Hi Mr. Goodman, I think you are talking about me when you mention the genius that sometimes accompanies valuable and important people who unfortunately tend to put on displays of individualistic irascibility that are unacceptable. As Manhattan Samurai, I was one of the best at this. I'm fortunate that I was eventually kicked off the English Wikipedia and most of my work progressively deleted. You'll now find my bibliography of William Monahan much improved at Squidoo, along with a web page about Dining Late with Claude La Badarian:
http://www.squidoo.com/William_Monahan_Bibliography http://www.squidoo.com/Claude-La-Badarian I even have a blog: http://nypress-studies.blogspot.com/ Keep on truckin' Bill ________________________________ From: David Goodman <dgoodma...@gmail.com> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org> Sent: Wed, July 14, 2010 2:06:03 AM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Admin / experienced user flameout - how do we talk people down off the ledge? Frankly, I see that as unwarranted pessimism. The sets of people who want to change things and people who want to cause trouble are not identical, though there is a substantial intersection. Admins who have the lack of judgement to try to force their desired change into policy by using their arbitrary power of their ability to bully people, are at least as much a problem as the over-conformist. Indeed, I think it my role as an admin to be a conformist, and do only what is generally supported. When I want to work to get something different, that has to be done without the presumed immunities and special power of an administrator. To a certain extent the role does require tolerated the other admins, but that is just analogous to the requirement that an editor tolerate other editors. In both cases, the difficulty is that we have no usable sanctions until things become outrageous. Mild disapproval over the distance of the internet is very easy for someone to ignore entirely, until they have gotten themselves into an impossible position. My personal view remains that we should not tolerate insult even from the best and most established editors or administrators. A more civilized environment in these respects will help us get many addition new good editors and administrators to replace the ones who can not work in an acceptable fashion. Joining in a collective work is not the place for displace of individualistic irascibility, even when accompanied by genius--such people are very important and very valuable, but they should be working creatively-- and independently. On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 9:54 PM, geni <geni...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 14 July 2010 02:07, FT2 <ft2.w...@gmail.com> wrote: >> The expectations upon admins are the pivot point for that. See [[ >> User:FT2/RfA <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:FT2/RfA>]]. >> >> Any ideas how we can get somewhere like that? >> >> FT2 >> > > Well to start with you could chuck your requirements out of the > window. Your requirements like most at RFA are selecting for 3 things > > 1)some degree of editing skill > 2)Not appearing to cause trouble > 3)A decent set of wikipolitics skill > > > It's two and three that cause the problem. Anyone whith a decent set > of wikipolitics skills is going to archive 2 by playing safe going > along with the flow and not challenging things. Almost anyone actually > passing RFA is going to have got into the habit of going along with > the ah "bad faith combined with mob justice". The people who might > actually try to challenge such things are unlikely to pass RFA because > either they lack the wikipolitics skills needed in order to pass (you > would tend to fail them under the "nor into politicking" clause among > others) or because they are not prepared to use them in a way that > would let them pass. > > Upshot is that we have for some years now been promoting a bunch of > admins who will go with the flow rather than challenge low level bad > behavior by admins and long standing users. The tiny number of rebels > and iconoclasts left are from years ago and have little to day to day > stuff. > > -- > geni > > _______________________________________________ > WikiEN-l mailing list > WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l > -- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
