User talk:Tennessee Ernie Ford/Rants

I saw your rant page a while ago and I wanted to comment on it but I needed to figure out exactly what I wanted to say, but here it goes...

About policies... When this wiki first started and the early community wanted to try a policy-less wiki, I thought it was going to be a temporary thing. A lot of people seem to attribute GWW’s trolling and maintenance problem at its height of activity to an idea that policies don’t work for a wiki. There were some silly policies that were unenforceable without a lot of work, and the strict wording on some allowed trolls to wikilawyer their way out. But just because there were some bad policies doesn’t mean that all policies are bad. The problem right now is that a lot of people also seem to think that GW2W has the same exact policies as GWW, start telling people what to do, quote policies that don’t exist, and cause some drama. I just don’t see why some people are obsessed with trying to force people to archive every thing in someone’s talk page.

The lack of enforceable policies on this wiki do bother me. So far it has worked fine but I think the reason is because GW2W is still a very small community where most users have a lot of experience in editing the wiki. There are also no groups of users that like to troll and be disruptive together. As the community grows, I fear that similar groups of people will form “cliques” in this wiki and cause some mayhem, and wiki newbies will be completely lost as far as what’s acceptable behavior or not (We are already seeing some instances of this occurring because of the lack of clear guidelines). In GWW, one person on the group is admonished or banned, and the rest of the “clique” comes to the rescue, quoting policy, wikilawyer, or even just vandalize using proxies. GW2W doesn’t have policies and it is up to sysop discretion, and I’m afraid that the same types of people, and ignorant new people will argue that the sysops have too much power, say it’s a dictatorship, etc etc and cause similar problems that occurred at GWW. Then the admins won’t really have any policies to fall back on when it comes to defending their actions. But I think lack of policies that are called policies might end up being kind of a minor issue compared to the next one.

In my view, the main issue that allowed trolls and disruptive users to persist for years on GWW without getting a permanent ban is the internal disagreements between the admin team. There were many cases where a simple short term ban of a clearly disruptive user by sysop A gets changed into a shorter or longer ban just because sysop B disagrees with the initial ban length. There was so much disagreement within the admin team about how disruptive users should or shouldn’t be banned or how to deal with them, almost every sysop was basically on their own team and the admin group wasn’t showing a “unified front”. It shouldn't take a hilariously long block log list to say, okay... this person is never ever going to play nicely with other people. While, I am generally confident that the current sysop team won’t repeat the same mistakes in the GWW dramafest that occurred several years ago, new sysops that never experienced that might be doomed to repeat that same mistake. It’s okay for sysops to disagree with each other, but it is not okay to change ban length behind someone’s back without discussion or consensus just because someone on the sysop team disagrees. Since enforcement this wiki is almost completely reliant in sysop discretion, I think sysop unity is even more important, and trolls will definitely exploit any divisions within the sysops.

I apologize for the length of this WoT, and some of it should probably go on my own rant page, but I thought it might be interesting to have a discussion about it since some minor issues with P&P is already starting to show, and discussion of this in the GW2W community talk pages just doesn't seem appropriate at this time because I'm not proposing any changes yet. Also, I value your opinion and input even if you aren't a admin (yet) on this wiki. :) --Lania 18:09, 24 May 2012 (UTC)