get
others to build it.
You seem to know him well. Since you've decided to defend him, tell me,
when he insists that "fair use" images can be used on Userboxes, and that
attempts to delete them are attempts by "the mob" to enforce "copyright
paranoia" and "wiki-law" that have "no basis in reality", and
then edit wars
both the policy pages which forbid it, and those who delete the images from
the userboxes, is he helping others build the encyclopedia?
Jay.