Is de-sysopping really enough?

There are bad sysops and they cause all kinds of torment to people and then after a long battle with many heroes virtually slain, a tiny number of the bad sysops get desysopped and that's it.

Their damage is never undone and the bad sysops are free to make a new identity and gain sysophood again.

Shouldn't these bad sysops be banned, too? Perhaps those that stood by and supported the bad sysops be punished, too?

Perhaps something more?

I agree those types - and their supporters - should be banned, but that would make way too much logical sense.

I don't know if you can invent a reason to put them in jail and make it stick...

DeSysOping is clearly not enough. Banning ends all potential for any other punishment. Maybe it would be better to make them do restitution, as in correcting spelling, providing cites for {{fact}} tags, removing vandalism from abused user's user/talk pages. Basically indenture them to the victim. They could also be required to display stigmatizing signatures. They could be sentenced to maybe 10,000 edits of indentured editing, then restored to previous status.

As with anything, I worry about abuse of power. Many admins are good people. Karmafist, Guanaco and Everyking were all admins who were de-sysopped for posting here. Karmafist was also banned for posting here. Do we want to see good admins like these banned just because they post here?

You forgot hanging, drawing and quartering.

I think all admins should lose global sysop power -- and only have responsibility for a small set of articles to which they are active contributors.

I don't think that it' matters one bit how they treat syssops, good or bad, over there.

Their system is the problem. And the central issue is Jimbo's "everybody's basically a good person" idea. That's not true in the real world, especially on a website that's in the top ten.....

There's no point in trying to salvage any of that. The only solution is work towards its ultimate demise....

That would work in some cases, but to give some admins power solely in areas where they have a POV would be disastrous.

I think that Jimbo should have tried out his system on something small, like a small mud or talker, first, before bringing it into something big. Or he could have asked Fantasia, who used the exact same system which led to the worst failure of anything anywhere on the internet, and was a laughing stock of the talker world. However, Jimbo had a new idea, Wikipedia, which got popular, but the admin idea was never a good one. People are bad. People deliberately go out of their way to destroy things. You need to be able to identify who people are, even if you don't know their names, at least to know that they aren't the same person. You need to have checks and balances. You need to have consistency. What you don't want is people who break the rules, then change the rules later on to prove that they hadn't broken them. This is just absurd.

He should have just started with a simple rule:

"What I say goes. Anyone who has got a problem with it can just leave"

and add to it:

"What any admin says goes, so long as it doesn't disagree with me. If anyone has got a problem with it then they can just leave"

Much simpler system. Much more transparent. Then people would have all made up their own versions of Wikipedia, and we'd have a bunch of little messes instead of one big mess.

The really bad ones should be forced to watch 16-hour marathons of old Battlestar Galactica episodes, recorded on cheap VHS tapes, with the commercials intact.

But as an incentive for the good ones, we should let them supervise the marathon viewing sessions for the bad ones, but they'd also get... a rewind button!

Depends on the situation. If it's bad judgement and they are just not equipped to handle the responsibility then taking their privileges away should be enough. If it's abuse of power then name and shame them as well. If they are bad editors they should be banned on that merit. In any case make sure they don't get a chance at that position again, including under a new name which will be harder to do. No sure fire way to avoid them getting power again.

Banning, banning, banning!!! It was the two blocks by an abusive administrator who corrupted me and made me defient of the entire system. Much like it was my unjust ban which made me defient of the system by using a sock. Abusive admins prevent the potential good contribution of an editor who they unjustfully block.

Those who support them, a very strong warning.

If they are bad admins, they should have to face RfA again. If they can still pass RfA, that's a community mandate and we should learn to deal with them. Of course, there's no means of enforcing new RfAs for controversial admins right now, which is problematic. But I think it's important to note that bad admins are bad admins because of what they do with their admin buttons, so if you take those buttons away you don't need to do anything else, like banning. Now, if they are causing trouble independently from adminship, then they should be appropriately sanctioned for that, but most of the abuse is directly connected to misuse of admin powers. Stripped of their powers to abuse others, they might focus their determination and energy (which most of them have lots of) on productively editing the encyclopedia.

I think since the arbitration is there to punish, if common members are punished so as abusive admins should.

Well, I think RfA, with enforced re-votes for controversial admins, can serve to appropriately sanction for misuse of admin tools, but outside of that RfAr should still be used if necessary. I prefer that someone is desysopped by the community rather than the ArbCom, anyway.

Reelection is probably the best. If they pass it after the complaint then obviously the case against them does not have merit. But who decides if they should face reelection? The arbcom doesn't have any better judgement than the rest of the community. If the community can decide on its own however then it is likely to be abused by everyone that has a grudge against an admin which at some point will result in collateral damage. Obviously someone must oversee it to decide if there is merit for reelection.

PS: arbcom should only make decisions when the community has failed to reach a decision. Atm they are in a position to dictate which has resulted in them abusing their power.

Petitions are a good way of doing this. It would just be like being open to recall, except it would apply to all admins regardless of whether they agreed to it. Requiring a quota of admins as a percentage of those signing could guard against it being exploited.

We can use petitiononline.com and make large petitions for every admin deserve to be desysoped, banned, and then catch arthritis so they can't use a computer again.

This is what happens when an admins have to run again for sysopping. Many will fail:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Req...nship/Sceptre_2


And sceptre was far from the worst. Although his helping to smear a guy as a pedo was bad.

Yes, that's what got him a lot of supports from the cabalish types, if memory serves.

I shudder to think what would happen if he runs again.

They really just need to make admin recall mandatory. Piss enough enough people in good standing, the people will punt you. The end. Lesson to be learned is play well with others.

I like that.. very true.

On other Wikipedias, like the Swedish Wikipedia, administrators have to run again I think every year. If they fail to get enough Community support, they are desyopped, not as a punishment or that they did anything necessarily bad, mind you, but just because the Community decided they shouldn't be administrators again.

I guess they can run again every year win or lose. I don't know of any term limits.

What were those guys actually de-sysopped for?


English WP is too big for that.

Someone came up with the idea of "Requests for de-adminship" whereby it is run like an RfA in reverse - you must get community consenus to remove the tools. It avoids the problem of admins having to deal with problem users, or getting a foloowing of people who dislike them even though they are doing a fine job - the trolls (real ones) could easily sink a good admin's confirmation with the current support percentages.

That sounds like something I would think of but I'm 100% sure someone else thought of it first, I'd like to know who!

A quick search revealed this which led me to what you really want, that.

From that page:
1. Guanaco lost adminship in December 2004 as a result of an arbitration ruling requiring him to re-apply for adminship. The stated rationale for the ruling was an ongoing pattern of controversial use of page protection and unblocks. Guanaco's first three re-applications failed, but his fourth re-application was successful. He was later desysopped (see below), and cannot currently re-apply for adminship. He remains an admin on Wikibooks.

6. Guanaco was desysopped again on April 12, 2006 after being granted adminship for a second time, as a result of a new arbitration ruling. The ruling also denies him the right to reapply for adminship.

From brief research:

Karmafist was desysopped due to an ArbCom decision relating to the Pedophilia Userbox War. He was also involved in an ArbCom case after that, putting him on a 1-year civility parole.

Everyking had three ArbCom cases against him:

# Everyking - Decided on 24 January 2005. Everyking is prohibited for one year from reverting articles related to Ashlee Simpson, and may apply in six months to have this restriction removed.

Remedy 2.2 revert parole clarified on 26 February 2005. Any article which contains a link to Ashlee Simpson or mentioning Ashlee Simpson, see what links to Ashlee Simpson, is an article "relating to Ashlee Simpson"; therefore falling within the articles covered by the revert limitation, if Everyking is editing with respect to that portion of an article which is concerned with Ashlee Simpson and in the opinion of an administrator reverting the article.

# Everyking 2 - Decided on 5 April 2005. User:Everyking is prohibited from editing articles relating to Ashlee Simpson for one year, and may apply to have this sanction lifted in two months.

# Everyking 3 - Decided on 11 November 2005. Everyking is prohibited for one year from posting to the administrator's noticeboard and subpages thereof; is prohibited from making comments on non-editorial actions taken by other administrators other than on the administrator's talk page, a Request for comment, or a Request for arbitration; is required to familiarize himself with the particulars of a situation before commenting on it.

* Amended by Open Motion on 29 December 2005. Everyking shall not interact with, or comment in any way (directly or indirectly) about, Snowspinner, on any page in Wikipedia.

Let's put this in real terms so that everyone can understand.

On Karmafist's user page it says quite clearly that he was banned for using sock puppets, which he admitted. The link to his "confession" is a link to a Wikipedia Review post.

In other words, Karmafist was banned for writing on Wikipedia Review, or at least for WHAT he wrote on Wikipedia Review...

In all 3 de-sysopping cases (and their subsequent attempts to be re-added to adminship), posts that they had made to Wikipedia Review were used as the primary rationale that they should be desysopped, and secondly that they should not be allowed back in. You can look through the links that Nathan provided, or someone else can provide some more explicit ones.

Everyking was de-sysopped because he agreed to post the text of a deleted post on Wikipedia Review. Everyking actually didn't post that text, he just agreed to. This was sufficient for him to be de-sysopped.

Karmafist was de-sysopped because he had said on Wikipedia Review a complaint about Wikipedia, and in particular a number of issues that had happened. This was used, in his arbitration (and beforehand) as an excuse for why his minor misdemeanour was sufficient to warrant him being de-sysopped.

Guanaco was de-sysopped for a variety of reasons, but "the feather that broke the camel's back" was his posting on Wikipedia Review.

All 3 of these people, while administrators, were supportive of Wikipedia Review. Certainly in the case of Everyking and Karmafist, I think that everyone here would agree that they were amazingly good administrators. I think that Karmafist was possibly the best administrator that I ever saw. Everyking was also a very good, very fair administrator.

In my first days of using Wikipedia, which I checked out much later, when admins like Tony Sidaway were engaging in rampant newbie abuse, I was running in to a heavily controlled article and getting abuse from all sides, Everyking told everyone to calm down and to treat me nicely, with some good faith, because I was a new user who didn't know what I was doing yet. Everyking said this on the Admin noticeboard.

Okay, so Everyking didn't make a big fuss of it, and that was about all that he said. But he was the only person that stood up for me. He went out of his way to help a newbie who was in big trouble. I didn't even realise he'd done this until 2 years later. He refused to join the crowd of people that were just having a great old time ganging up on a newbie.

If we have a rule that says that once an admin is "proven to be abusive", then we are going to be using admins like that.

There are right now a number of really wonderful admins. Eloquence went out of his way to get Wikipedia Review's off the spam blacklist, tried to get Blu Aardvark and Selina unbanned, tried to get Daniel Brandt's ban removed, and so forth. Linuxbeak did much the same. SlimVirgin did too, but for ulterior motives it seems. Essjay stood up to bullies like David Gerard and so forth. Essjay was a wonderful administrator who everyone here really approved of. Oh if only he hadn't lied about his credentials.

Should these people be de-sysopped and banned? Obviously, if Wikipedia were to de-sysop and ban the really bad ones, the Snowspinners, the MONGOs, the Tony Sidaways, the David Gerards, the Cydes, the Willbebacks, and all of those, then things are fine. But they won't do it. Okay, so MONGO got desysopped, but only briefly and they'll let him back in in a second. And even then that took about 15 people banned just to get that far.

The desysopping incident was actually separate from all the ArbCom cases (although I suppose they made me more vulnerable). They never took the desysopping as a case; they just ordered it done behind the scenes on an "emergency" basis (which was laughable considering the circumstances).

The thing is that A Man in Black recently showed deleted revisions on Wikipedia Review, something that everyking didn't do, but agreed to do, and was de-sysopped for. A Man in Black, however, was not de-sysopped.

Which gets to the *real* reason why Everyking (and the others) were de-sysopped. Not because of anything that they did, but because they all agreed with Wikipedia Review. Then Wikipedia just makes up excuses to get rid of them.

Of course, it should be noted that Everyking and Karmafist didn't get along with each other.

I don't agree that I was desysopped simply for posting here. I think I was desysopped because the ArbCom disapproved of my critical attitude towards abusive admins. They would have done it earlier, I think, but lacked a good excuse until then. They've always had the principle that you have to abuse admin powers to lose them, which protected me for a long time, because even my opponents had to acknowledge I was responsible with the tools. There were people calling on me to lose adminship as early as January 2005, in the first ArbCom case, but because of a content dispute and not anything administrative. I did not abuse admin tools in the desysopping incident, either, but there was enough of a case that the people who mattered got behind it, because they could present it as me intending to post personal information and having to be stopped by an emergency measure (in fact, I had no intention of posting it, which is why, during the intervening period of several days, I didn't--and anybody who still thought I might post it could have simply asked me; furthermore, it has never been clear that the information in question was actually personal).

Of course, if I didn't post here, it never would have happened, but my point is that I don't think they desysopped me just for being a WR participant--they had bigger issues with me than that. AMIB posts here, actually posted deleted information, and he wasn't desysopped, because they generally approve of him.

I don't know what you mean by saying I agree with WR: I agree with the existence of the board, and I value its usefulness as an open discussion forum given the restrictions on discussion at Wikipedia. My opinions on the mainstream views on this board vary; I agree with opposition to admin abuse but disapprove of outing, deletionism, and positions that oppose the fundamentals of Wikipedia. As for Karmafist, I have no recollection of not getting along with him, although I remember thinking he was too radical and had become anti-Wikipedia.

There's a difference between the cases. Supposedly the big problem with everyking's revision was that it had been deleted for privacy reasons, while AMIB's revision was not deleted for privacy reasons.

SlimVirgin sent a threatening email to MIB behind the scenes and then he went around trolling on here for a week acting like he opposed this site, which I'm pretty sure it was to keep from being de-sysopped.

That's not a meaningful difference, considering I didn't know anything about the revision in question, including whether or not in contained personal information. It would not make sense to punish me for something that I did not know (if it's even true!). Also, I was under the impression that AMIB's revision was deleted for privacy reasons.

Yeah, I'm not very good at translating, thank you.