Grants:IdeaLab/Measure administrative mistakes

Inspire campaign

Measure administrative mistakes

The mistakes that administrators make, and in particular the occurrances where they bend the rules out of rage against a specific user they don't like, must be counted, in order to counteract an arbitrary tyrannic rule over Wikipedia.

countryGermany

themeadministration

contact email• fellhauer@uni-bonn.de

idea creator• Mathmensch

this project needs...

volunteer

researcher

created on16:19, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

Project idea

What Wikimedia project(s) and specific areas will you be evaluating?

Is this project measuring a specific space on a project (e.g. deletion discussions), or the project as a whole?
This should be applied to any project, but is likely most effective at the English Wikipedia.

Describe your idea. How might it be implemented?

Provide details about the method or process of how you will evaluate your community or collect data. Does your idea involve private or personally identifying information? Take a look at the Privacy Policy for Wikimedia’s guidelines in this area.
Someone will have to do the tedious work of going through the incident noticeboard archive and evaluating case-by-case where there has been administrative misconduct and rulebending. In order to ensure neutrality, each admin decision that is evaluated as "correct" must be traced precisely to a Wikipedia rule, and if that is not possible, then the decision must be evaluated as "wrong".

Obviously, this task, which should involve many volunteers, must include appropriate methods of double-checking and work partition. Moreover, those admins who were involved with the decisions should clearly abstain from evaluation.

Are there experienced Wikimedians who can help implement this project?

If applicable, please list groups or usernames of individuals who you can work with on this project, and what kind of work they will do.
I myself would participate, investing a moderate amount of time into sifting through the admin decisions. Moreover, I'd be willing to develop a template that can be used to summarize a report.

How will you know if this project is successful? What are some outcomes that you can share after the project is completed?

A success will be indicated by a comprehensive statistic of admin decisions, at least in the domain of the incident noticeboard.

How would your measurement idea help your community make better decisions?

After you are finished measuring or evaluating your Wikimedia project, how do you expect that information to be used to benefit the project?
It would possibly give additional impetus to the idea of real control of administrative decisions, second-guessing, the prohibition of admin cabals (and cabals in general) and in this way a more friendly, less abusive climate.

Do you think you can implement this idea? What support do you need?

Do you need people with specific skills to complete this idea? Are there any financial needs for this project? If you can’t implement this project, can you scale down your project so it is doable?
I won't need any technical support, though I would have to be allowed to use a certain page (e.g. a "special" or "wikipedia" namespace page) for it.

Get Involved

About the idea creator

I'm a mathematician and avid contributor to wikibooks. I was brutally bullied out of two WP projects by unqualified personnel for bogus reasons. Apart from the bans, I recieved anything from threats to insults. Changes that I made were reverted, even though they were very clearly sensible. These experiences left me highly critical of the Wikipedia as a whole, and made me angry with editors who are verbally abusive and enjoy damaging another's reputation.

Endorsements

• yes, cannot learn if do not study mistakes. admin impunity is a problem. would be better in aggregate, with anonymized reporting. would make good "do not do this", could also get metrics on positive admin action, make a do "do this" , could lead to an admin "standard of practice". please look at commons also. Slowking4 (talk) 19:12, 8 August 2018 (UTC)
• This seems like appallingly obvious common sense, I am quite shocked that there aren't already systems and processes in place to limit this kind of behavior. BilltheCatACK (talk) 19:45, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

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