Wikipedia talk:Miscellany for deletion/User:Surturz/AdminWatch

Voting breakdown

• Comment. Just curious about how the voting was breaking down by status (admin/non-admin). Here are tallies as of Aug 9th (5pm NY time). These are rough numbers subject to change. 46 voted; of these, 67% voted delete and 30% voted keep and 2% were undecided (total > 100% because of rounding). Of the 31 persons voting delete, 55% were admins. Of the 14 voting keep, 29% were admins, and 71% were non-admins. It suggests that persons vote differently based on status here, that is, if you are an admin, you are more likely to vote delete. And, it will be an admin who decides how to interpret this vote and make a decision.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 22:16, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

• Note: Status based on this list -- if the spelling of a username is incorrect and led to wrong data please change this -- thanx) I would have posted this on a user talk page but feared it might have been interpreted as a "s---list" and deleted. :) --Tomwsulcer (talk) 22:16, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

• Admins voting Keep 4
• Admins voting Delete 17
• Non-admins voting Keep 10
• Non-admins voting Delete 14
• Undecided 1

Total 46

Analysis of votes as of Aug 9th by status

Handle	Vote	Status
Surturz	Keep	Non-Admin
Spartaz	Delete	Admin
Strange Passerby	Delete	Non-Admin
Tide rolls	Delete	Non-Admin
SDY	Keep (weak)	Non-Admin
Ben MacDui	Delete	Admin
Avanu	Keep	Non-admin
Jayron32	Delete	Admin
Ed	Delete	Admin
Hullaballoo Wolfowitz	Keep	Non-Admin
Coren	Delete	Admin
PeterSymonds	Delete	Admin
Hut 8.5	Delete	Admin
SarekOfVulcan	Delete	Admin
Dekkappai	Delete	Non-Admin
Reyk	Delete	Non-Admin
HominidMachinae	Keep (strong)	Non-Admin
Parsecboy	Delete	Admin
Nick-D	Delete	Admin
Dirk Beetstra	Delete	Admin
Joe Chill	Delete	Non-Admin
Crazynas	Keep (weak)	Non-Admin
Nyttend	Keep	Admin
Johnuniq	Delete	Non-Admin
La goutte de pluie	Keep	Admin
Hi878	Keep	Non-Admin
Cunard	Delete	Non-Admin
SmokeyJoe	Delete	Non-Admin
Elen of the Roads	Delete	Admin
Chick Bowen	Delete	Admin
Enric Naval	Delete	Non-Admin
DGG	Keep	Admin
Pedro	Keep	Admin
Seb az86556	Delete	Non-Admin
Tomwsulcer	Keep (strong)	Non-admin
Robofish	Delete (strong)	Non-Admin
I Jethrobot	Keep (conditional)	Non-admin
AdvertAdam	Delete	Non-Admin
Tarc	Delete	Non-Admin
Sandstein	Delete	Admin
Mathsci	Delete	Non-Admin
Worm that turned	Delete	Admin
Casliber	Undecided (leans keep)	Admin
MuZemike	Delete	Admin
Fetchcomms	Delete	Admin
ScottyBerg	Keep	Non-Admin

• This pattern is approximately similar to that at Wikipedia:Community de-adminship/RfC. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:42, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

I moved this over to the talk page because it is meta-discussion about the MFD, rather than about the page being discussed. Plus the page is almost 100K without this. But feel free to carry on with your analysis, and if you believe it is relevant as an argument for or against the deletion of the nominated page, you can reference/link to it in a comment there. --RL0919 (talk) 23:03, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

I agree, good call. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:08, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

I feel left out. Can I be put in there under "discussed and made suggestion but didn't !vote"? Or you could work out what I think should happen based on what I said. Hint: whether the page is deleted or not isn't really the key issue here. The key issue is that people come away from this with an understanding of how to approach dispute resolution properly (regardless of whether you are an admin or not, and regardless of whether your dispute is with an admin or not), and the difference between dispute resolution and meta-discussion on how to improve various things around here. Oh, and realising that admins are really only editors with extra buttons, they are not super-editors. Those are things that people only 'get' by discussion, and no number of delete or keep !votes or results of deletions will replace discussion. It would be far, far better to summarise the points made in the discussion (i.e. people's comments) than to count !votes. Carcharoth (talk) 23:49, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

If you felt left out, why didn't you vote? And whichever admin decides to keep or delete, they'll make their own analysis of the points -- this is a particular analysis just looking at two variables -- vote, and status -- to see if there was a relation.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 23:54, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

I think you missed my point. I thought it was obvious I was being sarcastic when saying I felt left out. The point is that discussion is what oils processes on Wikipedia, not !voting. Hopefully the closing admin will summarise the points raised here, but my point was more that the participants in a discussion can often do that summarising themselves. You don't have to wait for an admin to do that summary. Which feeds back to my point about people seeing admins as some kind of elevated super-class, when they are not. What you need to do is find a similar MfD to this one, but one that concerned the deletion of a list about other editors (not admins). And then see if the admins-editor !voting is any different there to here. It might be that admins are not defending admins, but are more sensitive to overall criticism than editors. I'd also look less at who is an admin or not, and more at how long people have been editing for. I find !voting tends to split more along 'generational' lines, with each Wikipedia 'generation' being about 2 years. You will probably find that those from similar generations have similar interpretations of policy and guidelines, and more broadly, newer editors tend to differ in opinion from more established editors, at least until they internalise how things work around here. Admins tend to be more established, so anything that is due to that can sometimes appear to be admins grouping together, when it isn't really. Carcharoth (talk) 00:08, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

I understand and agree with what you've written above, about the importance of discussion. I wasn't trying to over-emphasize voting but rather to shed light on one aspect of this. Isn't it interesting? And I like your hypothesis about "generations" interesting too. It may be that my own perceptions are colored by being an outsider, a non-admin, as well as memories of past disagreements in which I may not have fully grasped all of the rules but which I felt pushed around. Still, I think there is a kind of all power corrupts principle at work here, but perhaps only slightly, since what I'm sensing is the vast majority of people here, admin and non-admin, are basically reasonable (my POV).--Tomwsulcer (talk) 08:54, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

If you want to look for previous discussions of similar pages, this search might help. It returns discussions of other stuff, such as inflammatory userboxes and political rants, but there are several past "attack page" discussions. For example, I closed this one and this one in the second half of last year. Here is an interesting non-userspace example from this year. --RL0919 (talk) 01:04, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

I also think that admin status is a furphy. I tried looking at the table of votes by age of the user account, but the only thing to stand out is that accounts from the northern summer of '06 are seriously over-represented (15 June - 17 September '06 account for 26% of all !voters). --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:30, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

So it takes Wikipedians five years to figure out what an MFD is?</joke>Crazynas ^t 00:44, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

• Just noting a few things. Tide rolls is not currently an admin, but he did resign his adminship in uncontroversial circumstances less than a month ago (not sure if that's worth noting or not). There are two actual inaccuracies, though: you have Beetstra down as a non-admin, which is incorrect (he's been an admin since '07). Also, you have "Elle" (User:La goutte de pluie) down as a non-admin, when in fact, Elle has been an admin since '05, although she's had a username change since her RfA, which could have been what confused you. Jenks24 (talk) 08:01, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

Updated, thanks.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 09:04, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

"Age" of user and votes

Just out of pure curiosity, some other data - votes and date of first edit. This isn't a rigorous analysis, at least one user had an extreme gap between their first edit and their first real activity. To do this scientifically it'd be best to weight edits against when they were made, and I honestly don't care that much, I'm just curious if there's a trend. I shamelessly borrowed Tom's table format.

This is only data mining, I've no analysis, and the only trend I see is the 2006 thing. SDY (talk) 00:55, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

Analysis of votes as of Aug 9th by length of service in days

Handle	Vote	Days since first edit
Surturz	Keep	1930
Spartaz	Delete	1872
Strange Passerby	Delete	508
Tide rolls	Delete	1173
SDY	Keep (weak)	1334
Ben MacDui	Delete	1787
Avanu	Keep	1967
Jayron32	Delete	1880
Ed	Delete	1971
Hullaballoo Wolfowitz	Keep	1835
Coren	Delete	1931
PeterSymonds	Delete	1862
Hut 8.5	Delete	1829
SarekOfVulcan	Delete	1833
Dekkappai	Delete	2020
Reyk	Delete	1881
HominidMachinae	Keep (strong)	161
Parsecboy	Delete	1835
Nick-D	Delete	2103
Dirk Beetstra	Delete	1969
Joe Chill	Delete	834
Crazynas	Keep (weak)	2334
Nyttend	Keep	1827
Johnuniq	Delete	1329
Elle	Keep	2515
Hi878	Keep	983
Cunard	Delete	1257
SmokeyJoe	Delete	2008
Elen of the Roads	Delete	1185
Chick Bowen	Delete	2238
Enric Naval	Delete	2525
DGG	Keep	1799
Pedro	Keep	1838
Seb az86556	Delete	1648
Tomwsulcer	Keep (strong)	885
Robofish	Delete (strong)	2032
I Jethrobot	Keep (conditional)	1823
AdvertAdam	Delete	261
Tarc	Delete	2325
Sandstein	Delete	2200
Mathsci	Delete	2009
Worm that turned	Delete	1122
Casliber	Undecided (leans keep)	1922
MuZemike	Delete	1165
Fetchcomms	Delete	676
ScottyBerg	Keep	569

OK, I caved to my inner geekiness, some analysis because I'm just goofy about these things... the mean and two standard deviations on each side for "age" of users voting delete is 541-2766, and for users voting keep is 265-2898. Statistically, there is no meaningful correlation between "age" and vote since the two intervals overlap. (Caveat: statistics are not certainty.)

Some further numbers:

Admins voting delete: 838 to 2598 Admins voting keep: 1781 to 1861

Non-admins voting delete: 250 to 2920 Non-admins voting keep: (-22) to 2992

The things I do for fun when sitting bored in a hotel room... SDY (talk) 01:26, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

Interestingly enough, Hullaballoo Wolfowitz and I apparently started editing on the same day. Parsecboy (talk) 02:58, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

A classic Birthday problem result!!

Thanks to Tom and SDY for the breakdown, I was thinking of doing that myself and you've saved me the effort. Not sure if the samples are big enough to generalise, but as one would expect, the skew from admin WP:COI is pretty strong, enough to push it over the line. I'm not sure the non-admin 15-11 (58%) would count as consensus, but even if one assumes there is a non-admin WP:COI skew the other way, the result is pretty discouraging. One could theorise that non-admins wanting to become admins are more likely to post in MfDs such as this, I guess. What surprises me is the number of people voting. I guess the page name grabs attention. Thanks again, knowing the numbers makes me happier that there is actually genuine consensus against the page, rather than this being an admin beat-down. I think there is a strong argument that we should add a caveat to [[WP:ADMINACCT] though, that criticism should be in the dispute resolution pages, and not in userspace. --Surturz (talk) 07:39, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

The point you are missing is that most admins (hopefully most of them) are able to look at things objectively and comment in discussions and other places as editors, not as admins (I'm certainly commenting here as an editor, not an admin). The admin 'hat' is something that should only be put on when using the tools or closing AfDs and similar discussions. There are cases of admins getting too big for their boots and going on power trips, and there are cases of admins blindly backing up other admins without checking what happened, but if you have a genuine case there are enough fair-minded people out there that there will nearly always be someone willing to listen to you. When you get a lot of people voting, it tends to be because it got mentioned on a user talk page with a lot of watchers, or it got mentioned at a place like AN or ANI (the latter was how I became aware of this). Also, once a discussion reaches a critical mass, it starts attracting other editors merely because of its size. Anyway, interesting though the discussion has been, have you considered what I suggested? Which is copying the top half of the current page (i.e. not including the diffs), starting that as a new page with a new title aimed at turning it into an essay of some sort, and asking for the current page to be deleted? That would be a show of good-faith on your part and go a long way to helping things move on here. Many people come up against perceived deficiencies and injustices in the system, and the most useful thing is usually to write an essay detailing the general principles that you think need changing. Carcharoth (talk) 08:50, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

Essay writing works as therapy, perhaps, but without a little bit of cage-rattling these issues won't be fixed, and they aren't just "perceived" deficiencies and injustices, though some people may have had a run of bad luck with the experience they've had and not have a representative sample. In just editing, I haven't seen a whole lot of problems, but honestly I don't run into many admins in that context. On the other hand, even attempting to discuss policy seems to result in immediate defensive and sometimes hostile behavior from some of the admin corps (a la WP:OWN). I was particularly curious if there was some sort of trend with older admins being more in favor of defending the system-as-it-is and newer ones less enthusiastic about it, but that's not borne out by the data. Sample size is too small to come to any rigorous conclusion, of course. SDY (talk) 13:09, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

I've been hanging round Wikipedia for quite a while, and I can't say I've seen that sort of reaction to trying to discuss policy, but if you have any diffs then please do pass them over and I'll have a look. I'm open to change and willing to work towards positive ones Worm^TT · (talk) 13:19, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

Eh, when I get into one of those situations I tend to try and forget it rather than take notes. Life's too short to get too worked up over Wikipolitics, and I have enough stress in my offline reality anyway. Usually I end up feeling guilty over wasting time on "unsolvable" administrative problems and force myself to actually contribute some content, which is probably better for the encyclopedia in the long run anyway. SDY (talk) 19:43, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

On shitlists

Other shitlists we need to make sure and take off Wikipedia

1. The Ninety-Five Theses
2. Magna Carta
3. United States Declaration of Independence

Its not an exhaustive list yet, but I'm sure we have some people who can make sure we get all such shitlists off the site. -- Avanu (talk) 12:12, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

Lol. I think it was the Ninety Five Feces to constitute a true shitlist. --Tomwsulcer (talk) 21:11, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

Up until this point, I have generally accepted your point of view Avanu, I disagree, as I mentioned in my vote, but have not felt the need to say anything against your comments. However, this rhetoric is un-needed. You know full well these are articles, not user space collections of mis-deeds. Even if they were, we have WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS. Worm^TT · (talk) 12:18, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

I agree with you, in part, but so many of our editors simply are denouncing criticism without providing something to balance it. Enric's comment just a few minutes ago gives me a bit of hope, but we have to treasure thought and speech, and in many of the responses, I only see hard-edged rejection of the same. -- Avanu (talk) 12:37, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

Moved from main MFD. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 16:53, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

Ok, now you're just destroying your own arguments with this over-the-top hyperbole. This has nothing to do with freedom or civil liberties (and less still with a schism over religious dogma, ffs!).

Nobody is arguing that complaining about perceived misbehavior by administrators in a proper venue is inappropriate; or that collecting evidence is somehow wrong. What is being argued is that a sundry list of grievances has no place on-wiki unless it's for actual dispute resolution. Your implication that consensus veers towards deleting the page is caused by administrators "sticking with each other" to stifle dissent is not only unjustified, but downright insulting.

For that matter, I feel that this list is not appropriate to keep on-wiki and I am not only part of the one group who does sanction misbehaving administrators, but the committee is historically target to the most vicious and persistent "criticism" by unhappy editors — and we have unfailingly allowed such criticism to stand even when it veers deeply into malicious attacks and personal aggression out of a desire to go above-and-beyond freedom to criticize. — Coren ^(talk) 17:21, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

I felt this should have been left on the main MfD page to just fade away, I'd have removed it already, but people responded. Ed didn't need to draw attention to it by moving it here. -- Avanu (talk) 18:01, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

Twinkle generated CSD and PROD lists

If this page is an attack page how is this acceptable? It is essentially a list of articles the user doesn't believe belong on Wikipedia and automatically links to the article and user in question. If the creation of this shitlist is permitted by simply checking a box in the Twinkle user interface... what is the rationale for deleting this?Crazynas ^t 20:37, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

Tagging an article for deletion indicates you think the article meets the criteria for deletion, regardless of who edited it. Articles can have multiple editors, so the relationship between a tagging and an editor is not definitive. There's also (usually) no implication that the article's failings were willful; it may just be that the article-writer didn't understand our criteria for inclusion. A more comparable case would be keeping a list of XFDs where you thought the consensus of the discussion (contributed to by multiple editors) was wrong, as opposed to a list of XFDs where you think the admin (one person) willfully misrepresented the consensus. --RL0919 (talk) 20:51, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

Like this one (assuming it gets closed the way consensus is leaning right now) :P ? The twinkle interface links both the creator of the page and the page in question. Although less applicable in PROD cases in CSD cases where (generally) the only contributor is the creator how does that not violate the (strict) interpretation that the !vote Delete editors in this discussion appear to have regarding POLEMIC specifically including the recording of perceived flaws. and Users should generally not maintain in public view negative information related to others without very good reason.?Crazynas ^t 21:11, 10 August 2011 (UTC)