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Posted by: melloden

Well I don't make a habit out of checking RfA because it's usually always full of suck-ups and dimwits, but today's RfA made me gag even more than usual.

Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Guoguo12 2 (T-H-L-K-D) looks like the average try-again self-nom by some eager little myspacy kid. Who doesn't really know about privacy on the Internet (if there is such a thing), because what I discovered was slightly disturbing.

Mr. Guoguo12 (AKA Allen Guo, according to his YouTube account), seems to be an average, "intelligent" Asian American child who http://www.weirdyear.com/2010/09/92110.html, http://www.potomacartists.org/ponymania/students/medium/bfes_allen_guo_8.jpg, and http://www.youtube.com/user/guoguo12.

Well, he also is quite passionate about the rise of Asian-Americans in Western society, as is evident in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQaG_tlkvkY from 2008. Other than the shockingly young age of Mr. Guo (how many admins run when they're around the 13yo mark?), you will hear this being shouted in the video:

The giggles from the class and the expression of the teacher only add to the hilarity of the clip. Now, don't get me wrong. I agree that Asian people living legally in the US are indeed Americans, just like every other legal resident/citizen of the country. But really, Wikipedia, do you think that a barely-teenage Asian kid with such passionate views will really end up being a rational, sensible administrator? (Oh wait--there's no such thing anyway.)

Those folks always complaining about the "RfA problem" need to realize that RfA is not the problem, the people trying to pass it are.

Posted by: Abd

Melloden, you've been drinking way too much Kool-Aid, laced with racism. Complex mixture, for sure. Not good for the head.

I have no clue where to begin. Take two aspirin, call your doctor in the morning?

Meanwhile, stay away from Wikipedia. In your condition, there is a risk of chronic dementia.

Posted by: gomi

We don't need any children editing, much less administering, Wikipedia. That he is Asian is utterly beside the point.

Posted by: Kelly Martin

I still don't understand how this makes RfA any more of a joke than it has been since 2004.

Posted by: The Joy

Too late.

Posted by: Emperor

Isn't this the kid who banned all you guys?

Posted by: melloden

Good suggestions. I'll try not to become senile for at least another ten years, but you never know.

Anywho, dear Mr. Guo's RfA seems to be progressing rather well. Urgh.

Kelly, it's not just the child factor--it's the part where the Concerned Business Professional goes to see who deleted his biography and stumbles across a video of a young, loud child going off about the rise of Asian Americans in society. That would unsettle me more than seeing a picture of an old, fat, white nerd on the deleter's userpage, I think.

Posted by: EricBarbour

Nailed it.

Look at the vote. Right now, I see 26 support votes (including a few who should know better!)
and one lousy oppose vote. And yeah, I daresay that this nice young man looks a little too
immature to be "administrating" an "encyclopedia-thing project". He will have plenty of OCD
company, sad to say.

I'm willing to accept bets on how long it takes for him to start ruthlessly banning and harassing people.
He might turn out to be a good admin, he might turn out to be another Orangemike or Ryulong.
Not enough information to know.

Posted by: Silver seren

Huh, I have more edits than him. Sure, he has two GA's, but I have 26 (soon to be 28) DYKs to his 4. And he's only actually created 5 articles? I've created 51. I wonder if i'd win a RfA at this point.

Oh wait, I forgot, it's political, I so wouldn't. I have too many people that dislike me and they'd find insignificant things to complain about.

Since Guoguo seems to be more of the Wikignome type, he probably just stays behind the scenes and works, so he doesn't have anyone that he's gotten into disagreements with.

Well, other than OrangeMarlin, apparently. I wonder what that one's about.

Edit: Oh, and i'm 20, so there's that.

Posted by: Craftyminion

You're also a furry.

Yiff in Hell and all that.

Posted by: Emperor

The most hilarious thing about this RfA is the near universal disregard for this kid's plagiarism problem.

Posted by: Angela Kennedy

Dear, sweet, inoffensive, balanced Orange Marlin?

Surely not

Posted by: Michaeldsuarez

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/Guoguo12_2&diff=435495066&oldid=435493979

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/Guoguo12_2&diff=435496110&oldid=435495989

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/Guoguo12_2&diff=435497632&oldid=435496753

This thread apparently caused Guoguo12 to withdraw his self-nomination. Although I'm somewhat saddened, a person who can't handle or stand up to outside scrutiny shouldn't be a sysop.

Posted by: Theanima

Ah, everybody's favourite heroine, SandyGeorgia saving the wiki yet again from those evil children! Hurrah!

In all seriousness now, Lovetinkle tells SG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/Guoguo12_2#Oppose - her bullying, spiteful attitude is not something to be proud of.

And when SG doesn't like it, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Lovetinkle#Knock_if_off

Now if only all of us had the courage to stand up to bullies like SandyGeorgia, perhaps Wikipedia would be a more pleasant place to edit.

Posted by: Michaeldsuarez

The only useful thing Lovetinkle said was "Sandy, I think we need to be mindful that the candidate is a minor." Unfortunately, Lovetinkle believes that this means we must give youngsters more leeway, even on RfA discussions.

The only users being "bullied" here are the the users who decided to oppose the nomination. The Supporters are acting like hawks / vultures. They wait until someone opposes, and then they attack them. The Opponents aren't the ones stalking the Support section of the RfA and fighting against every support !vote.

Posted by: Theanima

No; Lovetinkle explained to SandyGeorgia, in plain English, what she is. A bully. Others also agreed that SG's commentary was needlessly aggressive.

In many cases opposers of RFA do so just because they like upsetting candidates and causing drama. They deserve to be harassed and attacked. In this particular RFA the opposers were correct, though SG's vicious TL;DR kind of overshadowed that.

Posted by: Michaeldsuarez

Alright, I agree that it was aggressive.

Posted by: RMHED

Yeah, SandyGeorgia really can be a nasty old bitch, unsurprisingly she gets on very well with Malleus.

Posted by: Theanima

Malleus is a but a mild lamb compared to her. When he opposes someone at RFA, or an article at FAC, he generally does so in a civil, polite and constructive manner. Not so SandyG.

Posted by: Kelly Martin

What I find interesting here is that the pogrom against "close paraphrasing" is going to make it even harder to write Wikipedia articles. The gap between "close paraphrasing" and "original research" (what Wikipedia calls "synthesis") is becoming increasingly small, and before long, I expect, nobody not already In The Cabal will be allowed to do much of anything at all.

This guy's RFA failed not because s/he is too young or even because s/he is inappropriate to be an admin (I offer no opinion on those points), but because SandyGeorgia didn't like him/her. This was a straight up gang mugging.

A bully can be right, and still be a bully.

Posted by: Michaeldsuarez

SandyGeorgia was in the minority, and he or she didn't generate a large following. The RFA failed because Guoguo12 couldn't handle the pressure. Silver_seren made a point:



Guoguo12 hasn't experienced a heated debate before, so he collapsed. He needs to experience more arguments with "bullies" such as SandyGeorgia and toughen up. Dealing with pressure is something a sysop must do well.

I'm not defending SandyGeorgia's behavior, but claiming that the RFA failed because "SandyGeorgia didn't like him/her" is silly. The users in the Oppose section weren't acting as if they were SandyGeorgia's brainwashed drones, and as I've said, they were in the minority. If anything, the support votes lacks the thought and care that went in the oppose votes.

Posted by: melloden

Does anyone else think that Lovetinkle is a sock?

Posted by: Theanima

Quite, the RFA rightfully failed. The child shouldn't have plagiarised and clearly cannot handle such criticism. It is true that supporters often don't do much research, but as already mentioned, it's the way in which the oppose was written which was unnecessarily cruel.



Is the pope catholic?

Posted by: NuclearWarfare

It took all of 8 hours after Sandy initially posted for the nominee to withdraw. I would have been surprised if it would have taken even two days for that minority to grow into a majority.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Shenouda_III_of_Alexandria

Posted by: Abd

That's never going to happen. What could happen is that those who understand the problem of bullying and attack editing stand up to it, and that enough of the rest of the community support them, instead of assuming that they are just "attack bullies themselves, a pox on both your houses," which is what happens in on-line communities, knee-jerk.

I stood up to two administrator bullies, JzG and William M. Connolley. In the first case, I was (originally) completely uninvolved, and careful, and there was enough support in the community, about one-third of commentators, to make the stand viable, especially since it was backed by basically irrefutable evidence. It really should be noticed that RfC/JzG 3, presented quite neutrally, with overwhelming and clear evidence, still resulted in a two-thirds opinion "Ban Abd."

With the next situation, I had become involved. When I was writing RfC/JzG 3, Durova had told me to expect being banned from cold fusion as a result. I really didn't care. Initially, I was completely neutral on cold fusion, and I only became exercised about it when I read the evidence, and saw how the balance of publication in peer-reviewed sources had flipped in recent years. (I only became COI, seriously engaged in the field, later, after I knew I was being banned.)

The appearance of involvement, then, gave the cabal much more cover to go on the attack before ArbComm, and they piled in. Because I knew these names, knew that they were far from neutral, it became necessary to call the cabal a cabal. Perhaps I should have called it a clique or faction. But didn't. ArbComm has a knee-jerk reaction to claims of "cabal." They didn't look at the evidence, I strongly suspect. I have other reasons to believe that they looked at very little evidence, it was too complicated for them. Okay, okay, WMC did go a little bit outside of norms, we gotta address that. But this Abd fellow, look at how much he writes. He *must* be an obsessed POV-pusher, and we know how to deal with them.

Actually, they don't. That's the problem, in fact. I've seen no evidence that the arbitrators, as a group, understand real dispute resolution, they are more like bouncers in a bar, and unskillful ones, at that. Real bouncers know how to defuse situations, because it's messy if they have to kill someone. I know. I was a volunteer chaplain, at San Quentin State Prison, and knew more than one such bouncer. The legal question will become if it was *necessary* to kill the guy who pulled the knife. Better have a good attorney, if you don't, ten to life.

In the second case, there was very little community support, because the issues had become far more complex. ArbComm should really appoint investigators to filter the evidence, it cannot possible read and review in detail all that is presented to it, there are only a few cases where I saw evidence that arbitrators took that kind of care, and it's not clear that they got it right there, they were trying to be "amateur experts" themselves. (PHG is what comes to mind.)

Durova had it right, she knew. It just didn't happen right away. They, through Hipocrite and WMC, who were almost certainly coordinated or cooperating in some way, came after me. WMC had long before predicted I'd be banned, when I confronted his use of tools with the Global Warming article, which was where I became visible to the cabal....

The young RfAr candidate here may not realize it, but he's better off not being so involved in such a cesspool., increasingly dominated by people who can tolerate the smell.

Posted by: we_are_devo

"Does anyone else think that Lovetinkle is a sock?"


Seems to me that the delightful Ms LoveTinkle is none other than Mr Giano. The barbed humour and other similarities are overwhelming.

Posted by: radek

Eh. SG just pointed out things which were actually wrong. If there hadn't been things wrong, there'd be nothing to to point out. You seem to have a quite weird definition of "bullying". Frankly, we need more people who are willing to point out, simply and boldly, things that are wrong. Kudos to Sandy. I'm actually pretty sure that Guoguo12_2 benefited more (at least personally) from being told exactly what he was doing wrong than he would have from being promoted and cuddled on the basis of a bunch of ignorant-and-proud-of-it Support votes. Think of it this way. Someday this kid will go to college. If he pulled that kind of stuff in a class he'd fail it, and maybe even risk getting kicked out/suspended for academic dishonesty. But this way, he made the mistake early on, was corrected, and will now know better. If he's willing to learn from the experience, then Sandy actually did him a huge favor.

This whole notion that "criticism = incivility" is just plain stupid. I wonder if this is some kind of age/cultural thing, where this notion is held by a particular demographic (in which case we can blame their hippy parents).

Maybe part of the irritation with Sandy's comments is that they obviously exposed all the support votes as a bunch of lazy know nothing ignoramuses. Again, kudos to Sandy.

Posted by: radek

It does have a lot of signs of a sock though I'm not seeing the Giano connection.

Posted by: Malleus

And neither do I.

Posted by: Malleus

You make an interesting conjunction. I have disagreed with SandyG and she with with me several times, but I respect the work that she puts in to the project. That you don't is a fault in your own psyche.

Posted by: EricBarbour

This is beside the point. We had an enthusiastic young man who wanted to be an admin, he made all the required rah-rah sounds, and one long-time editor showed up, accused him of plagiarism (on somewhat shaky grounds), and the enthusiastic young man folded and quit.

He ran for RFA before, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/Guoguo12, and it was a disaster. See the talkpage--he opened that account in 2008, but started editing heavily only 6 months before the RFA. In short, he tried to play the Wiki-Game Of Popularity, using Huggle and Twinkle to jack up his stats--doing the usual sort of non-edits (format cleanup, etc) to inflate his record, not adding actual information to articles.

The problem is not that he tried it (and failed). The problem is that others have done the same, and succeeded.

Posted by: Malleus

Quite.

Posted by: Theanima

There is a way to be critical without being hurtful. The kid is 12 years old. She didn't just "point things out", she wrote a huge TL;DR oppose in the most venomous, angry way possible. Instead of calmly pointing out the child's errors, she has bullied him off the project. This is hardly the first time this has happened is it? When will someone be able to create a decent request for comment on SG? She might contribute to FAs and might be a total workhorse on WP with no apparent life away from it, but she is a bully simple as that. When she doesn't like someone, she damn makes sure everyone knows it, be it someone who disagreed with her at FAC or a kid who misunderstands how to use sources properly.

Posted by: Emperor

I read it again, and I'm still failing to see the venom and anger. The tone I'm taking away from it is one of tough love, for the kid who needs to step up his writing standards as he nears high school, and for the community who needs to avoid filling its admin ranks with game-players with undeveloped social and academic skills. (especially since admin is a lifetime appointment)

I would have written it differently, but then again, I'd have never taken the time to go through this kid's contribution history to prepare a document like that.

I've had teachers who acted jerky and while I still don't agree with it, I can see what they were getting at. Bad news like "Hey kid you're a plagiarist!" is difficult to break gently, and most people just don't have the patience.