G'day Conrad,
- Mark Gallagher wrote:
G'day Conrad,
Hello Mark.
Of course, we don't know the full story. It could be the editor was an obnoxious so-and-so who'd been cutting a swathe through Wikipedia, vandalising and POV-pushing, and when he seemed to be about to re-write our article on New World Order to make all those loony right-wing Americans seem less loony, the camel gave one hell of a scream as it felt its long-suffering back finally break. Or perhaps not.
As I said, the user had never been blocked or 'in trouble' before. Nearly all of those defending the admin action actually cited bad behaviour by OTHER people as 'justification' for blocking. 'They are all disruptive POV pushers so we should block them indefinitely' sort of thing - with NO evidence of this being true of the person actually blocked being presented... or apparently needed in the eyes of far too many.
Well, that's not good.
Now, it's obvious to anyone that refusing to accept criticism, refusing to change in the face of clear evidence that we're wrong, etc., is a terrible way to conduct our affairs. It's not quite so obvious that pointing to unspecified inappropriate behaviour and the unnamed admins who encourage it and saying "tut, tut" without making any effort to do anything about the problem is also pretty terrible.
Perhaps it could be noted that there are OTHER (less 'terrible') reasons for describing issues without 'naming names'... such as focusing on a general problem rather than specific individuals, attempting not to bias ongoing discussion by leaving the individual name out of it, and/or presenting a scenario without names to get an evaluation based on the scenario itself without any preconceptions based on the names attached.
You're focusing on the idea of "naming names". That's not what I meant the focus to be. Sorry if I was unclear.
What I meant was, this handwavey "oh, oh, there's a problem, a terrible problem," without giving more details or (seemingly) doing anything to help fix it is Not Good. It's like that old joke --- you can't trust the Church to fight evil, because if the Devil were vanquished and all men led sinless and happy lives, they'd be out of a job. If all admins behaved blamelessly, then some of our critics would be out of a job ...
And... weren't you the one who, when I DID specifically object to the actions of someone by name, told me that such public confrontations are counterproductive and it would be better to keep the matter private? It seems almost as if objections are ALWAYS wrong, no matter how presented.
No-o ... not exactly. I pointed out that, instead of damning all sysops to the end of time on the basis of the behaviour of one admin, you could instead take the matter up with the lady in question, and stand at least a decent change of fixing the problem ...
Oh, there was another interaction: when you stated publicly on AN/I that anyone who closed an xfD on some basis other than a strict numerical count must be acting in bad faith. But there, my objection was not to the public naming and shaming of the "bad faith" admin concerned, but to the sheer cluelessness of the statement. Since I trust you're no longer making statements like *that* (certainly I've not seen any, particularly on this list), we can assume that particular problem won't crop up again.
Lookit, I can accept that you're doing what you think is the Right Thing to improve the behaviour on admins on Wikipedia (I didn't believe that, earlier, hence at least part of my aggression here). But I think your approach is doomed to fail. If there's a problem admin who can be dealt with privately, deal with them privately. If the problem's so big --- or it's a group thing --- that they need to be dealt with publicly, deal with them publicly. Denunciations from the sideline aren't much use. It's the equivalent to people on the list muttering to each other about how terrible AfD or RfA or whatever is, without ever trying to educate the specific people causing problems.
I see. Do you have a link?
As you insist;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/MONGO
And what did you do about it? Did you say "no, this is not appropriate. This was plain-jane edit warring, and should be treated as such. Admins should never use their admin powers in an edit war, nor should they call non-vandalism edits 'vandalism' to justify a block."
Um... yes?
Did you seriously think there was any question of that? If so, I think you need to consider the possibility that you do not understand me at all;
I did, and I think you may be right about that. My apologies.
<snip links and suchlike/>
In response to your analysis I would propose at least two more 'groups' - those who challenge the admin community as a whole to confront the perceived double-standards, and those who respond with some rather nasty comments and assumptions instead of considering that they might have a point.
Or perhaps those aren't "groups" so much as individuals. :]
I'll cop to the "assumptions" bit. I have made certain assumptions about you --- and some of them are wrong. But I *have* considered that you may have a point --- and said so, during the last exchange we had on the list (though I didn't say so when you were posting silly things to AN/I, because the point you had there was actually the wrong end of the stick).
You *do* have a point ... sometimes. I think, however, that viewing yourself as one who "challenge[s] the admin community as a whole to confront the perceived double-standards" is what we generally refer to as "looking through rose-coloured glasses". If your comments are, in fact, meant to challenge the admin community to do anything at all, they need to be quite a bit clearer. The impression you're giving in your denunciations is not the (much better) impression you give in this email.
Cheers,