User talk:Iridescent

An administrator "assuming good faith" with an editor with whom they have disagreed.

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How Arbcom Works: part 1

February Metro

Simply south...... having large explosions for 5 years 22:53, 5 February 2012 (UTC)

I saw your post ..

... on the Civility AC talk page - great to see you back. I think what you wrote is absolutely fantastic, and well stated. I do hope the post was a consideration of returning to a more full time role here, as your wisdom could surely be appreciated by many. Either way, it was great to see you, and I hope all is well in your real life. — Ched :  ?  16:52, 18 February 2012 (UTC)

I have to say, we really could have used you on the Committee in this case. If nothing else, it might have been interesting to see whether I still would have been solo dissent on one or two things or whether I might at least have had company. Hope all is well. Regards, Newyorkbrad (talk) 17:24, 18 February 2012 (UTC)

What NYB said. Jclemens (talk) 00:17, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, I don't log in a lot, but I still read a lot. And you're still on my watchlist that I never check, Iri., but I checked today, and Ched's post intrigued me so I found what you wrote, and I found it to be rather brilliant. I didn't realize you'd disappeared for most of the winter. Good to see your input and be once again reminded of how remarkably clearly you are able to communicate within a difficult medium (the interwebs). So anyway, just saying. And back to IP I go. :-) Keeper | 76 18:28, 18 February 2012 (UTC)

I'm not back; not only do I not have time, but the more I see of Wikipedia from the vantage point of a semi-detached observer, the more certain I am that the trends I was pointing out a couple of years ago—an obsession with strict compliance over common sense, the increasing domination of policy-wonks, an accelerating decline in the number of editors actually active in content work of any kind, entrenched US west coast and south-east English cultural bias, and simultaneous (and contradictory) unhealthy fixations on the concepts of "anyone can edit" to the point where respected users argue for the unblocking of some of Wikipedia's most disruptive nutjobs because "anyone can edit" and of "disruption warrants blocking" to the point where generally non-problematic users are either blocked from editing or hounded off the site owing to minor breaches of etiquette or personal grudges—have come to dominate the internal workings of Wikipedia to the point where it's becoming impossible to get anything done unless one's a member of one or another privileged clique who'll circle the wagons for you. (Ched, you might want to think long and hard about exactly why you're pushing so hard for the return of Rlevse—who in terms of "time and effort taken to clean up afterwards" is arguably the most disruptive user in Wikipedia's history, and who left such a mess that the cleanup effort is still incomplete 18 months later—but you're not arguing for the return of Ottava, Mattisse, Peter Damian, Kohs, Mbz1 and many more, all of whom were considerably more productive and certainly no more disruptive.)

As all four of you presumably know, I've believed for a long time that Wikipedia's internal systems have failed and that the most pressing action for Arbcom to take is to oversee its own dismantling and replacement with formal and separated structures for dispute resolution and policymaking. Watching the Civility Enforcement mess—where Arbcom ended up painting themselves into a corner in which they were forced to create policy post facto, and then the same people who created the policy had to rule on who had breached said policy despite the fact that it hadn't existed at the time—just drives home how dysfunctional the current system is. (Plus, despite the pseudo-legalese and the best efforts of three of the Arbs to be genuinely impartial, the current system is almost entirely personality driven. As Malleus can confirm, when the list of "arbitrators active on the case" was announced I correctly told him what the findings would be along with voting numbers, based purely on what I know of the interpersonal relationships of the current arbitrators; all the three months of discussion was just window-dressing to give the foregone conclusion some legitimacy. No system should work like this.) While I may make the very occasional reappearance, I don't really see the point in dedicating substantial time to a system which is willfully ripping itself apart.

@Brad—your comments here are thoughtful, but they're missing a very important point. The strict enforcement of "banned means banned" doesn't actually work; the reason it appears to work is that those admins who do enforce it are flat-track bullies. The two highest profile cases of banned users who made significant contributions using sock accounts and then saw those articles deleted thanks to the strict enforcement of WP:CSD#G5 both wrote in low-traffic areas, where the deletion of the articles had no particular impact on Wikipedia. If you (or anyone) genuinely believes that "edits made by banned users must be reverted and any page created by them should be deleted" (which is not what WP:Banning policy actually says), then head on over to Boeing 747 (most of which was written by Dereks1x socks post-ban), and remove everything added by socks. If you're willing to delete River of Renewal: Myth and History in the Klamath Basin but not to stubbify Boeing 747, you need to ask yourself why. – iridescent 14:02, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

You did indeed predict the result spot on. As you say, the case was just three months of window dressing. Malleus Fatuorum 14:14, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

Not necessarily. Might have been an intimate understanding of the issues and then making an assumption that most sober eyes might see it the same way.....or maybe I'll just take off my rose-coloured glasses now. Casliber (talk · contribs) 14:33, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

All that aside, I really worry that the dilemma of COI blows civility out of the....oh bleh. Thanks for the link on the cleanup effort as I think some summary at the end would be good. Casliber (talk · contribs) 14:33, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

Yeah. And I got to this page thanks to the recently banned user Mbz1 [1], heh. ASCIIn2Bme (talk) 19:50, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

• As an experiment in government, Wikipedia is very young. These things need a couple of hundred years to bed in. I do wonder how different it would have been if it had been presented in a different way (with fixed rules for example). I am minded that it actually would have been more productive, as most editors would continue to edit under any vaguely rational set of rules - workplaces and academic institutions get by with plenty of arbitrary rules, and few people expend significant energy getting them changed unless they have a major impact. A few years ago, I worked somewhere that suffered a series of fire alarms from incendiary toast incidents. Faced with a call out bill from the Fire Brigade, management sent someone round to remove all the toasters from the kitchens. In real life, the majority of people don't get drawn into extensive, ongoing arguments about that kind of stuff - a little water cooler whinging, and it's over as far as getting anything changed goes. Wikipedia's mistake was to hold out the prospect that anything could be changed, meaning that nothing can ever be done without heavy collateral damage from people who feel they weren't personally invited to submit their 100kb. Elen of the Roads (talk) 15:07, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

  • • "workplaces and academic institutions get by with plenty of arbitrary rules, and few people expend significant energy getting them changed unless they have a major impact." The options are limited except in exceptional circumstances (pdf, Lomax (1976) "Workers Councils" Socialist Register) resistance to the rules of workplaces and academia is in the final analysis futile. And between 1940 and 1980, in the conditions of full employment, where labour was valued, a toaster was a perfect reason for an eighteen months drawn out shit fight; because any cause was a decent reason for an eighteen months drawn out shit fight with people forcing foreign structures of conduct onto the people who did the work. Fifelfoo (talk) 04:26, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

Not having set-in-stone rules was what got the system started; if Wikipedia had had firm rules in the early days, it would have ended up like Citizendium with a mob of petty tyrants preventing anything getting done. Something Jimmy Wales does deserve full credit for is a willingness to sit back and let things take their course, even when he wants to intervene. However, this openness has now become a millstone around Wikipedia's neck; at some point around 2007 "anyone can edit" came to mean "everyone is of equal value". Thus, Wikipedia has reached the point where (for instance) two of Wikipedia's most highly regarded editors are flinging shit at each other like a pair of bored gibbons owing to a minor spat over who notified whom regarding a potential copyright violation in a WikiCup entry; where another two people who should know a lot better are tossing insults back and forth over whether to retain a one-line substub on a deeply obscure specialist magazine; where brand-new accounts can harangue long-term editors to the point of resignation; and where nobody feels they have the authority to tell them all to knock it off, because "anyone can edit". The more I see of Wikipedia, the more I think it would make sense to raise the autoconfirmed cutoff from three days to three months.

I agree that "Wikipedia's mistake was to hold out the prospect that anything could be changed", but that's only half the story; Wikipedia's real mistake was to give the impression that, since everyone is of equal value, any given editor's personal prejudices were of equal value to those of anyone else, and thus not only "anything can be changed", but anything should be changed. The constant references to WP:FIVE as if it had been carried down from Mount Sinai on stone tablets by Larry Sanger—as opposed to being an essay User:Neutrality knocked off one day about how they thought Wikipedia ought to be run—don't help either, since new users seeing it assume (reasonably) that it describes how Wikipedia works, not how some people feel it ought to work, and get shocked and upset when they see established users failing to follow it. – iridescent 15:37, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I agree with many, though not all of the concerns Iridescent has expressed here and over the years. (Another way of putting things, I think, is that the Wikipedia editor base or community has very weak skills of prioritization.) I just wish (1) I could write about the site's issues as clearly as Iridescent does, (2) that I had a clearer idea than I do about how to address them, and (3) that the issues weren't continuing to drive some of our most thoughtful editors away from the site. Newyorkbrad (talk) 16:25, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

Good luck with that part about editors being driven off. As go MastCell and Iri, go most of us. I, for one, have had all I can take of being shat upon by abusive admins and arbs. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:29, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

I've been where you are now many times Sandy, and if NYB really doesn't know how to tackle the problems here then I say shame on him; it's bloody obvious what's gone wrong here, and it starts with the administrators and their dumbass enforcement of Wikipedia's dumbass pillars. And so far from recognising that blindingly obvious truth are ArbCom that they consider it proper to stifle any criticism of the admin corps at WT:RFA by topic banning me, and effectively disenfranchising me. One might have thought that even a lawyer could see the dangers inherent in such an approach to dealing with criticism. Malleus Fatuorum 18:28, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

You may have been here many times, Malleus, but I was there first :) And in spite of that, I was hopeful that things would change after FeloniousMonk was desysopped, so I spent four stupid years working hours every day in what with hindsight amounted to feeding the very "reward culture" that is part of the problem, knowing all too well what I knew all the way back to the days before I was FAC delegate, when an admin cabal could go after me: if you are an admin or are perceived to have power on Wikipedia, you will not know what it's really like in here, as long as you are "protected" you won't find out how abusive admins with double standards can be. But there is some very good news here: NYB has learned how to say nothing in fewer words than it used to take him (said with all due affection, because I do believe he tries :) :) And again with all due affection, NYB-- if you had to edit in the trenches with the rest of us, I think you'd much more quickly get some very clear ideas of how to address these problems. When you all look at admin abuse, it's not enough to look at just abuse of the tools: they abuse just as well with threats to use the tools, and by smearing regular editors with impunity whenever they damn well feel like it. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:19, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

Once again, Iridescent set a very good and principled example by giving up the tools for a year and doing exactly that, editing like a regular user. I invite NYB to follow that example; it may clarify his thoughts. Malleus Fatuorum 19:38, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

...but he'll still be NYB, just as iridescent was iridescent when he was not an admin.....I am not sure that is the way to go. Casliber (talk · contribs) 20:09, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

Well, I am sure. Try editing articles as opposed to pontificating, find out what it's really like in the trenches. Malleus Fatuorum 20:14, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

I don't understand that comment, Cas ... it took 'em six years to beat me down to a place of no hope. He would still be NYB for a while, yes, it takes a while to have it beaten the hell out of you-- so, where do you think you would be today (in terms of having any hope) if you faced an MDD FAC every single day you edited? Even when you tried to just go do your own work and stay out of other people's way. If that person were still hounding you, every where you went, every thing you did, and nobody helped. Etc ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:21, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

He wouldn't be the same NYB for very long, guaranteed. Malleus Fatuorum 20:27, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure what an "MDD FAC" is, but it sounds painful. --MZMcBride (talk) 21:03, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

It was. And those who need to know, do. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:04, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

Ok McBride, you're a clever cookie, I'll give you 24 hours and see if you can figure it out. Use your deductive skills. :) Casliber (talk · contribs) 00:28, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

There's probably a very good reason why Casliber goes off to a quiet corner of Wikipedia to work on his mushrooms. I'm sometimes jealous of editors whose articles get 30 page views a day, and one edit a year. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:58, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

Re: "While I may make the very occasional reappearance, I don't really see the point in dedicating substantial time to a system which is willfully ripping itself apart."

You chose to run for adminship (and you're still an admin here). You chose to run for ArbCom. Most editors don't do this. Most editors quietly and peacefully edit articles.

The more the Wikimedia Foundation grows and expands, the less I like it. But it's not as though I came here to Wikipedia to work for the Wikimedia Foundation (or Jimmy Wales or anyone else), so it doesn't really matter, does it? Wikipedia is about the content; as someone once said, without the content, Wikipedia would just be Facebook for ugly people. ;-) There's a difference between being involved in the inane, political bullshit and editing articles or uploading images or doing other types of content work.

Simply, I don't accept your premise that dedicating time (substantial or not) to this project is a bad idea. Like nearly anything else, it's simply a matter of how you choose to spend your time. --MZMcBride (talk) 21:03, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

I was kinda following you .. until ... ummm, we are working for the WMF now. Like it or not, and it does affect us. In my area of editing, we are getting killed by their efforts to recruit students who are editing and damaging medical articles-- quantity over quality, and that is precisely what is making Wikipedia least enjoyable for me right now. Cleaning up copyvio and POV and all manner of crap after editors who are doing it for a grade and won't stick around. The rest is little stuff. Medical topics that are damaging children's health and welfare is not "inane, political bullshit", and we have no equivalent of a BLP policy to protect them. Novice editors can plop in all the primary-sourced, dangerous POV they want, and there's little an individual can do about it. In the medical realm, Wikipedia has gotten too dangerous to walk away from. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:09, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

"Wikipedia has gotten too dangerous to walk away from". That's a very interesting perspective, and returning to NYB one of the things he has to come to terms with is his long-term advocacy of pre-teen administrators. Which has contributed to the mess we're in today. Give up the tools for a year, see what damage your spawn has done. Malleus Fatuorum 21:31, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

Edit conflict, to Sandy: I know we've talked about this quite a bit, but maybe it's time to develop a BLP-equivalent policy dealing with medical content. There's ample evidence that Wikipedia's medical content is widely read, and the potential for real-life harm dwarfs that associated with BLP violations. But there are no real protections for people who go to the mat for quality (or at least not-actively-dangerous) medical content. If we could tap into even a fraction of the self-righteousness that's grown up around BLP issues and harness it in the interest of heading off potentially dangerous medical content, Wikipedia would be a better place. MastCell ^Talk 21:34, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Well, it sounds as though you're making arguments to continue editing, not stop. I think we agree there.

If the Wikimedia Foundation is making a mess, tell them to clean it up. :-) I'm not sure why the burden would be on anyone but them or why anyone else would volunteer to fix their mess. They're paying people to do that recruiting. If it's resulting in damage to the encyclopedia, it absolutely should be stopped, using whatever tools necessary. --MZMcBride (talk) 21:34, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

But it won't be, because the WMF's focus is on quantity, not quality. Malleus Fatuorum 21:41, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

MZM, you're not getting it-- I guess I'm not explaining well. The WMF won't fix it-- for starters, they don't care to, and for seconds, they wouldn't know how to even if they were willing. I'm not talking about trivial medical topics: I'm talking about complicated neuroimmunology and medical sources that even those well versed in the topic have a hard time working with. It's not "damage to the encyclopedia" that worries me-- it is damage to the health of real people caused by POV and inaccurate medical information on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is widely read-- POV warriors and advocates know how to use it to push quackery, often dangerously so. We have adequate medical sourcing policy guidelines (WP:MEDRS), but when POV warriors chunk in primary sources, we can't revert as we can with the protection we have on BLPS. So the time it takes to keep the articles medically accurate is a burden. We need a policy for medical articles that is the equivalent of our BLP policy, that gives MEDRS some teeth. WMF's solution is to recruit new editors who chunk in more copyvio and primary sources, because they have an agenda, are unknowledgeable in general, or don't understand primary vs secondary sources. In the neuropysch realm, just about every new editor who shows up has a POV agenda. Now, that's just one piece of what I deal with in daily editing-- on top of the admin abuse even when I'm minding my own business. I've also got one admin who follows me around and is convinced every word I write is about her, and periodically shows up to "warn" me ... and there's more. I wonder if anyone who isn't really in the trenches of article editing can understand the daily toll. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:52, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

WMF has been able to implement whatever half-thought-out "experiment" they like, based on the assumption that there is plenty of free labor to fix things if they go wrong. So far their assumption has been roundly confirmed. As long as folks continue enabling WMF by cleaning up their messes, they have no incentive to stop making messes. Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 22:46, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

That's a good point, or at least half of one, because I remain unconvinced that they recognise the messes they create, far less the effort required to clear them up. Malleus Fatuorum 22:58, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

agree about MEDRS - we've got the guideline, it's a matter of making editors more aware of it. Maybe a piece in the signpost? Casliber (talk · contribs) 00:31, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

I think it needs a different emphasis, at least in the introduction. If you read BLP, it's very forceful about accuracy and sourcing etc. in its opening, it reads very differently than MEDRS. Put a little urgency into the policy, and then urge administrators to enforce it more forcefully. There's no Siegenthaler incident to put it into everyone's mind, so that'll have to be done the hard way. Nathan ^T 02:10, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

The real problem is that most new editors never even read the page, so how it's written might not help much. I've been dealing for three days with one editor who won't respond on user talk or article talk, but keeps on chunking in primary sources with POV text that is contradicted by secondary reviews. And I've been dealing for one year with another advocate whom I have educated about MEDRS, who simply created a POV fork with primary sources to avoid having to source correctly. Admins don't typically get involved or even always understand content disputes. GA and DYK regularly promote medical articles that don't comply with MEDRS, and the lack of awareness is everywhere. Nobody reads The Signpost (the last time they bashed me, their readership was about half of what my talk page gets). In short: it can't be enforced more forcefully unless we have a policy similar to BLP, where we can shoot poorly sourced medical information on sight. It reads differently because it's a sourcing guideline, not a policy like BLP. Because it's a guideline, and because there are times when judicious use of primary sources is indicated, we have no policy akin to BLP that allows us to enforce strictly, so we have to spend hours, days and weeks dealing with advocates or axe grinders or the merely unaware who use primary sources to support POV. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:37, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

Forgive my passing comment, but I would strongly support the idea of promoting WP:MEDRS to policy and giving it the same enforcement "teeth" as WP:BLP. You make a convincing argument, Sandy. Bad medical information is just as bad, if not worse, than libelous material on living persons. Both have the potential to do immediate harm to innocent people. What's the best way to go about making this happen? –Grondemar 02:44, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

I don't really know how to answer that, Grondemar; I'm not that well versed in how to get a guideline elevated to policy, but I do know it ain't easy. All of the medical editors "in the trenches" have agreed for years that we need this, but I just skimmed the TimidGuy arbcase and see that MEDRS was an issue there, and I see some alarming issues in that case. The numbers of knowledgeable medical editors are declining as we give up in despair (eg MastCell, me, Eubulides is gone, and we're just stretched too thin), while the number of POV warriors and advocates who want to use primary sources incorrectly grows all the time. I witnessed one case at FAC where an editor who realized an article was going to have to have some primary-sourced POV removed and replaced with secondary review sources if she wanted the article promoted FA, so she withdrew the FAC nomination (you can get your google hits with POV without the FA star). There may be some opposition to strengthening of MEDRS, so I don't know how to launch a policy proposal effectively. And I'm not even sure how it would be written, because there are some cases when primary sources are appropriate. And most admins can't or don't know how to enforce MEDRS, in fact, don't know how to distinguish a primary study from a secondary review. The best person for this job is User:Colin, but most medical editors these days are just ... exhausted. We've had to deal with the whole malformed student editor recruitments for a year ... I am glad you cared enough to ask, though. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:54, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

No, their worst fears have been confirmed, namely that the clueless old curmudgeons fight them! It took me a while to find out what the WP:ACTRIAL that Sue mentioned here was about. ASCIIn2Bme (talk) 01:47, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

Apparently I missed that proposal. So, if I'm understanding you, the community agreed on something in a widely supported poll that would help us deal with the problems mentioned above, but WMF refused to uphold what the community had agreed upon? Is that how it went, or am I missing something? So, what did Sue Gardner have to say? (I'm hoping you'll save me from watching that whole dreadful presentation again.) At the same time, the WMF recruits students without ample supervision and based on no community input or feedback, with results that make us all miserable. What the heck. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:16, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

(to Iridescent, waaaay back above) You are probably the best person to actually propose such reforms. While I grant that you don't have the time, those of us currently trying to do the committee's day-to-day work are hamstrung by that workload. Even assuming that actual membership on the committee doesn't impose a myopic outlook on its structure and problems, the workload is both a split in attention and loyalty. What you have that no one else has (except the sitting committee and recently retired arbs like Coren and John Vandenberg) is an insider's view of what the workload actually entails. On that basis, I think you have the best combination of credibility and support, if you can find the time to put a proposal together. Cheers, Jclemens (talk) 03:47, 25 February 2012 (UTC)