[WikiEN-l] New York Times article

[Mark Gallagher]

G'day Conrad,

> * Kat Walsh wrote:
>>On 6/17/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>since when have admins had "authority to exercise editorial control"?
>>
>>I'm particularly disappointed by that statement, considering I spent a
>>fair bit of effort in the interview explaining how and why they don't.
> 
> In my opinion this is slowly becoming little more than a fiction we tell 
> ourselves. Recently an admin labeled a user changing his wording of, "Some 
> conspiracy theorists disagree..." to "Some disagree..." as "vandalism" and 
> placed a 48 hour block after edit warring with the user (and others) over 
> this phrase.

Admins *don't* have the authority to exercise editorial control (with 
the caveat that we won't call preventing someone from replacing the text 
with "poop", "exercising editorial control"), or at least, to exercise 
more control than any other editor.  The admin you cite was, on the face 
of it, exceeding his authority.

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.

It seems to me we have two equally obnoxious sides to the "bad admin" 
question.  One takes the view that admins can do no wrong, and resists 
any push --- within the admin community or without --- to help those of 
us who need to clean up our acts to do so.  This is obviously Harmful, 
with a capital 'H', no less.  This side never refers to admins by name, 
doesn't want to embarrass anyone.  Doesn't try to improve the conduct of 
individual admins, because then the trolls will win.

The other side sits on the sidelines and laughs at us.  This side never 
refers to admins by name, either: if those few admins who misbehaved 
were encouraged to improve (or even de-sysopped), then this side would 
no longer have anything to criticise.  This side enjoys criticising the 
status quo so much that it would never *dream* of actually doing 
anything likely to make things better for Wikipedia, or the community 
that supports it.

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.

<snip />

> So what do you suppose came of it?
> 
> When the user put the 'unblock' template on their page it was denied by 
> another admin who was involved in the same edit war and then the user's 
> talk page was protected by yet another admin to prevent them from 
> requesting unblock again. And when his objection was raised at AN/I? Yet 
> more admins lined up to say that the action was entirely proper. All this 
> against a user who has been on Wikipedia for nine months (~350 edits) and 
> never been blocked or cited as a 'troublemaker' before.

I see.  Do you have a link?

> We SAY that admins do not have authority to exercise editorial control, 
> but, given the fact that we don't enforce it, the reality is quite different.
> 
> I think the blocking admin's message to the user illustrates how far lost 
> the 'no editorial control' concept has become;
> 
> "If unblocked and you revert me one more time, I'm going to block you for 
> a week."
> 
> Those are words that NO admin would ever be able to utter if the principle 
> you cite above had ANY meaning. But the fact is that a dozen other admins 
> looked on and said that it was just fine.

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."  Did you 
say anything at all?  If you piped up at all, was it to make a comment 
like my suggested one, or did you make one more of the sort you've 
become famous for --- like the one in your email to the list?

We have damn near a thousand admins now.  Some of them are becoming 
admins without even knowing what adminship is all about.  Others have 
become too caught up in the tougher admin jobs, and become jaded.  A 
couple (and this one irritates me) feel they have the support of ArbCom 
regardless of what they do (whether ArbCom agrees or not is a different 
story), and feel they have no reason not to do as they please.  Overall, 
considering the sheer number of admins involved, I think we can be 
pleased that very, very few of them are bad admins.  But when we come 
across an example of an admin misbehaving, we should be either trying to 
improve their behaviour, or stripping them of adminship until we can 
trust them with the extra tools and the inevitable (but unfortunate) 
increase in status.  Clucking that everything's broken isn't going to 
improve the lot of Wikipedia's admins, nor that of the Wikipedians who 
are forced to put up with them.


-- 
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse