[WikiEN-l] Admin / experienced user flameout - how do we talk people down off the ledge?

[Bill Carter]

Hi Mr. Goodman,

I think you are talking about me when you mention the genius that sometimes 
accompanies valuable and important people who unfortunately tend to put on 
displays of individualistic irascibility that are unacceptable. As Manhattan 
Samurai, I was one of the best at this. I'm fortunate that I was eventually 
kicked off the English Wikipedia and most of my work progressively deleted. 
You'll now find my bibliography of William Monahan much improved at Squidoo, 
along with a web page about Dining Late with Claude La Badarian:

http://www.squidoo.com/William_Monahan_Bibliography
http://www.squidoo.com/Claude-La-Badarian


I even have a blog:

http://nypress-studies.blogspot.com/

Keep on truckin'

Bill





________________________________
From: David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com>
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Wed, July 14, 2010 2:06:03 AM
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Admin / experienced user flameout - how do we talk 
people down off the ledge?

Frankly, I see that as unwarranted pessimism. The sets of people who
want to change things and people who want to cause trouble are not
identical, though there is a substantial intersection. Admins who have
the lack of judgement to try to force their desired change into policy
by using their arbitrary power of their ability to bully people, are
at least as much a problem as the over-conformist. Indeed, I think it
my role as an admin to be a conformist, and do only what is generally
supported. When I want to work to get something different, that has to
be done without the presumed immunities and special power of an
administrator.

To a certain extent the role does require tolerated the other admins,
but that is just analogous to the requirement that an editor tolerate
other editors. In both cases, the difficulty is that we have no usable
sanctions until things become outrageous. Mild disapproval over the
distance of the internet is very easy for someone to ignore entirely,
until they have gotten themselves into an impossible position.

My personal view remains that we should not tolerate insult even from
the best and most established editors or administrators. A more
civilized environment in these respects will help us get many addition
new good editors and administrators to replace the ones who can not
work in an acceptable fashion. Joining in a collective work is not the
place for displace of individualistic irascibility, even when
accompanied by genius--such people are very important and very
valuable, but they should be working creatively-- and independently.



On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 9:54 PM, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 14 July 2010 02:07, FT2 <ft2.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The expectations upon admins are the pivot point for that. See [[
>> User:FT2/RfA <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:FT2/RfA>]].
>>
>> Any ideas how we can get somewhere like that?
>>
>> FT2
>>
>
> Well to start with you could chuck your requirements out of the
> window. Your requirements like most at RFA are selecting for 3 things
>
> 1)some degree of editing skill
> 2)Not appearing to cause trouble
> 3)A decent set of wikipolitics skill
>
>
> It's two and three that cause the problem. Anyone whith a decent set
> of wikipolitics skills is going to archive 2 by playing safe going
> along with the flow and not challenging things. Almost anyone actually
> passing RFA is going to have got into the habit of going along with
> the ah "bad faith combined with mob justice". The people who might
> actually try to challenge such things are unlikely to pass RFA because
> either they lack the wikipolitics skills needed in order to pass (you
> would tend to fail them under the "nor into politicking" clause among
> others) or because they are not prepared to use them in a way that
> would let them pass.
>
> Upshot is that we have for some years now been promoting a bunch of
> admins who will go with the flow rather than challenge low level bad
> behavior by admins and long standing users. The tiny number of rebels
> and iconoclasts left are from years ago and have little to day to day
> stuff.
>
> --
> geni
>
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-- 
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

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