On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 3:11 PM, Emily Monroe <bluecalioc...@me.com> wrote: >> Firstly, that powers to ban indefinitely have been devolved (sort >> of) from ArbCom to the admins as a group (the qualification being >> that ArbCom cannot ban anyone indefinitely). > First off, thanks for the history lesson. No, I'm not being sarcastic, > really, thanks. > >> In short, the checks and balances can fail where people are >> unscrupulous and/or are too vested in getting rid of a particular >> editor who is not a classic vandal but something else. > Good point. This actually interferes with accessibility to people who > are disabled (usually cognitively or emotional disabled) or from > different, perhaps non-English cultures. Both of these can interfere > with competence required to edit Wikipedia, and also with being > accepted in Wikipedia.
To add to this - People who are causing a problem but have "aware friends" - people who know them and know AN and ANI and policy ok - rarely get driven off. Their friends post an ANI thread if they're blocked excessively, or go to the admin and advocate moderation, or go to another administrator and advocate moderation, etc. Once one becomes known to someone in that set of people, actually "driving someone away from Wikipedia" becomes exponentially more difficult, if anyone supports the problem case at all. What we are missing is that the vast majority of cases of someone getting run off aren't visible to anyone who's active or experienced enough. Nobody is generally following non-admins around looking for them being self-appointed gatekeepers who are behaving abusively, and there's little QA / review for admin actions practically except where the "aware friends" issue comes into play. I almost wish we had an admin action review board, whose job it was to say just quickly look at some fraction (10%? 1%?) of all admin actions and see if they're documented, justified, reasonable etc and give the admins feedback, request more writeup, ask for reconsideration etc. Key question - in terms of hostility, do people think that hostility to new editors is more from admins, more from self appointed gatekeepers, more from normal users interacting hostiley in a small article space? -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l