 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
 | This page in a nutshell: State your point. Retreat gracefully. Apologize – gasp! – in the face of a truculent response. Disarm your interlocutor. Subduing one's opponent without fighting is not only the highest form of mastery, it is also a winning solution for all editors involved, as well as the encyclopedia. Rather than enforce, teach.. Rather than lecture, demonstrate. Rather than confront, retreat gracefully. |
For the record, Wikipedia owes a great debt to its 848 volunteer admins, of whom perhaps 570 are active as editors. The encyclopedia is a success, despite its faults; its 6,890,317 articles currently comprise the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet. Much of the credit for this success is due to admins. Sometimes working behind the scenes, and sometimes very much in the thick of a madding crowd, admins strive to maintain order among Wikipedians, and to tidy up all the detritus associated with the monumental amount of labor that has been invested in the project by thousands of editors. Being granted the status of admin is often referred to as "getting the mop", and many of the labors they face are comparable to cleaning the Augean Stables. After a hard day of arguing with edit warriors they wipe the sweat from their brows and log off, knowing that the next time they log in again, things will be pretty much the same – perhaps with a different gathering of harmful or unhelpful users, but perhaps not.
And yet for all their plainly apparent value to Wikipedia and its community of editors, admins remain an oft-maligned crew. Accusations are as legion as accusers: Admins are too imperious. Admins pursue vendettas. Admins travel in small packs, and always have each others' backs. And so on. At first glance, these might seem susceptible to a simple Sticks and Stones line of defense. But calumny is a toxic and cumulative poison, especially when taken together with chafing verbal conflict and aggressive behavior, and even more especially when experienced in recurring doses. In certain low-frequency but accelerated-risk scenarios, the need for self-defense goes even further, leading some admins to self-identify as being willing to make difficult blocks in response to threats and harassment off-site or in real life because of administrative actions they have taken on Wikipedia. It begins to appear that those who are granted the mop should also be issued hazmat and bombsuits.
A hefty share of the blame for this toxic environment can be laid squarely on the shoulders of the accusers. Most of Wikipedia's thousands of editors collaborate constructively, adding facts, files and images to the encyclopedia. A persistent minority behaves in other ways. Deep personal investment in the topic of an article, or investment of an unhealthy amount of ego into the content one has added, can lead to a tendentious or disruptive editing style that seeks to protect a preferred version of an article, perhaps over an extended time frame. This in turn engenders conflict, which necessitates admin involvement, and seldom leads to a happy ending.
And yes. There have been some admins in the past who were simply bad eggs, and there probably are still some in the present. WP:RFA is not a crystal ball or a magic gate. In any regulating process that has granted extended editing rights to over 1,700 (largely anonymous) people based solely on their contributions to a single outlet, the occasional release of effluent is unavoidable. The good news is, though the wheels of justice may turn slowly, they do turn. Bad admins eventually become ex-admins.