The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Arwel Parry:

Zeborah @ 188 'people may object to writing down, frex, "Administrators tend to be more highly regarded than other users" for fear that the act of writing it down lend authority to the thing, thus turning a regrettable fact into a goal to be maintained'. I agree with you, but it's human nature that administrators will tend to give greater weight to the opinions of other administrators than to ordinary editors, although I have to admit that Wikipedia has become too large for anyone to be familiar with the the editing history and style of the majority of administrators - back when I became an admin in 2003 it was possible to come across all the other admins as they edited and looked after their areas of interest, but it no longer is.

Going back to the block which started off this thread, I've come across the edits of Dmcdevit, the original blocking administrator, for several years and recognise that he's generally a pretty good editor and admin, although like anybody he's only human and capable of making mistakes; I had never previously come across Gerry Lynch until I found the block being discussed in blogs of people I respect, and I decided to look into it. It was apparent that it was likely an error had been made, but I was going to give the blocking admin 24 hours to justify his action, as it's generally considered bad form to just reverse another admins' actions without discussion. When all is said and done, it's important to remember that it's only Wikipedia: nobody will die because they're unable to edit for a few days while a proper investigation is conducted.

Gag@50: So why didn't you take out that line? Until just now that North Korean cinema article had only ever been edited by one person -- which is in itself a reason to treat the articles' accuracy with care. Claiming they'd only ever produced 40 films looks very like "original research" which should never have been allowed to stand anyway, as there were no citations, which was grounds enough for me to take that line out.

Zeborah @ 46: Yes, I unblocked the 77 IP address myself, about 4 hours ago...

Greg@90: I wouldn't agree with you about banning admins from writing articles, although it has to be admitted that I think most admins don't actually get to write many new articles any more - we're just too busy with the janitorial duties but we do keep an eye on articles we've edited in the past. I am however aware of the dangers of taking a proprietorial attitude to the articles I've written, and restrict myself to countering vandalism and updating articles with new facts.

A bit of background, I've been on Wikipedia since January 2003, and been an admin since the following July or August (when there were fewer than 250 admins, and getting adminship was "no big deal" - certainly I never had to jump through the hoops which they make admin candidates go through these days and which I doubt I'd get through). My particular area of specialisation is mainly confined to the UK, football, history of UK television, various historical topics, railways, stamps, coins, and banknotes. Some of those areas are pretty non-controversial, others - particular some football teams and players - attract vandals like flies to a honeypot. In my time I've created articles on obscure football teams from Luxembourg (ever heard of "F91 Dudelange"?!), eastern Europe and central Asia when they qualified for international competitions; I was an admin at the time, but would you say the articles should never have been created? Other people have since expanded the majority of those articles to be more informative than the basic stubs which I wrote, linked them to articles written in other languages (the article on Dudelange currently exists in Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Letzebuergesch, and Polish), and generally made it apparent that the articles have value.

I won't deny that there may be tag-teams of admins looking after each other's interests - I myself will tend to look more kindly at an edit made by a named account I'm aware of than from some anonymous IP address, especially one that's never edited before, but I have to say that I'm more or less completely unaware of who most of the admins currently are and I've never come across them or their edits. If you do have problems with a tag-team, then please do complain to Wikpedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents - but we've all seen far too many complaints from trolls and vandals claiming to have been hard done by, so please use moderate language and provide evidence of the tag match, to avoid being automatically assumed to be another troll. Three or four years ago it was possible to be familiar with the work of most of the candidates for adminship, and form an opinion of how well they'd do as admins; Wikipedia is now simply too big to do this, and when I see the list of new admins published on the Signpost it's usually the first time I've seen those user names. I certainly don't keep an eye on Requests for Adminship - life's simply too short.

Andrew Gray@80: Oh, Robert Stanek! His article got nuked last January by Jimbo Wales himself under the "Biography of Living People" policy, and now contains no sign that he ever wrote anything other than computer books. I suspect Stanek must have complained directly to Jimbo. The talk page is quite interesting - I argued that Jimbo's whitewashing was as bad as a hatchet job, but since the Seigenthaler case it looks like anything that reflects badly on someone is banned unless there are very strong published sources to back it up.

As an administrator with nearly 4000 articles on his watchlist, it's depressing watching the vandalism and general poor-quality edits that get made to many of them, but one tries to keep up the standard - and play whack-a-mole with the vandals...

Regarding deletionism, many of us are concerned that the "....for Deletion" (AfD, etc) mechanism is broken, but on the other hand about half the new articles which get created each day are instantly (well, within a day) deleted because quite simply they're crap - kids creating articles about their girlfriends, their bands, some inconsequentiality or other, and it's not surprising that some good stuff gets caught up and deleted with the rubbish. The Recent Changes patrollers don't have the time to review everything in detail as there's a tidal wave of nonsense being posted; we just have to accept that sometimes they'll make a wrong decision - they're only human after all.

I got my first email ostensibly from Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs a couple of days ago, claiming that they owed me £170. Since I got my real notice of coding for 2007-08 from HMRC in the post the very same day, and due to personal circumstances haven't actually had to pay any income tax for several years (it's only payable if you actually have an income, after all), I rather tend to disbelieve them!

Comment statistics for Arwel Parry on the Making Light blog

Total: 6 comments. View all these comments on a single page.