[WikiEN-l] De-sysoppings in the year of 2007

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 02:56 AM 12/29/2007, David Goodman wrote:
>  If anything, 1% implies that we should be looking for more to
>investigate. i cannot believe that just that small number is the total
>size of the problem. No group of diverse voluntarily gathered people
>can do quite that well.

While this may be true, I'd really hate seeing a witch-hunt 
atmosphere. Rather, there should be a better complaint process. I'll 
report one incident from my own experience. I had started editing 
Wikipedia fairly intensively, my interest aroused by an article on a 
political topic. I discovered that an article was being maintained by 
sock puppets and an IP editor. The IP editor was making extensive 
reverts with a summary like "editor is a critic." I tried to file a 
3RR report, and I hadn't yet figured out the proper way to do diffs. 
So I posted Contribs for the IP, which essentially pointed to the 
edits *more* efficiently than diffs. The admin who looked at it 
rejected the complaint because I hadn't followed proper process. I 
asked how to do it. I wasn't told. I was basically told, "Assume good 
faith." Good advice, inappropriate for the situation. There was 
enough information in my complaint that any admin paying attention 
would realize that some action was needed.

Many users would simply have gone away. I didn't. I had come to 
understand that any user has the same rights as any administrator, 
but without the buttons. So I did, effectively, what an administrator 
would have done, only less efficiently. I reverted sock edits -- 
unless they were useful -- and I didn't consider myself limited by 
3RR, since blocking is *effectively* more than 3RR, even more 
damaging potentially.

Naturally, the sock knew process quite well. But also didn't want to 
call attention to himself. So he created a new sock which, as its 
first action, placed a 3RR warning on my Talk page, then filed the 
complaint. Since I saw it coming, I simply posted, underneath the 
warning, very briefly -- I *can* write briefly if I take the time, 
it's harder than writing as it comes -- what was going on.

The admin took one look at my Talk page -- as he had to, to verify 
the warning -- and blocked just about everyone in sight. One innocent 
user got blocked, and one meat puppet. I was temporarily IP blocked, 
immediately lifted. The article was semi-protected. All this could 
have happened much quicker if the admin watching 3RR had considered 
himself a servant of the community, instead of expecting the 
community to serve him by putting everything in proper form and 
*dismissing* the complaint when it was not.

I've been a chair for large meetings. If a member rises and says 
something that is out of order, and it is at all possible, it is the 
duty of the chair to assist the member to do what the member wants to 
do. A chair will often rephrase an improper motion from a member to 
make it proper. An abusive chair will say, "You are out of order," 
and if the member protests, will order the member removed from the meeting.

A helpful chair, if the member objects to the action of the chair, 
will inform the member about appeal process. Wikipedia has some good 
practices in this regard, explaining to blocked users how to appeal the block.

A little while later, an experienced user, who had originally written 
on my Talk page to warn me about what he thought was contentious 
editing, actually read my response and turned around: he started an 
RfA for me, and asked me to accept. I did not want to be an 
administrator, but I accepted, simply wanting to acknowledge his 
kindness and consideration. It was, of course, snowed out, but what 
was interesting to me was how parochial the process was. The 
administrator who had been so unhelpful in 3RR was a prominent 
objector, "he didn't even know how to present a diff."

Of course, he had been right, and I understand why admins want proper 
diffs in complaints, but.... he didn't know how to assist a user. 
Other objections were simply to the number of edits, which was still 
in the several hundred range. However, I've in the past taken on 
major responsibilities where I was technically not qualified, but 
.... I knew what to do when the situation was outside of what I was 
familiar with, who to ask. I've done this with life-and-death 
situations, and nobody died. The key question with administrators 
should be their personal trustworthiness, their willingness to serve 
the community consensus, their sensitivity to the needs of Wikipedia, 
their understanding of when to recuse themselves. Not knowing 
technical process is a remediable defect, not understanding how to 
serve the community is commonly much more difficult to fix.

The standard applied to me was almost purely number of edits. I 
forget, but I think that there may have been some objection as well, 
to contentious edits. (The blocking admin in the case above, though, 
clearly ratified my actions as protecting Wikipedia against sock 
puppets.) However, I had addressed this in the RfA, that I'd 
scrupulously avoid exercising administrative powers where I had a 
specific POV involved in the issue. The fact is that having admin 
powers would be a *hindrance* when I get involved in a difficult 
article. It would not have helped me with the article in question, 
I'd not have blocked the editors involved. The only reason I'd want 
those powers would be to more generally serve the community. And, in 
fact, I'm not particularly available for that, I couldn't do much of 
the routine mop work, and there is a lot of it.

Wikipedia is going to need many more administrators as the scale 
increases. It is also going to need additional structure to make 
administrative support more efficient, while preserving the open 
community process that makes Wikipedia so special.