[WikiEN-l] Newbie and not-so-newbie biting

[George Herbert]

On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 3:11 PM, Emily Monroe <bluecaliocean at me.com> wrote:
>> Firstly, that powers to ban indefinitely have been devolved (sort
>> of) from ArbCom to the admins as a group (the qualification being
>> that ArbCom cannot ban anyone indefinitely).
> First off, thanks for the history lesson. No, I'm not being sarcastic,
> really, thanks.
>
>> In short, the checks and balances can fail where people are
>> unscrupulous and/or are too vested in getting rid of a particular
>> editor who is not a classic vandal but something else.
> Good point. This actually interferes with accessibility to people who
> are disabled (usually cognitively or emotional disabled) or from
> different, perhaps non-English cultures. Both of these can interfere
> with competence required to edit Wikipedia, and also with being
> accepted in Wikipedia.

To add to this -

People who are causing a problem but have "aware friends" - people who
know them and know AN and ANI and policy ok - rarely get driven off.
Their friends post an ANI thread if they're blocked excessively, or go
to the admin and advocate moderation, or go to another administrator
and advocate moderation, etc.

Once one becomes known to someone in that set of people, actually
"driving someone away from Wikipedia" becomes exponentially more
difficult, if anyone supports the problem case at all.

What we are missing is that the vast majority of cases of someone
getting run off aren't visible to anyone who's active or experienced
enough.  Nobody is generally following non-admins around looking for
them being self-appointed gatekeepers who are behaving abusively, and
there's little QA / review for admin actions practically except where
the "aware friends" issue comes into play.

I almost wish we had an admin action review board, whose job it was to
say just quickly look at some fraction (10%?  1%?) of all admin
actions and see if they're documented, justified, reasonable etc and
give the admins feedback, request more writeup, ask for
reconsideration etc.

Key question - in terms of hostility, do people think that hostility
to new editors is more from admins, more from self appointed
gatekeepers, more from normal users interacting hostiley in a small
article space?


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com