[WikiEN-l] Moderation on this mailing list

[Parker Peters]

On 2/22/07, Rob <gamaliel8 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 2/21/07, Rich Holton <richholton at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > However, the more I think about the way interactions take place on
> > Wikipedia, the more I am convinced that the asymmetry in power and
> > experience between an admin and a typical editor results in vastly
> > different perspectives on the same actions. What seems (and in fact is)
> > reasonable to an admin or an experienced user, can seem to be (and in
> > fact is) a demonstration of admin "dickism" to a newbie.
>
> This is pretty much the problem.  To many newbies, admins represent
> the power elite, The Man, and not individual volunteers, thus they
> think nothing of subjecting them to abuse.  Any response is seen as an
> abuse of power, even when the incident is relatively innocuous.
>

Not true.

There are any number of admin actions I do not have any problem with.
Blocking of actual vandals, or even whole vandal IP ranges when there's
something like a GNAA assault going on, I understand and agree with.

What I have problems with are admins who are (A) stuck up, (B) over-egoed,
(C) dickish, or (D) abusive. Admins who insult users, or who fail to
properly sanction other users who are insulting someone, or go over the top
blocking/banning one person while excusing horrid behavior on the part of
others towards that person.

Again, to use a recent example, I'll pull up RunedChozo's block list (
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log/block&page=User:RunedChozo).


Perhaps this will help you understand what I'm getting at:

Block #1 - Blocked by Aecis for 24 hours, for getting involved in a pagemove
problem. Related to Israel/Palestine and an ongoing news item at that time,
so unsurprising that new users would show up to the article. Seemed to be a
good faith move, and Aecis admits as much on talk page. No major
controversy, though later users have claimed he had a "fight" with Aecis,
which is a quite overblown way to characterize it.

Block # 2/3 - By William M. Connolley. Block for 24 hours, Connolley
accidentally hit "indef", then fixed it. Later admins being abusive would
construe this as two different blocks in their "summaries" of how many
blocks RC had.

Block # 4: By Future Perfect at Sunrise. Block at the "urging" of a POV
editor, looks like FP has connections to. Block done for a full three days,
well beyond anything stated in process and policy.

Block # 5: William M. Connolley, another 3-day (far too long by policy)
block for 3RR. By this point, RC is dealing with a major POV clique that has
caused repeated problems for Wikipedia and regularly start fights on
articles they think they "own", but only RC is being blocked, because said
POV clique has the support of admins who are members of the clique.

Block # 6/7/8/9: by Tariqabjotu (member of the POV clique) and Tom Harrison
(friend of Tariq). Tag-teaming multiple extensions of block, based on some
rantings by other members of the POV clique. This would later be construed
as four different blocks by users trying to attack RC.

Block # 10/11/12 by Asterion: this is where ZakuSage incident was going on,
ZakuSage was caught wikistalking (record of report is still in history at
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3AZakuSage&diff=103257547&oldid=103088642and
concurred by Asterion. Blocked for 1 week (which was already
overkill),
extended to 2, then back to 1 when Asterion was caught abusively extending
the block out of process. Later assailants would again claim this as "three"
blocks.

Final series, # 13/14/15: Steel359, after insulting the user for reporting
Sean Barrett/The_Epopt's abusive locking of user page, sits around haunting
his edits all day until he can come up with an excuse. Yamla then extends
the block when RC lashes out against Steel359's abuse: Steel359 then
finishes off by slapping an abusive infinite block and for good measure,
locks the talk page and abusively removes the unblock request from it.

Now, let's make a few things perfectly clear here:

FACT #1: I do not disagree that RunedChozo deserved to be blocked in any of
these incidents.

FACT #2: HOWEVER, RunedChozo was not the only one at fault in any of these
incidents. In each case of 3RR, or worse in the case of ZakuSage, there was
another party who received no sanction. ZakuSage was caught wikistalking,
and in normal cases a user targeted by a wikistalker is allowed a chance to
calm down and treated fairly, but in RunedChozo's case there were admins
with an agenda waiting to target him when he returned.

Likewise in the rest: meatpuppetry and POV cliques who regularly try to
exercise ownership of articles related to Israel/Palestine and the Middle
East do this sort of thing to new users regularly, but they for some reason
get defended, because there are admins in their ranks, and that's not right.
When RC was blocked for 3RR, there were other users playing edit-war games
who should have been blocked for edit warring, yet this was not done, which
taught them that they can get away with organized edit warring.

And the end result? You've made an enemy of RunedChozo, because it wasn't
just Israel/Palestine articles where he was attacked, but the moment he
tried to improve ANY portion of wikipedia, he was attacked.


-- 
====
Parker Peters
http://parkerpeters.livejournal.com