QUOTE(Maunus @ Tue 13th December 2011, 8:41pm)
QUOTE(SB_Johnny @ Tue 13th December 2011, 8:05pm)
Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with telling a moron to fuck off (assuming the guy deserved it, which I can't be bothered to look into), I'm not sure how that illustrates good-guy-ness.
Well, I'm not particularly proud of any of that. But that particular guy had been nagging me over several days where he was continously borderline uncivil and doing the "oh but you're an admin (and everybody knows and all admins are assholes) so I expect power abuse so I'll comply but your wrong and I'm right " passive/aggressive schtick, basically baiting me as much as he could, and making it painfully clear that he'd cry "admin abuse" if I made any use of the tools in his neck of the wiki. The suggestion to fuck himself was a response to this last message of his
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=465472806This coupled with the fuss over a completely legitimate block I made which I refused to undo because I believed and believe it was solid (while I had said I didn't mind other people to unblock) - it made me think that the kit wasn't really worth the hassle.
So that's why I decided to loose the toolkit and tell the asshole what he needed to hear. But I'd like to note for the record that I was not an admin when I said that to him. Basically I think admin-haters like you guys are making it worse for wikipedia rather than better - only people who don't give a fuck about what people think can tolerate the abuse that's thrown at them and sane people either don't run for admin or give it up.
"Involved admin" is the most ridiculous crap accusation you can throw at people - it is basically a get out of free card you can use if the same admin happens to catch you with the hands in the cookie jar twice. Wikipedia will have the administrators it deserves.
Hmm. Well... there's basically so many dysfunctional aspects of Wikipedia at work here, some of them intersecting with each other, some of them offsetting each other, some of them amplifying each other in both negative or positive ways, that's it's really hard to comment on specific individual cases.
Admin-hating is there for a reason - the competency or intelligence level of the average admin is well below what one would expect from any decently run internet forum (so here the standard of comparison is other internet forums out there, which, to be perfectly honest, is a pretty low threshold), never mind any real world organization. Given this ... dullness, of your average admin, it's particularly grating that the mop gets given for life and that once they get it, it's a "you'll pry the admin privileges from my dead cold hands" kind of thing (you're proving yourself to be a notable exception - but that's more or less an actual quote there). It's essentially feudal. And on top of that the whole process by which admins get chosen is admitted to be completely wack by EVERYONE, even by Wikipedia insiders. Everyone know's it's fucked yet no one wants to do anything about it. The end result is that you get a bunch of know-nothing 16 years old - or their older equivalents - who have never done shit for the encyclopedia harassing and abusing people who actually have written most of it. But hey. Judging by the latest, it's pretty obvious that they take their ques from the top, with Jimbo trashing on Cla68 and mocking his 'track record'.
An the whole "involved admin" card. Yes, yes, yes. It gets abused. The first... the zero pillar of Wikipedia is that "any policy, no matter how sensible in its intent, can and will be gamed, and this applies to WP:GAME as well". If you didn't have trully involved admins, who are buddies with some certain users, plain ol' axes to grind or just simply being part of an established "good ol' boys network" (I think the word "cabal" is more traditional) showing up to various drama boards and, with a straight face, engaging in pharisee levels of hypocrisy and lying by saying shit like "I am not really familiar with this matter but..." then this would never come up.
And you're very much looking at it from the "me, the oh so pure innocent abused admin" point of view. Maybe that's what you are. But that's not what most are, and that's why you get suspected by the nature of your status. But think of it this way - you do some admin action against a particular user, they complain that you're involved ... what's the worst that will happen to you? Your block will get reversed? Someone might say the awful words "you were wrong"? Ok. That's what usually happens. Whining about this kind of thing is essentially complaining about the fact that someone didn't "respectah your authority" enough. But think of it from the complainer's point of view, even if they're wrong. If they get abused by a truly involved admin, what recourse do they have? Basically, at that point they're fucked (unless they have a meaningful mailing list to back them up... (don't pay attention to that, that's old news)) They loose they're editing privileges, they get slandered, their name is shit from then on. Now, maybe... 7 out of 10 times the "involved admin" really is "uninvolved", but the other three is enough to really ruin it for a whole lot of people who probably gave a lot to the encyclopedia only to see themselves shat on and thrown away.
You're very much thinking about things in terms of you social class here. You're smart enough to realize that there are problems but still can't make sense of why it's happening. Well, it's a start.
Anyway, finish your studies first, and good luck.