Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 09:49, 6 December 2008

Purpose

So what is the purpose of this page, exactly? To watch admins? How do you intend for it to work? – How do you turn this on (talk) 13:25, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Are you stalking me? Tony (talk) 14:03, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Er... no, I just noticed you mentioned the idea on your talk page, and thought it looked interesting. I took a glance at your contributions, and found this page. If that counts as stalking, I don't know what to think. I'm sorry I even said anything. – How do you turn this on (talk) 14:08, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps I over-reacted, but I found your contributions in the recent fracas most unhelpful. I now feel nervous about editing MOSNUM and other style guides at all, so it's understandable that I might be stressed about your early questioning. Tony (talk) 14:34, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, I completely understand. I'll leave you to get on with it without my interference. Best wishes, – How do you turn this on (talk) 14:44, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

I suggest that you add bureaucrats to your page. Tennis expert (talk) 06:07, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

And I suggest you make good with your "retirement". Not going your way is it? Apologies Tony that this stalking doesn't quit. And by all means watch me comply with guidelines, correct grammar and markup and tag the dozens of pitiful tennis articles with the maintenance tags they need. The Rambling Man on tour (talk) 06:53, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Don't be so obsessed with your own importance. I didn't have you in mind, actually. I previously told Tony that I supported him about this admin watch, and I thought that "administrator" was underinclusive. By the way, I couldn't care less about your correcting grammar, drive-by tagging of articles, or whatever else you do with your time. And who is harrassing whom? Tennis expert (talk) 09:26, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Haven't you retired yet? And it is interesting that you don't care that you blind reverted my edits to introduce redirects, bad markup and incorrect grammar. As for tagging, I can't believe how long so many poor articles have been left untagged so I'm doing the right thing. Enjoy retirement. The Rambling Man on tour (talk) 03:53, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Tennis expert, where do I mail the golden watch? Tony (talk) 08:13, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Hope I'm not out of line by posting here, but just wanted to register my support for this project. Will you let me know when it's up please :) Ryan4314 (talk) 21:15, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Please keep at this, it's important. Some of the admins on Misplaced Pages remind me of the hunchbacked, bald-headed, black-uniformed henchmen in The Incal by Jodorowsky and Moebius. What irks me especially is to see new admins fresh off their RfA "make their bones" on AN/I by publicly declining an unblock request with some F-U boilerplate ("I Have Reviewed Your Unblock Request and Determined it to be Unfounded.") Blechhh. On the other hand, there are good admins who make good calls but get unfairly attacked.--Goodmorningworld (talk) 23:49, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

• Thank you both for your support. I need to finish the draft quickly, I can see, now that word is out prematurely. Problem is, I have little time right now. Give me a few days and I'll formally ask for feedback. Tony (talk) 00:35, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Well, I just wanted to add my voice of support. If there's any way I can be of help, do let me know. This is a very interesting and I think, largely workable draft proposal. Well done. Tiamut 16:02, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Comments by FT2

The idea that administrator standards should be easily questioned when poor, is no bad thing in theory. I personally favor high admin standards, and this seems to be trying to prevent "gaming" or poorly founded requests, by allowing only certain categories of issue to be raised. However there are some serious issues or points to think about while developing the concept. Without supporting or opposing, some comments on the proposal:

1. The single huge exposure here is "forum shopping". That is, a user has raised a complaint at ANI, on their talk page or such, this gives the appearance of "one more venue to complain at". For example a user gets blocked, do they now request unblock, or do they ask someone else to post here about the blocking admin and how biased it was? You want to be very careful to ensure it isn't hit with a large amount of that kind of thing, because claims of bad adminship by disgruntled or blocked users (that turn out spurious on checking) are quite common. A simple means might be as follows:

   • all requests go into a "new requests" section for (say) up to 5 days. If any admin is prepared to endorse there's a concern, then it gets opened under the process. Otherwise after 5 days if not one admin can be found to agree, then forget it.
   • put in a provision against forum shopping. "This is not an appeal process" and explain where it fits in between ANI and RFC and so on. When should users use this, and when would another process be better?

2. The draft title is a problem, as is its implication. "Administrator action review" would be a more neuutral title. "Admin Watch" sounds like a stalkers paradise, and isn't really what your proposal seems to suggest anyway.
3. Bear in mind many complaints may be by users who are disruptive, against quite experienced admins who are very used to spotting disruption.

   • Will your "co-ordinators" have the experience to assess the admin's view? Or (worst case) will it just annoy other admins active in the crucial task of protecting editorial work against disruption, to be asked to justify what to a seasoned user is obvious stuff, that's being forum-shopped by a tendentious disruptive user, and judged by users who may not have the experience needed? (Any admin decision should be able to be justified, but just like experienced content writers "can all see obvious stuff" in an FAC, so experienced admins who deal with certain kinds of disruption can usually "see the obvious stuff" in certain behaviors.) Note: the suggestion made at #1 may basically deal with some of these issues.
   • What would the qualifications of your "co-ordinators" be, or your own qualifications to choose them initially?

4. Any dispute resolution process needs to consider its own stance. You will need to show ways you will ensure fairness. And avoid the risk of "lynch mob" mentality either way, developing. Will the co-ordinators themselves start to show "group-think" if it's a small closed circle? Why would a "co-ordinator" reviewing an admin be expected to be any fairer than any other user? It'll need that for any hope of credibility and use.
5. Why wouldn't existing routes be adequate to the task, when a concern arises?
6. Be aware that new proposals like this only have a slight chance of passing. Misplaced Pages is developed by users, so new ideas are worthwhile, but if after much effort, the community doesn't buy it, you would probably have to let it go at some point.
7. Will this add excessive bureaucracy or WP:CREEP to the project?
8. Do you propose to WP:OWN any of this process if it goes live? (Eg choosing new "co-ordinators"?) If not what will happen instead? Consider looking at the Mediation Committee or the less formal Mediation Cabal, or Wikiquette alerts for how this might better work.
9. What's the conclusion of a case? How is consensus formed? What if there is disagreement by the administrator or other admins? "One of our co-ordinators looks at it"... and then what?

Some thoughts. Higher standards are definitely never a bad thing. But the above are immediate observations. Have a think about them, and see if they suggest any ways to improve the draft concept.

FT2  16:41, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Tony1's interim response: Thanks for your comments, FT2, which I have no time right now to respond to fully. That must wait about 12 hours. Just for now, I'll deal with Points 1 and 2.

Point 1: The proposed structure does indeed have a "new requests" section (Stage 1), where coordinators decide on the merits of each. The options for their actions are set out below the subtitle. Yes, there is room to write in more detail governing what constitutes a vexatious/trivial notification. The large list of behavioural requirements that have been extracted from the policy page need to be analysed from the perspective of the boundary between what is vexatious/trivial and what is not; therefore, it may be that some of those requirements need to be footnoted to examples. But I'm wary of editorialising the wording of the Admin Policy page. Policy is policy.

The idea of asking a police officer (even just one) to endorse a complaint against one of his/her fellow officers defeats the whole purpose of this process.

I think your suggestion of guarding against "forum shopping" is worth looking at. Don't forget that complainants will have to specify which of the policy tenets the admin has breached; this will need to be illustrated by diffs, and possibly diffs/text briefly reporting a history of similar behaviour of the admin. (Some of the policy wordings use words such as "repeated", etc).

On your Point 2, the title says exactly what the process is: the strongest muscle that we as civilians have (in userspace, if you please) is (1) naming and shaming, or at least putting an admin "on watch" for a specified period, and (2) ensuring that the process adheres to the two tenets of natural justice ... what are they? Um ...

• everyone has a right to a hearing; and
• justice must be seen to be done.

If "watching" is our method, so be it. If the community wants to get serious about instituting—in practice, not just in theory—the kind of punishment measures that admins mete out to civilians every day, that would be far better, but it would need to be done properly, and not be subject just to the call of admins. Tony (talk) 01:07, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

I agree that those in favor of this process need to answer the crucial question: "how is this venue different from a block review at WP:AN/I?". Also, I agree with the naming change proposal of FT2 (point 2 above). Pcap ping 17:42, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

I see this as a "sharing page" for examples of sloppy adminship. Examples:

1) there is sometimes a problem with admins who claim policy reasons for things but refuse to elaborate, and refuse to answer even straightforward questions as to how these policies would apply in different circumstances. Putting up such examples here enables others to say either "Complainant Z is being a wiki-lawyering nuisance" or "This is the answer and Admin X should have told you" or "Admin X is trying to bully you into accepting an edit that has no basis in policy".

2) Another use for this board would be exposing examples of duplicity - "Admin X let editor Y off a 3RR block with a pat on the head but blocked editor Z for 3 days."

3) Or ... how about the sometimes severe problem of POV-pushing under the guise of policy? I came across an example of an admin who wanted one particular date (of two significant choices) used in an article. It turned out that both possibilities were in the source - but the admin claimed that was alright, because the source was RS so he could have exactly whatever he wanted there. Duh?

It's tough being held to account for your decisions in life, but admins who do things sloppily and/or play games are damaging the product of our efforts. None of my examples are individually important enough to make a federal case - but that's why a noticeboard would be a valuable resource that might help uncover just how much of this is going on. PR

I would suspect that the information at WP:Admin abuse pointing users at WP:ANI and WP:RFC/ADMIN would handle all of the circumstances you describe rather well, as would such processes as WP:WQA, WP:3O, WP:RSN, WP:NPOVN. What benefit does this page have on all of those? MBisanz 19:09, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

MBisanz: that is very simple to answer: it won't be run by admins (or at least it won't be dominated by them). It has been made necessary because the current "official" processes are a sham. Admins support each other—hadn't you noticed? We need a NPOV process that is run by the community as a whole, not by admins, who can't be allowed to judge themselves (that would be like allowing the police to run internal investigations on misbehaviour or transgressions of policy without external review. Tony (talk) 00:45, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

How is WP:RFC/ADMIN, which is a complaint filed by any user against an admin and usually dominated by non-admin comments a process run by admins? Also, seeing as there are about 1,000 active admins and 10,000 active users, it is unlikely that any given process is dominated by administrators. Also, the similarly styled WP:OmbCom was rather strongly rejected by the community twice. MBisanz 00:53, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

That is interesting; I'll look it up later to try to learn from its mistakes. I wonder whether it failed because it started in WP space and was subject to death by committee (a committee of hundreds). Here, the advantage is that it's in civilian userspace and can be shaped by a smaller team. That might be a more effective way of setting up a good system; once the kinks are ironed out, it will succeed or fail on the basis of whether the community likes it—that is a strong incentive for us. Gotta go. Tony (talk) 01:21, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

The problem is that the final decisions about administrators are made by administrators, often with little regard given to the comments made by non-administrators. When administrators protect each other under the excuse of mutual respect or refusing to engage in wheel warring, the whole process breaks down, especially the core Misplaced Pages policy about consensus. And aside from this problem, there is the equally serious problem of some administrators not bothering to provide advance notice before blocking or banning non-administrators. Tennis expert (talk) 02:32, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Correcting this -- wheel warring isn't consensus (or consensus-seeking). It's the attempt to use force to obtain one's way, and to misuse tools provided for quality purposes, to do so, when it is clear there is significant disagreement. In that case what admins should do is switch to dialog and if needed, dispute resolution. It's to ensure they do, that wheel warring is treated seriously. High standards count, and "talk, don't fight" is the essence of many Misplaced Pages standards. "Refusing to engage in wheel warring" as a problem? No. FT2  16:09, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

My comments need no correction. An administrator's reversal of another administrator can have either of two motivations: (1) ensure that administrative action reflects consensus; or (2) as you suggested, "attempt to use force to obtain one's way." Too often, administrative action does not reflect consensus, and other administrators are afraid to correct that action because of the wheel warring admonition or the misguided, clubby nature of administrators in general. Tennis expert (talk) 22:10, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Tony, some comments above are a problem. We aren't engaging in civil war here, we aren't playing "police vs. civilians", and administrators are appointed at the rate of many a month based on a communal poll at which any user can have equal say (and non-administrators outweigh administrators and are not shy to speak). So as soon as these everyday users, who were deemed trustworthy by a wide range of the community, are appointed, they become "police" and need "civilians" to "watch" them? Not really. I think some parts of the idea have legs, and surely some admins need to raise their standards. But a lot of the above is seriously disappointing. FT2  15:57, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Who are the people that watch the Misplaced Pages "police"? Oh, right, other police. That doesn't work in the real world and doesn't work here. Tennis expert (talk) 22:10, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Tony's invocation of the Stanford Prison Experiment on the AdminWatch page is relevant. A modicum of real or perceived power can transform an ostensibly "trustworthy," reasonable or nice person into an abusive bully.--The Fat Man Who Never Came Back (talk) 16:27, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

AdminWatch personnel

I foresee a problem with them being initially selected by Tony. This could become a bone of contention that derails introduction of what I see as a major improvement over the present situation. It might be a good idea to think about a process for electing Watchers that attracts the best and brightest.
Apart from that, I really like the progress you are making here. Pulling together relevant information that was spread out over different pages is good. Also the focus on treating editors respectfully. The reference to the Stanford Prison Experiment is NOT hyperbole. In a pre-academic age, it was just common knowledge, known as "human nature".--Goodmorningworld (talk) 17:13, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

The recruitment of coordinators was always going to be an issue. I'm not happy exposing their selection to the potential for distortion in an "election"—not yet, anyway. It's still in user-space, don't forget. I also want to get it running and refine it before making a big deal over that process. Another problem I foresee is that a community-wide election would have to exclude admins and bureacrats from election (that's the whole point), whereas I am free to invite anyone I trust at the moment. Coordinators will know that the credibility of the system depends on the maturity and even-handedness of the process. It's here to set the bar properly for admin behaviour, yes, but it's here also to bring us all together and gain more respect for adminship. Admins should like the overall outcome, even if some individuals end up being named and their admin activities monitored for a defined period of time. Perhaps you may feel more comfortable when I've written more details of how how decisions should be made; that can't be done entirely without running the system and quickly rooting out any rough edges that appear. Catch 22. Tony (talk) 01:24, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Feedback on the Specific Policy requirements section

Hi Tony1. I read over this section and read the WP:Administrators page from which it is derived. I think you've done a great job in distilling the contents of that page in an easy to read and straightforward way. There is one thing I would add (somewhere in there maybe) which reflects this basic idea in the policy: "Occasional mistakes are entirely compatible with adminship; administrators are not expected to be perfect."

Perhaps I might express it as: "Admins are human and they can make mistakes. When an admin screws up, he/she should own up to it, do all they can to repair any damage, and avoid making similar mistakes in the future."

blech ... I don't know. Not so good at policy writing really. But I think you catch my gist? Something about WP:AGF in the face of what might seem to be something awful, but turns out just to be a misunderstanding might be worth mentioning. That's all I have to say for now. Good work. Tiamut 17:25, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

I think the frequency of administrator mistakes is more relevant than whether they stem from malice or incompetence. Thus the question should not be "was the incident an innocent misunderstanding?" but rather "how often is this administrator prone to innocent misunderstandings, compared to his or her peers?"--The Fat Man Who Never Came Back (talk) 17:31, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Both good points. Let me think about it. No time right now. Tony (talk) 01:25, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Suggestion regarding AdminWatch rules

You say: Who can lodge a grievance? Only registered Wikipedians who are not administrators or bureaucrats may file a grievance.

Admins and 'crats can be the victims of poor administrative decisions too. They are not permitted to use their tools to undo any action against them, personally. Therefore why would they not be permitted to use this mechanism also? Setting up a system where admins can be complained about, while specifically restricting them from making a complaint themselves, is a sure way to establish an us vs them atmosphere, and will, I predict, result in rejection by the admin community. Rockpocket 17:57, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

I wondered about this very issue; I'm leaning towards your argument. Do other people have an opinion? Tony (talk) 01:26, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Who?

Hi Tony, I'm just musing over a couple of things in this about scoping who can be involved how.

1) Reported issues about the behaviour of those with some sort of power in Misplaced Pages don't stop with ordinary admins but also covers checkusers, oversight and arbcom. (See User talk:Thatcher#Statement on the perceived need for oversight on the first two.) I think you need to be explicit on which powers and groups of users are or aren't covered by this process. E.g. you might say that this committee won't have the access proveleges to be able to review the use of checkuser or oversight powers but reserves the right to comment on the use of admin powers by checkusers. Or you might want to recruit a former Arbcommer just so that you can have someone able to review these issues.

2) Another complaint is about people being seen as collecting as many badges as possible and this committee would be another. Should the number of other roles held by coordinators be limited?

I may think of something else later.--Peter cohen (talk) 18:08, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks: I'll peruse this one in about 12 hours' time. Tony (talk) 01:30, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Addition to nutshell

Greg L, a major contributor to MOSNUM, inter alia, has suggested an extension to the nutshell text (the second para):

This is a non-official process for dealing with users' grievances against administrator (admin) behaviour, in the absence of an effective official mechanism for ensuring that admins comply with the policy requirements governing their behaviour. As a non-official process, the available correctional mechanism of this process is to place offending admins on a watch list. The watch list gives bureaucrats a convenient tool to see if an admin who has come to attention might have chronic issues, The watch list also serves as "club of shame" to which admins would care not be a member. Admins can 'earn' their way off the watch list after a probationary period wherein no further substantive complaints arise.

I think this is too long for a nutshell, and I'd rather have the negative stuff less prominent. Yes, the strongest muscle we have is "name and shame", but there's something to be gained by avoiding negativity where possible (it's not entirely possible, but there is some leeway).

We can't assume that bureacrats will take notice of it as a systemic part of their role, so I'd rather not suggest that at this stage.

Let's allow this to lie for a little while and determine whether anything from this extra para might be integrated into the main text. Tony (talk) 01:36, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Compromise working now. You like? Tony (talk) 09:49, 6 December 2008 (UTC)