 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
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This user feels that out of process deletions subject to an administrator's whims rather than consensus damage Wikipedia more than any userbox ever could. |
| meta | This editor is a metapedianist. |
| This editor is a deletionist. |
| anti-pedo | This user will continue the fight to remove all pro pedo material from wiki |
| Civility | This user will continue the fight to restore the civility of wikipedia |
| Majority Rule | This user will continue the fight to remove radicals from power |
- Because I am mourning the loss of civility and and the loss of too many good editors from the Wikipedia.
- Because the Wikipedia has become a victim of its own success and its internal mechanisms for helping maintain civility have not scaled well.
- Requests for comments now generates more heat than light.
- Even some members of the Mediation Committee admit that it is not working and skip Requests for mediation and go on to the next step.
- Finally there is Requests for arbitration, which takes forever to make decisions, and seemingly refuses to take on the bad behavior of some administrators unless the admin's behavior is so egregious that it can't ignore it.
- I will not even attempt to enumerate the other dysfunctional areas of the Wikipedia, such as Articles for deletion.
Just one part of the solution: There are some editors who don't necessarily need to be banned, but just need a time out, which is why the Wikipedia has a temporary blocking process. Well admins are editors too, and they also occasionally step over the bounds of appropriate behavior for editors. What is worse is that they can use their admin tools to do their misbehavior.
Right now there is no quick and effective way to punish a misbehaving administrator or even stop their misbehavior. If another admin blocks them, they can unblock themself. If an article is protected, they can edit it anyway. If they are in a revert war, they can continually use their rollback tool. And they can do all of this basically with impunity.
Because admins are trusted members of the Wikipedia community I feel that their misbehavior must be taken more seriously than those actions of other editors. There needs to be a small group of trusted supervisor administrators who have the ability to temporarily block misbehaving admins from doing any editing for periods of time up to a week and removal of admin powers for at least a month based upon the severity of the misbehavior. Any further misbehavior would be grounds for permanent removal as an administrator and they would have to reapply at Requests for adminship.
- (Also, the number of admins is growing so large, and the Wikipedia is growing so complex, that it would be a very good idea to have volunteer "mentor" admins to help show the newbie admins the lay of the land.)
Look at the Requests for adminship page. It says, "Admins...are held to high standards, as they are perceived by some users as the "official face" of Wikipedia." Unfortunately the first part of that statement is not true. Instead, because they are admins, they can do practically anything they want without facing any consequences in almost all cases of admin misbehavior. Because they are admins they are given much more slack than other Wikipedia editors for any of their misbehavior. This needs to be changed.
Many good wikipedians have left the community because the lack of civility. Articles that break the NPOV rule are nominated as good articles, Overzealous editors and vandals are given respect, and spam is protected. I liked wiki in the beginning because the concept was good. I will not leave I will restore the civility and the removal of all material that is NPOV including anti-piracy Propaganda, Pro-Pedo Propaganda and other forms of POV articles
When I first found out about the Wikipedia my first thought was "Wow! That's a great idea". But then, when I visited topics that I was familiar with, I found that many of them were woefully inadequate for an encyclopedia. There were topics that didn't have articles yet. Many of the articles that I found were just stubs. Even larger articles were missing important information. Too many articles had factual errors.
So I decided to join in this noble experiment. I started editing—anonymously first, but then quickly getting a user account. If I had just kept to those topics I was most familiar with, things might have been different, but even there I had one very odd run-in with another editor, which should have given my a clue about how the Wikipedia really works.
But I wanted to help, to make the Wikipedia better. I saw other things that needed work, and so I started to get more involved in the "backstage" stuff in the Wikipedia namespace. Sure, I realized that there were problems, but I thought that things could be improved, just as any Wikipedia article could be improved.
It took me way too long to realize the underlying facts about the way the Wikipedia works. In this libertarian anarchy, any process is only as functional as it's most dysfunctional participant. What that means is that in too many areas the inmates are in charge of the asylum.
Sooner or later someone or some group will take a look at this experiment and will figure out how to avoid most of the problems that exist on the Wikipedia. They will fork things off to build a better user-edited internet encyclopedia and the Wikipedia will be replaced. Until then, I wish the best of luck to all the nice (and sane) users on the Wikipedia I have met and hope that they can help make the Wikipedia function more effectively. I, however, have decided that I can find better things to do with my spare time and am leaving. --GK
I think that his writings were right. Except I want to help restore the expiriment.
I do not see it as acceptable to have advertisements, whether they be for brand identity or for a product, on Wikipedia. It appears that this line has [1]been breached, and those involved, including several on the foundation board and employees, many of whom I respect, see things differently. I understand their position, but cannot accept it as the future of a project that I will continue to contribute my time to.--Improv