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)

I'm going to try and maintain a theme here that I tried to observe in the IRC channel: I can only reach conclusions based on what I see, and I'm not inclined to made declarations on behalf of other people who are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves. I'm sorry if that meant that you felt I was only offering vague and defensive responses, but bureaucrat or not, I'm not omniscient. Carrying on that theme, then, I'm going to restrict myself in what I respond to in your post; other people can respond to explain their own actions, and I won't try to speak on their behalves. If this makes my response unsatisfying, so be it.
To respond to a paraphrased quote of mine: saying that drama wasn't warranted after a block is put in place isn't an attempt at indemnifying a sysop for an improper block. Rather, it's a comment that just because a community (or, in this case, a segment thereof) reacts negatively to a block, the block is not necessarily wrong. People get angry if their friends get blocked regardless of whether it's warranted, but that doesn't speak to the validity of the block. In order to conclude that a block is unjustified, I need to see more than a list of "supporters" of a blocked user; since a list of names doesn't convince me that the action was unjustified, I think such a list ("drama") unnecessary. The same effort would be better spent explaining why the action may not have been justified, rather than just waving one's hands in the air. So I still think that was a fair statement.
Since you don't have much of a history around here, you may not be entirely aware that I have not been particularly active; the fact that I'm even a bureaucrat here is really just the result of some combination of peculiarities and fanciful timing. You have noticed some things that you believe to be astray on this wiki, and you have responded by raising a red flag, acknowledging that you may be impaired by your admittedly limited perspective. I don't consider myself to be in too dissimilar a position to you, but I am more willing to put my trust in the hands of people who have been more active than me. I certainly don't think all the sysops are corrupt, and I've seen certain administrative actions reviewed and revised, so I'm inclined to defer to process there.
But again, if my attempts at explanations to you seemed vague and exculpatory, it would be because they were simply my attempts at explanations--my observations and inferences--which is all I can offer. There are other users who are more qualified to explain their own actions, and other users who are more qualified to offer their own running observations of fact. So with that said, I do look forward to reading those accounts and perhaps enriching my own understanding of events. Until then, however, I'll continue to withhold judgment, because I don't consider myself active or informed enough to do otherwise. --Kirby King 06:31, 21 August 2008 (UTC)
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