Filll has asked for some input about his AGF Challenge

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Filll/AGF_Challenge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Filll/AG...Multiple_Choice - Multiple Choice Version
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Filll/AG...lenge_Exercises - Essay Version

And apparently Kim Bruning proposed that some of these should be incorporated into the standard RFA questions, could this be the end of "adminship is no big deal" (Well...ok...that idea died long ago).

I had only been editing in Filll's backyard for about a week when he decided the time had come to BITE me hard...



So much for AGF, eh?

Tragic ironies never cease within Wikipedia's circle.

I note how Durova and Filll have made something of a WikiCareer out of building "games" based on the day-to-day fulfillment of the Wikipedia project. I've already noted how and why Durova can't be trusted "within" the game, so I suspect Filll is probably more of the same.

Do any of them have day jobs?

Greg

That ideology died a long time ago...before I started editing actively (April last year). Now, it's so big a deal candidates need to take a pop quiz on every.darn.policy if they want a chance. At least these questions are interesting (for the candidate and the voter).

I presume Filll is quite young as he doesn't seem to understand certain aspects of Wikipedia editing, or how to create a credible body of work.

I've no idea why he wants Wikpedia Reviewers to answer the questions, though I suspect he is still smarting about Moulton's appearance on the PM show, and the multiple choice questions are in some way designed with him in mind.

Can these Wikipedians comprehend the idea that many prolific Wikipedia Reviewers have either never edited WP, or never wanted to edit WP, or when they did edit WP, did so without controversy being significantly more productive than Filll himself before becoming disillusioned for their own reasons? So would have to answer "other" to each question anyway.

I guess if it were called "The Straw Man Challenge," at least it would have the benefit of not having such a misleading title.

There are no options in the Straw Man quiz for the answer:

...which would surely be the only serious response to any of the questions.

The underlying reason for this massive instruction creep is that it's nearly impossible to desysop administrators. Therefore, we must ask them every conceivable question before trusting them with the bit. None of this does much good, however, because once passing, an administrator can act (or not) as he pleases regardless of the answers to these questions. The bottom line is that administrators remain nearly completely unaccountable for their actions and inactions. A better system would be to state in very clear terms what's expected, both what must be done and what must not be done, and sack anyone who falls short of these expectations. Administrators should be desysoped about as often as good faith contributors are blocked. Correspondingly, it should be easier to be resysoped when the issue is addressed.

We have documented many cases where admins claim to be open to recall, only to change their minds when people take them at their word.

Forgot where I read it, but it said something along the lines of:

Bureaucracy increases 15% in every company every year (or was it 5%? I forget )

Basically you're seeing a bloating of the bureaucracy and how it is bogging down the system.

“Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work”

Albert Einstein

Yes, and amazing responses to these situations which boil down to: yes, he/she lied to gain adminship, however, there is no wikipolicy which prohibits lying to gain adminship, or specifies what can be done in those cases. Therefore, nothing can be done.

What a joke. Judging by the comments to JzG's RFC's here are some better questions:

1) An editor has been naughty, should you:

a) tell them to "fuck off"
b) call them a "cunt"
c) call them a "twat"

2) Your incivility is the subject of an RFC, should you:

a) participate and agree to amend your ways
b) ignore the RFC and continue engaging in the same uncivil behaviour
c) tell everyone to "fuck off"

Here is a charming comment I received from Jim Schuler (User:Jim62sch) in the course of my RfC, which he gracriously shared with Bob Stevens (User:Filll) and Tim Makinson (User:Hrafn)...

AGF is one of the overrated policies, especially with regards to pandering to people. I wrote the MAYPOLE essay to show flaws with where it disrupts the flow.

Granted, I failed my RFA because I told David Shankbone's stalker to "fuck off", and I told a POV-pushing troll to "shut the hell up". But in those cases, do they really need people to smile and say "uh, what you're doing is wrong, please don't do that or we might... [dramatic gerbil stare] file a request for lynching comment!"

If you were in a professional environment in public services and talked to people like that, you'd be severely disciplined. Librarians and teachers have to deal with far, far worse in the real world every week.

If you want to be an administrator, please adopt a modicum of adult, professional behavior when addressing the public, or get out of the business.

Since when was being a Wikipedia admin professional or adult?

In the spirit of AGF Exercises, here is one that I invite Proabivouac and others to take a look at. It illustrates my own effort to assume good faith (of ConfuciusOrnis and others), when such good faith probably wasn't warranted at that stage of the game.

The AGF Challenge Multiple Choice section requires a final question...


An admin 'in good standing' (snort!) has been repeatedly engaging in sockpuppeteering, bullying of other editors, rampant sneering invective & incivility, WP:OWNing BLPs to protect their blatant POV pushing & libels, wielding the banhammer with wild abandon against anyone they see fit to with or without an iota of cause, lying, abusing checkuser & oversight, continually conspiring with others of their ilk across backchannels to make sure they can all get away with this kind of crap forever, killing baby kittens and pulling the do not remove tags from pillows and mattress'

Do you....


(1) Assume Good Faith where there demonstrably is none?

(2) Err...?

(3) .........

(4) PROFIT! (?)

DRAMATIC GERBIL STARE:



Face it Sceptre, you didn't know it at the time but you were being fed the red pill. Can you believe you actually wanted to be an admin?

That is one of those disconnects that Wikipedians have with the real world. Anyone, anywhere, dealing with disputes knows that if the aim is to de-escalate, then politeness is more effective than rudeness... and politeness does not mean not swearing, it is the whole kit and caboodle.

Vandals get bored if you either ignore or quietly fix the problem. Make a fuss and they win, and are encouraged to do it again. So rudeness is unlikely to work against vandals.

With intelligent people, where there is a mis-understanding, a polite approach will typically elicit a reasoned response, although we can acknowledge that where there are misunderstandings, it may take a few interactions to get to a common understanding, and initially the person being dealt with may not share the same reasonable approach.

With unreasonable people, neither a polite or impolite approach may work, however, at least a polite approach sets an example and encourages others around not to join in.

I've had some 25 years experience on public forums, including admin roles. I can assure you that the game of putting on a facade of politeness in the face of unreasonable behaviour is very enjoyable, even as you sit swearing at the screen in the privacy of your own home, especially when you get the result of a resolution. It does not take long for the atmosphere to pervade, a tone is set, people follow your example, and the place becomes pleasant.

If your aim is that you have no wish to deal with people because you have a presumption that they are evil trolls, then as you are going to ban them anyway, and you are not going to take the consequences of your actions, then it doesn't really matter what the fuck you do, and fuck the rules because you are going to do what you know is best. Just hope you don't meet your clone the next time you sign on.

Regardless of vandals, I reckon Wikipedia could still become a pleasant and constructive place if, from the top down, everyone followed a be polite policy. It would not require any bans, or sanctions, simply that every time someone said something harsh, someone else picked them up on it and said, "Sorry Guy, regardless of provocation, it is not our policy to be rude to people. Please don't do it again." Over time, the right atmosphere is generated. Currently, vocally supporting Guy and MONGO's WEDONTLIKEYOU approach is generating more admins who think that being hard and controversial is a Good Thing.

Precisely so. See Cultivation Theory. Impressionable people adopt the behavioral norms of the culture in which they reside, especially the practices of those in dominant or leadership roles.

(5) Leave a note on JoshuaZ's page congratulating him on getting away with it?

LOL!



Erm, isn't that called WP:CIVIL?

And I agree of course.

Well I don't think it is, because WP:CIVIL is applied as a bastardised version of politeness where as long as you don't swear or directly accuse someone of something, this is thought to be acceptable behaviour, even in the face of blatant provocation. CIVIL is Wiki-lawyering, politeness is getting on as well as you can.

Put another way, it is that looking glass world of Wikipedia, where words never quite mean what you hoped they meant. In WP, CIVIL is a way of getting someone blocked.

By Jimbo, I think he's got it!

Yep. I managed to hang around for around a year before I had the honor of running into Filll and being repeatedly attacked as a supposed creationist.




I never have quite figured out what I did to earn his hatred. I had intended on just chiming in about a minor wording change. It wasn't terribly important, but I can sometimes be mildly anal about using language precisely. My refusal to be trolled for any length of time only seemed to piss him off, though.

Filll seems to be attempting to show that people who espouse civility are fools (per item 1 on his purpose statement page), but few of the scenarios have much to to with actual AGF... at least, not more so than any other situation. AGF is a method of communicating that helps avoid escalation of conflicts, like the classic "I statements", and not, for the most part, a course of action. It's not necessarily about solving problems, but not creating more ones.

A good example is his exchange with me. Typically, I'm one of the most laid-back people in existence. If he'd politely disagreed, rather than attack me based on some false assumption, I probably would have just moved on. However, his incivility made him memorable, so when I saw him do the same to others... as in the case of Moulton's problems, I wasn't exactly eager to take Filll's side. I'm not interested in holding grudges. I'd just like to see him stop treating others that way.


That and, of course, CIVIL only applies to editors we don't like, otherwise it's time to circle the wagons.

I was somewhat mystified and perplexed by his harsh and hostile attitude, as well.

But there is one thing that sticks in my mind. When Bob called me on his SkypeOut line to discuss my concerns last August, he laid out for me his view of the Discovery Institute (which up to that time I had never even heard of). He described them as extremely right wing. I don't recall if he also used the term "fascistic" but I clearly recall that he characterized them as right wing. And so I presumed Bob was of the opposite stripe, left-leaning liberal-minded.

And yet his RfC was one of the most fascistic tactics I've ever had the displeasure to be subjected to. It was as if he had become a mirror image of the right wing monster he was presumably fighting against.


Me too. Which is why I wrote those Op-Ed pieces and blog posts before I knew about this site.

I think there is some common ground that the Wikipedian society is somewhat dysfunctional.

I think that with good leadership, it could be fixed. It is the sort of thing that WMF should be doing. They should be looking at this issue, realising there is something going wrong, and dictating that it should be fixed. That might mean some structural changes, but mainly it should mean that those given authority to police Wikipedia, the admins, are held to a high standard. If the admins do not wish to be held to that high standard, or they feel that it is not something that is within their abilities, they should set aside their representation of Wikipedia, and carry on in the project without that burden of representation. Simply put, it should not be an optional extra to be polite when being an administrator - there is nothing special about Wikipedia that makes good practice in the real world inapplicable there.

The other thing I would change in short order is the casual banning of people for long periods of time for incidental rudeness. A mate of mine who was in a pub. The young staff were chatting, serving their mates, not doing their job, and after five minutes or so watching this, he called across "Excuse me. What do I have to do to get served at this bar?" At this point, the landlady, who had been present the whole time and was herself not helping, simply said, "I will not have my staff spoken to like that. You're barred!" That is a lot like Wikipedia.

And yes, the words to support all this are already in policy. It is just that, from the top, the message went out that the policy does not apply to the most "important" people in the project.

Moulton it is the faceless, voiceless internet that encourages this sort of behaviour unfortunately. I doubt these people act this way in real life.

Well, it's true I've never seen his face. But we've both heard each other's voices -- initially by phone and more recently on NTWW.

It is by no means endemic to the right to feel that it's okay to step on a few people along the way to making one's point.

Could somebody kindly apprise me of the point he was trying to make?

Perhaps I should have written, "It is by no means endemic to the right wing…"

Yah, I know you meant "right wing" but my question still stands.

I never did grasp the point he was trying to make by stomping on me with that RfC.

Was he trying to demonstrate how Wikipedia reprises the Spammish Inquisition?

I meant the point they're making in mainspace about evolution vs. creationism, the Discovery Institute, etc. You stood between them and making it.

I don't particularly care if they want to attack the Discovery Institute, although Wikipedia seems a strange place to do that. The DI is a public relations and political action site pushing a political agenda that goes against what I would personally like to see in the way of quality science education in our public schools.

The DI might be pitching creationism vs evolution, but evolution isn't even about the origin of life. Science doesn't even have a good theory for how life got started. Science classes should teach what science knows, with emphasis on how scientific theories are tested and improved.

Stuff which science hasn't figured out yet (and there's a lot of it) should be talked about to explain that these are frontiers, and it's anybody's guess. I'm gonna guess that someday a reasonable theory of abiogenesis will emerge. But that's just what I want to be true. It's not yet a scientific theory. Mebbe it will turn out that life drifted to this planet on cosmic dust, making it even harder to figure out where and how it originated.

You just can't put people on a simple left-right spectrum. There are left-wingers who are pro and anti-immigration, pro and anti-pornography and the same for right-wingers.

Retributive Justice vs Restorative Justice

The distinguishing feature that I have in mind is not in terms of which legislative programs they are for or against, but how they envision acculturation to and enforcement of community norms -- hard line crime and punishment regulatory models (a la the fascistic Spammish Inquisition) vs compassionate integration into an enlightened cultural norm (e.g Social Contract Model in a Congenial and Collegial Culture).

I still find this funny. I'm getting old or something.

I see; hard line crime and punishment (Stalin, Mao) is left-wing and an enlightened cultural norm (Konrad Adenauer) is right-wing.

Mebbe that's why left vs right never made much sense to me.