[WikiEN-l] declining numbers of EN wiki admins

[Ryan Delaney]

On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 4:34 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:

> Are you saying that a _declining_ number of administrators means a
> _growth_ in bureaucracy?  It would normally mean the opposite, either
> a loss of control, or that the ordinary members were taking the
> function upon themselves.  What I see is a greater degree of control
> and uniformity, not driven by those in formal positions of authority.


 No, I don't think there is any direct correlation between number of
administrators (which is quantifiable) and growth in 'bureaucracy' (which is
not). I'm referring to a general cultural shift that has occurred in the
past couple years in various places (I could go into detail). "IAR" and the
philosophy behind it is most definitely losing ground on Wikipedia, almost
completely gone, and to the great detriment of people who frankly want to
get shit done. That can be enforced by admins and regular users alike: it
makes no particular difference.

If something I said implied otherwise, I was quite wrong to do so.

On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 7:18 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <abd at lomaxdesign.com>
 wrote:

> At 12:56 AM 6/1/2010, Durova wrote:
> >Let's not mince words: Wikipedia administratorship can be a serious
> >liability.  The 'reward' for volunteering for this educational nonprofit
> can
> >include getting one's real name Googlebombed, getting late night phone
> calls
> >to one's home, and worse.  The Wikimedia Foundation has never sent a cease
> >and desist demand to the people who have made a years-long hobby of
> driving
> >its administrators away.
>
> 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. She might have been desysopped had she not
> resigned, but that would have been a miscarriage of wikijustice. She
> should have been defended, but was not. And why? I've never really
> studied that.
>
> While I've studied and have dealt with administrative abuse, the
> people who are most abused by the Wikipedia system are
> administrators, and that is probably a major source of abusive adminship.
>
> I've argued for clear and strong rules for admin recusal, but what's
> often been missed is that this *protects* administrators from
> becoming over-involved in the mudslinging contests.
>

This is intensely problematic, and the current trend of strict (almost
fanatical) adherence to the principle of administrator non-involvement is a
serious barrier to the functioning of Wikipedia. We talk about how there is
a lot of administrative work to be done, and I'll indicate to you that a
reason there is so much work to be done is that administrators are regularly
being prevented -- even punished! -- for doing it by these kinds of
arbitrary rules. Smart administrators do not do the difficult work of wading
into 'mudslinging contests' and trying to sort them out because the general
community will *not* support them for their efforts, and as in my case, will
actually consider them *responsible* for whatever further ugliness occurs
after their involvement begins.

Administrator non-involvement is supposed to be advisable as a means to
avoid possible conflicts of interest. Arbcom ruled that administrators
should not use their sysop tools to further *their own position* in a
content dispute. This was in my opinion a very wise choice of words, as it
specifies exactly *what* is wrong with administrators using their sysop
tools improperly.

But in fact, non-involvement is interpreted far more broadly by the
community. Administrators are now applying the principle of non-involvement
as a way of saving face -- and their necks, because even the appearance of
impropriety can be fatal where the community in general tends to side
against administrators and assumes that an actual conflict of interest is
occurring whenever an administrator even appears to have one. The result is
that the smart people don't get involved in the hard cases, which creates an
atmosphere of peace, but causes article content to suffer dramatically --
and those admins who don't have that street sense, like me, run afoul of the
rules and get disillusioned and quit. Witch-hunts that result out of
conflict-of-interest complaints are only one of many issues where
administrators have no support at all for what they are doing.

This is a cultural problem that we really could change by coming to defense
of administrators who are the subject of witch-hunts. I'm equally to blame
for this, because I fell to "first they came for the gypsies" syndrome -- I
should have spoken up when it was Durova and others, but I didn't, and then
they came for me. But I can tell you, and I hope you all take this feedback
seriously because most disillusioned admins who lost interest in doing this
hard work won't bother to tell you why they quietly left, or quietly stopped
doing the hard ugly work that nobody wants to do, that there is no reason at
all for an administrator to do the ugly work of dealing with the worst
situations on Wikipedia if they cannot depend on community support.

I still strongly believe in this project and want to help. But only a fool
would continue to work as an administrator in this climate, so I'm gone
until I get some indication that the climate has changed.

- causa sui