[WikiEN-l] for years been promoting admins who go with the flow rather than challenge low level bad behavior by admins and long standing users

[Ryan Delaney]

On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 5:18 PM, FT2 <ft2.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:

> But I think the key norms are universally accepted.
>
> Take "No personal attacks" and "civility" as two examples. Differences may
> exist whether a particular matter is or isnt an attack or uncivil, whether
> to act or ignore it, and a number of long-term users and admins have at
> times posted in a way that clearly breaches those and do not seem to hold
> them in high regard judging by their conduct. Despite all the breaches of
> these, in 10 years I have yet to see any communal proposal gain any kind of
> traction to agree that incivility is okay, that rudeness or attacks are
> sometimes allowed, or that vested/long term users should be held to a
> different standard than anyone else. Nothing to that effect has ever been
> proposed seriously nor gained traction. Why? Because we don't believe in
> those things. The belief in a common high standard is universal, even if
> some users don't act up to it.
>
> What we have trouble with is people who _know_ these are universal norms
> but
> still seem to think "who cares" about them. The first problem is basic
> attitudes - people who know what is agreed but flagrantly ignore it when it
> suits them, or selectively apply it.
>
> The second problem beyond that is the problem of "fiddling while Rome
> burns". While we potter round discussing if, perhaps, such and such an
> incident was uncivil or BITEy, and whether anyone feels consensus exists to
> act, the user affected may be discouraged and leave. That's fine, we want
> to
> go careful and not be over extreme. Again we count on users to act to a
> high
> standard and enact the norms of the community. if they do - and the norms
> are pretty uncontroversial - then these issues would largely be resolved by
> the involved person themself.
>
> Given that the community has fairly stable long term and universal norms
> (although the detail and edge cases are very uncertain) what we need is
> admins who at least agree and follow those norms or try to, to a high
> standard. This would mean taking care in grey cases to avoid risk of upset
> even if it's an "edge case"... take care to be visibly fair and neutral
> even
> if they could argue they aren't involved, take care to explain and
> apologize
> if needed rather than assume or act rough.
>
> This is what I mean by needing users to have the right basic attitude. the
> rest then overlays that.
>
> FT2
>
>
I'm still losing sight as to what this has to do with administrator
flame-out.

Anyway, I think you've chosen easy cases for "universally accepted
standards". Let's try a hard case of a disagreement about basic values that
directly led to my 'flame out' and retirement: Should an administrator avoid
the appearance of impropriety by declining to use sysop tools to enforce the
Biographies of Living Persons policy in a dispute where he could be seen as
a participant? My opinion, and that implied by a few interesting Arbcom
rulings, is that it's dangerous -- but BLP-violating content is much more
dangerous, so we ought to remove it with all possible haste. That is not at
all everyone's opinion, as I found out.

Now, in my view, that's a kind of disagreement people ought to be able to
talk about. Both sides are plausible and it's a hard nut to crack, and you
could hold either viewpoint in good faith. So suppose I really was wrong.
Someone should be able to peer-review administrative conduct and say "Look,
you don't want to do it that way because X Y and Z consequence is bad for
the project." That's how we reach this kind of consensus about how things
ought to be done that gradually takes form in the policy. The problem was
that not only did people disagree with me, but they were fundamentally
unwilling to talk about it, or even listen to what I had to say: rather,
they took on this exact same attitude that you display here: "These are the
rules, you fucked up, so grovel and apologize, and you should be desysopped.
It's not necessary to explain why the rules are the rules because they're
the rules. If you don't understand or disagree, you're a problem, and having
you around is bad for the project." What you said is the nice way of saying
the same thing.

Why would anyone want to be an administrator in this kind of environment?

- causa sui