AE admins set a new record for stupidity Options

[radek]

The subject itself is a bit parochial, but it does illustrate the incompetent workings of the Wikipedia admin bureaucracy and the sham that the whole "Arbitration Enforcement" and "discretionary sanctions" regime is. It's also of the "beat your head against the wall with incredulity" kind.

So the article is "Mass Killings Under Communism". Whatever you or I think about the article itself is beside the point here (honestly, I don't care about the article at this point one way or another). The thing is that the article has been contentious ever since I can remember. The exact people involved have changed but it's same ol' same ol'. As a result the article is on a 1R restriction (which is reasonable).

Anyway, so two editors, Tentontunic, and The Four Deuces were editing warring over a POV tag. TFD filed an AE request on Tentontunic for 1RR violation (standard tactic, when there's "discretionary sanctions" around as a weapon). Tentontunic pointed out that TFD did the same thing. Sounds pretty standard, right?

But what the geniuses at AE decided is that Tentontunic and TFD be let of without any kind of sanction, but that instead any editor who has ever been part of a Eastern Europe related ArbCom case (Digwuren, EEML, RB) is topic banned from the article. You know, to stop the perennial problems at the article.

Here's the thing. Aside from TFD, (and one other possible minor exception), NO EDITORS from these ArbCom cases have edited the article at ALL in the past six months, if not a year, if at all.

So the two culprits are let off with nary a warning while a whole bunch of people who don't have crap to do with this mess are all of sudden under sanction, courtesy of Sandstein, Ed Johnson, AGK and T. Canens. You'd think at least one of those four wouldn't be too lazy to actually click on the article's revision history and think about it for a second.

Of course, since most of the editors now sanctioned don't edit the article anyway, maybe the practical implications are small, in this narrow sense. Still even if you don't care about the principle, and fairness, here, then just consider the fact that these guys seriously believe that banning editors from an article that the editors don't edit will somehow solve the problems on the articles. You know, with pixie dust or something.

Of course the practical implications in a broad sense are more severe - stupid decisions like this one become the standard operating procedure on Wikipedia, they are unquestioned, they implicitly transfer power to a group of self appointed ... trying to think of an adjective here that is not too harsh yet appropriate and can't think of one, oh well at least I tried ... creeps (who don't even do much article/content writing themselves) and generally foster the prevailing atmosphere of admin incompetence combined with hubris.

Here's exchange at Sandstein's talk page. Here's article's revision history.

[Somey]

I suspect the problem here, other than the fact that Mr. Sandstein is, shall we say, an officious twat, is that there have just been so many people/accounts involved in these disputes over the past 3-4 years that they simply can't keep track of them all. They almost have to be shamed, if not actually forced, into putting some actual thought into how to deal with the situation before they manage to come up with something that's, as you say, sensible.

Starting in October of last year, if you look about 2/3rds of the way down the so-called "log of blocks and bans" listed under the "Digwuren" ArbCom case, you'll see that most of the bans they've handed out have been related to this particular article. There are lots of accounts involved... I think they just gave up and lost intellectual control of the situation, not that they ever really had that, but they couldn't bring themselves to simply lock down the article completely because that would have been admitting defeat - at least from their perspective.

Over the years they've developed a kind of class system for disputes - there are flashy, glamorous and attention-getting disputes, there are obscure, almost private disputes, there are nerdy and silly disputes... and then there are the dirty, nasty, nobody-wins disputes like this one, that nobody outside of the dispute itself even wants to think about. They shouldn't even have articles like this, because they just can't manage them properly, but if they delete this article now it looks like what - like they're giving in to the communists? Nobody wants that! And this is just one article out of hundreds, maybe thousands that fall into that class of dispute.