[WikiEN-l] declining numbers of EN wiki admins

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

As usual, I recommend not reading this if allergic to Abd Thought. 
Some of you are. Consult your physician.

At 08:37 AM 6/3/2010, Daniel R. Tobias wrote:
>On Tue, 01 Jun 2010 10:18:03 -0400, Abd wrote:
>
> > Durova's history is a classic example. She was hounded by a screaming
> > mob when she made a mistake, even though she recognized the error and
> > undid it within an hour.
>
>I might well be counted as part of that "screaming mob" since I was
>one of the critics at the time, but my intended target was never
>Durova personally (who is now a Facebook friend of mine), but the
>entire system and its associated mindsets, in which a group of
>"insiders", with closed mailing lists of their own, takes on a
>"circling the wagons" mentality against "trolls and harassers",
>leading to snap judgments that can get people blocked or banned for
>saying politically incorrect things.

Yes. Durova became a stand-in, a poster girl, for that situation. But 
she was not the typical stubborn and abusive admin. She was not a 
knee-jerk "our faction right or wrong" enforcer. She made a mistake, 
admitted it immediately, and took responsibility for it. She has been 
very helpful in confronting admin abuse.

JzG, on the other hand, never admitted error, disappeared when it got 
hot at RfAr/Abd and JzG, resigned his bit a few months later, and, as 
I recall, complained that I was the reason -- even though I was 
site-banned at the time and all I'd done was to point out his use of 
tools while involved with Cold fusion -- and then, later, asked for 
the bit back, and since he'd only been admonished and not actually 
desysopped, it was routine.

And then went after his old nemesis, Pcarbonn, who had quietly 
returned to editing by making suggestions on the Cold fusion Talk 
page. JzG claimed that Pcarbonn was pushing the same POV that had 
gotten him banned, and the cabal jumped in to chant "yeah!" Of 
course, Pcarbonn had not been banned for his POV, he'd been banned 
for allegedly treating Wikipedia like a battleground, and JzG had 
successfully framed the issues that way a year before. In fact ....

Pcarbonn's ban was renewed, and GoRight got slapped for pointing out 
that there wasn't any evidence of misbehavior, I was blocked for 
allegedly violating my MYOB ban because I voted in a related poll (I 
was allowed to vote in polls!) and then commenting on the situation 
(it had become about me!) on Talk:GoRight; I was blocked for 
disagreeing with the administrator who blocked me. If I'd cared 
enough, that would have gone before ArbComm. Might still, I suppose, 
but ... I do have a real life.

And so it goes, on and on. I really don't care any more, I just have 
a habit of saying what I've seen, from time to time. My story is far 
from unique, it has been repeated over and over, and until it's 
realized that the lack of sane decision-making structure that would 
restrain the nutty unpredictability of how Wikipedia operates is the 
core problem, and it's addressed, Wikipedia will continue to foul its 
nest, building up reservoirs of people who have been burned.

Hipocrite, who stirred up the shit that led to RfAr/Abd-William M. 
Connolley, practically wears a blinking neon sign, "I'm a troll." 
He's been completely outrageous. But he's not the one who usually 
gets blocked. It's his targets, and how in the world does this 
happen? It's easy. There are admins who don't like his targets. He 
gives them cover to act.

In a sane structure, this kind of behavior would be spotted and 
interdicted quickly.

>I had some comments on that situation in my essay I wrote as a
>rebuttal to one of JzG's essays:
>
>http://dan.tobias.name/controversies/cyber/wiki2.html


Good essay, Dan. In my view, part of the solution to the Wikipedia 
problem would be off-site structure, for if Wikipedia is to fulfill 
its mission, it must have the faculty of *independent* judgment. One 
of the classic ways that organizations, once an oligarchy develops, 
suppress this, is through central control of communication. It's an 
error to pin this problem on the "bad guys." Rather, it's a 
phenomenon that naturally develops as part of the Iron Law of 
Oligarchy. The solution is to decentralize communication, such that, 
while there remains central communication, it cannot be dominant 
unless it sits reasonably with the consensus of what is 
decentralized. So off-site structure, because it cannot be 
controlled, bypasses the central. Only if a significant number of 
central participants, though, connect with the off-site structures -- 
and it's obvious that there must be many of them, not just one! -- 
can this become an effective restraint. Wikipedia Review, however, is 
already functioning as a bit of an ombudsman. When really outrageous 
behavior is noticed there, there is a tendency for some correction to happen.

But it's not reliable enough. I see the mailing list as the device 
that, being push, is most likely to be functional. And, yes, the 
cabal used and uses mailing lists. That wasn't the problem, as I 
think you realized, Dan. The problem was lack of balance.

The hysteria around that "secret" mailing list became, more or less, 
the official position of ArbComm with the EEML case. There, the very 
existence of an off-wiki list, private, with some apparent bias and 
some coordination of on-wiki activity (Canvassing! An article was 
semiprotected by an admin when notified by the list of IP revert 
warring! Some people commented in AfDs!) led ArbComm to completely 
set aside privacy concerns, using list archive material apparently 
obtained and published illegally, to throw the book at list 
participants, sanctioning far in excess of what could be justified by 
on-wiki behavior. And that should have been the standard, not the 
existence or non-existence of "collusion," which, after all, is just 
another name for cooperation. If it's okay for the "administrative 
cabal," as Jimbo called it, to cooperate, why not any other faction?

I joined the EEML when I saw the flap; I was under my site ban at the 
time, and, given my theories about the Wikipedia solution, I wanted 
to see, and, as well, to encourage them to work effectively and 
*properly*. They welcomed me, and they also started inviting others 
to join. The problem had been the secrecy, not what they actually 
did, for the most part. One editor had posted his password and 
invited others to use it while he was away to, say, effectively sock. 
There is no sign that any of the list members actually did this, but 
there the offer was, in the list archive. He was properly 
trout-slapped for that. My own suspicion was that this was trolling 
for others to violate policy, and that he may have been the one to 
leak the archive, but list members seemed to think that he'd merely 
been foolish. Arbitrators, on the other hand, clearly were attempting 
to sanction off-wiki communication with exemplary punishment, as a 
message to others to not do the same thing, and that was explicit in 
the deliberations.

Of course, nothing was accomplished but to drive away a loyal WP 
administrator, Piotrus, an academic, a sociologist, with 
peer-reviewed publications about Wikipedia, quite naive, actually. He 
believed in the system, which slapped him down when that was found 
convenient. And the editors with the most knowledge and, in fact, the 
most belief in neutrality, were also banned. (Some were hotheads, to 
be sure, there are those in every faction, and this is visible in 
list traffic.)

The system eats those who support it. It either literally rejects 
them or it burns them out, by failing to build stable structure and 
thus stable articles and predictable process. Flagged revisions could 
be a step toward fixing this, if accompanied by a review structure 
that's designed for reliability. But that is being vigorously resisted.

The paradox is that the crowd-sourced, ad-hoc structure of Wikipedia 
is an excellent and efficient device for originally building 
articles, if hybridized with a dispute resolution structure that 
would be easy to access, facilitated, and reliable. Many early 
decisions -- and non-decisions --, however, became locked in place. 
It is not that they were necessarily wrong, it is that mechanisms 
were never developed for efficiently finding wide consensus; the 
ad-hoc system that worked for rough article development is lousy for 
building stable policy and behavioral management when the scale 
becomes large, as it rapidly did.

There are lots of available solutions, but ... those who know and 
understand them and try to implement them are often blocked and 
banned. Within months of becoming active on Wikipedia, in 2007, I saw 
it happen. While it wasn't surprising -- this is how organizations 
work, that had been my study -- it was still disappointing, because 
Wikipedia had excellent policies and guidelines, generally, and I had 
some hope that they reflected the actual operating consensus. They 
didn't and don't. See User:Abd/Rule 0. It's not that actual practice 
is the actual consensus, it isn't. It's that the actual consensus is 
mostly asleep, and only comes up when there are extraordinarily 
striking problems and discussions that bring in massive attention.

Example: Jimbo intervened in Wikiversity, deleting some pages and 
blocking a user who, he declared, was globally banned. It caused a 
huge flap on Wikiversity, and Jimbo engaged in a bit of bluster, 
unfortunately, being technically correct (as a defacto representative 
of the WMF Board, he had the right to take action to protect the 
entire family of WMF projects) but not necessarily taking the wisest 
action; since WMF projects depend on massive volunteer labor, pushing 
the fact of central authority in the face of the volunteers that 
their consensus is not in charge isn't, shall we say, productive. 
It's legally correct, but in organizations like those of the 
projects, the legally controlling Board, and thus its representative 
or representatives, will normally align itself with the volunteer 
consensus, unless it finds it legally necessary to do soemthing else.

So elements within the WV community, and probably representing the 
majority opinion there, filed an RfC on meta to remove the founder 
bit from Jimbo, that had allowed him to take these actions. It was 
running 2:1 opposed. Now, that much anti-Jimbo opinion should have 
been a big red flag to the WMF (and to Jimbo). But elements within 
the community representing the "cabal," i.e., the 
circle-the-wagons-against-trolls faction, were, I'm sure, smugly 
confident that the trolls were being crushed, and they thought of the 
1/3 as being simply malcontents, and the RfC ridiculous.

And then Jimbo deleted porn on Commons, bypassing community process. 
To repeat my summary of this sequence: "You can take away our 
academic freedom, but don't touch our porn!"

That, of course, is an oversimplification. The real issue was exactly 
the same, but Commons is much more central and much more noticeable. 
It got a lot of attention. And what happened then at the RfC on the 
Founder Flag probably represents a truer consensus, and this affair 
shows exactly how participation bias can create a false impression. 
I've seen plenty of examples where particpation bias produced an 
impression of a "consensus" in one direction, whereas an aroused 
community went overwhelminingly in the other direction. The !vote, 
last time I looked, was about 3:1 in favor of removing the flag. 
Jimbo caved and gave up the intrusive privileges, they were removed 
from the flag set.

The point is not "Jimbo screwed up!" The point is that ad-hoc dispute 
resolution doesn't work, except at the lowest levels. I.e., if it 
works ad-hoc, if disputes are actually resolved, fine. That's 
efficient. But you have never resolved a dispute when you have 
blocked a disputant. You have, generally, taken a side in the 
dispute, which isn't resolution, it is awarding victory to one side. 
Which then encourages that side to again push the same position with 
the next victim or opponent. While it's obvious that sometimes blocks 
and bans are necessary, they, far too easily, become part of the 
problem instead being genuine solutions. The Scibaby ban is still 
creating enormous disruption, with ban enforcement having created far 
more disruption than the damage an individual POV-pusher could have 
done. If actions had been taken to integrate Scibaby into a 
cooperating community, he'd probably have gone away, or would have 
settled down into occasional contribution. And the community has 
never actually gone back and looked at what happened with Scibaby, 
only a few have bothered, instead, even though Scibaby was never 
banned per WP:BAN, by a consensus of *uninvolved editors*, the 
community simply assumes that the ban was legitimate; after all, 
hasn't it been enforced for years? Scibaby was screwed over, in 
short. And human beings tend to resent that. Don't we?

So then we have two juvenile positions, locking horns: Scibaby: You 
can't stop me! The cabal: Yes we can! We're in charge! However, what 
Scibaby has successfully shown is: "You can't stop me without harming 
yourself more than I'm harmed. I'm having fun! Are you?"

You cannot have a neutral project if one faction is in charge, 
excluding others. Obviously, there must be some central authority of 
some kind, or a project could not attain the uniformity of 
expectation that's needed for reasonable reliability. But it must be 
one which simply facilitates genuine consensus. It's been done, I've 
pointed to examples, ad nauseum. Until the Wikipedia community wakes 
up enough to see that it desperately needs this, it will careen from 
crisis to crisis, rolling the boulder up the hill and watching it 
roll down again, until the boulder-rollers give up and do something 
else, being replaced by new generations of boulder-rollers, not yet 
burned out, all the while wondering why it's so difficult.

Actually, my opinion, it's not necessary for "the community" to wake 
up, not directly. It would only take a small number of editors who 
recognize the nature of the problem and who start to cooperate toward 
a solution.

It is more than any one person can accomplish, but I don't know what 
the necessary number is. In many contexts, I've been told that it 
might be as low as two or three. Now, that might seem easy, but try 
to find two! What happens is that groups of two form, but can't 
accomplish enough to start the larger ball rolling. So, probably, 
three. Good luck. I'll help, if asked. I generally understand the 
necessary structures. But I never wanted to *control* it. I leave 
that desire to those who imagine they know better than an informed 
community consensus, or who imagine that they represent the 
consensus, which is the general position of the default oligarchy in 
most organizations, whether it's true or not. Usually, it is somewhat 
true, but that may be because most who differed were shut out or left 
in frustration or didn't join in the first place.