Grants:IdeaLab/Administrating the adminstrators

Idealab

Administrating the adminstrators

Some of the admins, not taking names, of the Wikis sometimes punish way beyond what a person deserves or just not bothered. Even criminals are released early if they improve. They do not try to be helpful which further aggravates the situation. Their attitude is also not friendly or helpful which will also discourage other users from being cooperative and causes a lot of stress. Sometimes it feels like they act on their whim and some of the things they do don't even seem to be based on the policies. An effective policing is also needed to keep a check on admin behaviour.

idea creator• MonsterHunter32

this project needs...

volunteer

community organizer

advisor

project manager

created on22:49, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

Project idea

What Wikimedia project(s) and specific areas will you be evaluating?

Is this project measuring a specific space on a project (e.g. deletion discussions), or the project as a whole?
English Wikipedia

Describe your idea. How might it be implemented?

Provide details about the method or process of how you will evaluate your community or collect data. Does your idea involve private or personally identifying information? Take a look at the Privacy Policy for Wikimedia’s guidelines in this area.
A separate set of users for monitoring the administrators but not able to edit much on Wikipedia is needed, so no conflict-of-interest arises.

Are there experienced Wikimedians who can help implement this project?

If applicable, please list groups or usernames of individuals who you can work with on this project, and what kind of work they will do.

How will you know if this project is successful? What are some outcomes that you can share after the project is completed?

If the administrators be more compassionate and helpful, then it will be successful.

How would your measurement idea help your community make better decisions?

After you are finished measuring or evaluating your Wikimedia project, how do you expect that information to be used to benefit the project?
An administrator who is not helpful and is too harsh discourages the user from contribution and following the rules.

Do you think you can implement this idea? What support do you need?

Do you need people with specific skills to complete this idea? Are there any financial needs for this project? If you can’t implement this project, can you scale down your project so it is doable?
I cannot as I am not as experienced as them. But I think my suggestions will be helpful.

Get Involved

About the idea creator

I have contributed a lot on Wikipedia. I was blocked for multiple accounts without being given a chance even though I never used them for personal gain. I did troll sometimes for fun, but I stopped doing it.

I created another account and lost the previous ones but was blocked after a year. I stopped trolling eventually and stopped edit-warring and promised to stop socking which I have, but was shown no mercy. Even criminals are released earlier if they have good behaviour.

Not just that, instead of encouraging me to be clean or say what I was doing wrong in my requests, the blocking admins simply revoked my talk page access even though policy allows to make as many requests as you want. I did come clean in UTRS and freenode channel but was even kicked out there even though I only asked for merciful treatment.

Not just at my block, I was even threatened with a block for uttering censorship when some users kept reverting me over one baseless reason or another. But the adminstrators did nothing even when I was alleged to be pushing an agenda even though I only added reliably sourced materal. I was even threatened to back away and not edit particular articles by some users, but the adminstrators did nothing.

Endorsements

• This is very much needed. One admin hassled users over the then-recent death of Avicii, when it was already over the media. This is the kind of problem this idea was created for. Hats off MonsterHunter32. PF4Eva (talk) 02:00, 21 July 2018 (UTC)
• Admin abuse needs to stop I heart kumamon (talk) 06:29, 21 July 2018 (UTC)
• As the pool of active admin pool shrinks and power is concentrated among a few individuals, there does seem to be a problem with increasing admin abuse. Some non admin's even encourage this, writing elaborate reasons why it's best that admins don't even try to be fair. FeydHuxtable (talk) 17:34, 21 July 2018 (UTC)
• I do not feel this is much of an issue on English Wikipedia, which has a very active community of both editors and administrators. However, this is a severe issue on smaller Wikimedia projects, a number of which have only one active administrator. Specifically for small Wikimedia projects, there must be more oversight directly from the Wikimedia Foundation to prevent abuse of power due to a lack of oversight and not enough local administrators to police each other and establish rules of conduct for administration. Nicole Sharp (talk) 00:14, 22 July 2018 (UTC)
• because I support the open sharing of knowledge without censorship and without authoritarian fascist types who block those they disagree with and make up false claims for blocking them. SMendel (talk) 04:57, 22 July 2018 (UTC)

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