SmashWiki talk:Community portal/Archive 6

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content appropriateness

How do we feel about the level of appropriateness of our content? (swearing, nudity, etc.) Zixor (talk) 18:30, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

Swearing is discouraged. Cafinator (talk) 01:55, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

I ask because of a picture of someone flipping the bird. I'd say this doesn't belong on the wiki. Zixor (talk) 23:39, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Could you provide the link? It would have been helpful if you had done that in the first place. --Kirby King 02:40, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

My question remains valid regardless of its intent.
In any case: here is the link: http://super-smash-bros.wikia.com/wiki/Image:N184805085_30438739_4012.jpg
Zixor (talk) 02:25, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Open Letter: An Outsider Looking In

Preface: Although I'm an avid SSB player, I'm not a contributor on SmashWiki. However, I do have quite a bit of experience editing and managing wikis, having been involved on both GuildWiki and GuildWarsWiki and having helped to found PvXwiki (where I'm currently a Bureaucrat), and, when it comes to wikis, my primary focus/interest tends to be policy-related and managerial. As such, it should come as no surprise that my interest was piqued when someone on an IRC said, in regard to SmashWiki: "there's one sysop who thinks literally permabanning people is a way to resolve the issue and refuses to acknowledge that half the problem is backlash against his bannings." The discussion that followed (along with another, related discussion on SmashWiki's IRC channel) prompted me to write this "letter." However, before I begin in earnest, I'd like to make it clear that what follows is purely from the perspective of an outsider looking in and, as such, it may not reflect the "whole picture." Thus, if I've neglected anything that could potentially mitigate the following, please, by all means, spell it out for me if necessary.

References:

The links above, taken as a whole, even assuming good faith, i.e. that the bans were deserved, etc. -- which, based on the Block log, may very well not be the case, paint a disturbing picture, especially when examined by someone who, all self-aggrandizement aside, knows quite a bit about what it takes to administrate a wiki. I’m sure that Randall, etc. are excellent contributors and maybe Galaxia, etc. were really poor faith editors, I don’t really know, nor do I care. Being a good contributor is not anywhere near the same as being a good administrator, and, no matter how bad those bad faith editors were, there’s no question in my mind that the administrators handled themselves poorly, to say the least! I really don’t mean to pick on Randall, but, for example, when you’ve got a sysop who is willing to ban users based on evidence of sockpuppetry that turns out to be faulty, and that same sysop is willing to (from everything I can infer) ban people for disagreeing with him, there’s a problem. When, on top of that, you have permanent bans being thrown about more liberally than I have ‘’ever’’ seen, there’s a ‘’big’’ problem. It’s not even so much the permabans themselves, either, it’s the rapid escalation to permabanning coupled with the fact that permabans have apparently been deemed necessary for, as near as I can tell, rather minor offences (if repeated ones). And another thing, maybe I’m just reading a bit too much into this phenomenon, but it seems like the sysops feel obliged to, when banning someone for, say, a personal attack, specify that the attack was against a sysop as if the mere fact that the recipient of the sysop made a difference. Assuming I’m not merely making mountains out of molehills, so to speak, that trend is perhaps equally disturbing since it runs entirely contrary to the intrinsic nature of wikis.

And it’s not only the bans, themselves, that have me worried, it’s the way the sysops are handling themselves with respect to those bans. I’ve seen statements like (these are not quotes), “oh well, he wasn’t a major contributor anyway” or “oh well, the wikidrama that followed sysop x’s ban really wasn’t necessary” used to defend certain administration actions that, if nothing else, toed the line between good faith and outright abuse, and the backlash that inevitably followed. Such statements reflect a horrendous understanding of the way wikis work, particularly the second type which, astoundingly, seems to essentially discount the sysop’s potential culpability for having been the source of the wikidrama. And the “us (sysops) vs. them (the users at large)” mentality that such statements foster and that seems to run rampant throughout SmashWiki is, as near as I can tell, at the heart of most of the problems I’ve noticed. Heck, some of the sysops have seemingly dropped even the façade of civility; I expect to see block caps from trolls, not from sysops. And banning people when they disagree with you (again, that’s how it seems looking at some of these situations from an outsider’s perspective) makes the situation all that much worse. As a very wise person once said, “inability to discuss and reach consensus is a scary thing indeed, especially when the alternative is banbanban.” Indeed, that uncompromising attitude makes it all the more likely that people will disagree, and, even if they do so in a manner that ‘’does’’ deserve a ban, that doesn’t excuse the culpability of the sysop, and it is certainly cause for concern.

If the above represented isolated events, that would be one thing, but I have a nagging feeling that there’s a lot more where that came from (and I could have written quite a bit more simply about the things I’ve listed in a great more detail, but, alas, I’ve other things that I need to get done). Equally disturbing is that when I sought answers from an active bureaucrat -- quite possibly the only active bureaucrat -- the responses were vague at best and often seemed designed to exculpate the sysops as much as possible (again, that’s just a perception). I have no stake in the success (or lack thereof) of this wiki; indeed, I sought out answers for no better reason than my own edification. However, whatever comes of this (and, most probably, nothing will), I felt compelled to post; hopefully I’ve given at least some of you cause to pause and reflect on what I’ve said; to be blunt for a moment, a number of other experienced wikieditors and I, were nothing short of astounded by what was going on here, and that opinion reflected the consensus of more than a half-dozen "outsiders," that alone should (hopefully) say something. Regards. Defiant Elements 04:42, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

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