Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-233706-20150624014033/@comment-1267828-20150626170157

Tupka217 wrote:

I am not me wrote: What are you getting at? You still haven't explained why Wikia Staff should get involved in every single individual dispute a user has with local admins. Just to throw this in: The main point against it, which has been made ad infinitum, is that neither side will tell a 100% true account, and going into deep research - which potentially includes the grey area of chat or even third party websites - on every slighted user's behalf will more often than not turn out to be inconclusive. Which means the judgment stands. Which makes neither side happy.

This might seem as a graveinjustice to the blocked user, but it's dime a dozen stuff here on Community Central. Multiple cases a week. Maybe once every day, two days. 90% is hogwash - either misrepresentation or misunderstanding. Or completely justified.

Staff only step in if the majority of the community wants to oust their admin. And even then, that's a last resort because it is an ugly thing. You may not like that, but that's how it is. If you've got a feasible idea how to make an appeals process (beyond asking the blocking admin), send it to Special:Contact/general.

Agreement with Tupka. The issue here is severalfold and on more than just a "you're right/you're wrong" level, which you moved this conversation to.

Believe it! wrote: Read it already. You're wrong. I refuted you in my first post. By assessing that such things as the "Why Bad Admins Aren't Removed" as wrong and 'refuted' automatically places this argument into a factual realm, which becomes entirely impossible.

1. Most users who are slighted suffer from what is known as "Confirmation Bias", in that everything and anything ever said by that admin becomes an automatically damning effect against them, and that information that will reinforce your point is either ignored, or defined in ugly terms. For example, if an admin said "Please leave the chatroom", and you were mad, you could say "They hijack the chatroom, so they told me to leave the chatroom" when in reality all they meant was they needed a group admin conversation and you interrupted, so they politely asked you to leave.

Now does that make it okay? That's up to the community. Is the community okay with group admin discussions hogging the chat for several hours? Do they trust their admins to not be doing an "Admin Swim" where only admins are allowed in the chat? Even if they are, is the community okay with that also?

What one user can see as excessively hostile intent can be seen as the remainder of the community as totally acceptable behavior, and that one user sits in a minority against a crowd of others agreeing with the admin in question.

2. Since most users who are slighted are also very upset, a second problem can arise known as the "Overconfidence Effect", a bias that is often found in individuals whom are upset, angry, or disturbed, who will assure with high belief that their interpretation of the events is absolutely accurate when in fact they are heavily tainted by emotion all because the individual's confidence in their statement outweighs the objective situation for a subjective truth.

A wikia user who comes on here, assuring us of 'Tyranny', and 'Abuse of Power' may actually have been subjected to no more than an argument with an angry admin. Said user may even have violated a rule, but in their opinion they violated absolutely nothing and that admin was simply an overreacting power abuser. Often times a user DID violate a rule, but they are so incredibly angry with the argument that they refuse to admit or even consider that they violated anything at all, creating a subjective truth over an objective truth.

3. Every individual will interpret events differently. This is known as the "Rashomon Effect", wherein you could put ten people in the same situation and get ten totally different accounts that only share certain details. This is an extremely problematic situation in the real world as well, especially with eyewitness accounts who can argue multiple outcomes to the same situation with only certain details the same.

If three gentlemen witness a robbery, and the first man says it was a young man who broke into a gas station and sped off in a black truck, the second man says it was a 15 year old boy with black hair and a stolen black sedan who sped off after robbing a gas station, and the third man says it was a young man who knocked a man out and stole his black car, what do you know? You know it was a man, likely young, he had a vehicle, and he robbed a gas station. However, how much else is valid? Was the boy really 15? Was it a truck, a sedan, or what? Was the car stolen, or did the man just assume that? Did he really knock someone out like the third man claimed? The other two didn't see a victim be battered. Did the boy have black hair? The other two men said nothing of hair color. This also leaves a plethora of questions open such as if he had cased the joint, if he's local, so on, all questions that can't be answered with the testimony.

Wikia Admins and their angry banned Users are subject to this as well, where the admin can recant the situation totally different than the angry individual. They may misquote each other, state that entire statements by the other are false, or even argue that "that wasn't what I meant when I said it!" Suddenly now you have two interpretations of the same events that look like two totally different novels, and even then there are a ton of questions you have that can't be answered with what you've asked, or can't even be asked because you kno they're either going to make it up or have forgotten.

Without a solid comment trail on message walls, blogs, or comments, or even a chat bot, it becomes absolutely impossible to stop any sort of situation with 100% accuracy. If the Wikia Staff remove the angry admin, they may remove a totally justified admin. Then again, if they side with the admin, the User may have been totally justified. It's much safer to assume the User in question should just move on and sits in a minority.

The reason for that is the absolutely numerous complaints this site receives on a regular basis. Admin emails. Chatmod/Admin message walls, Chat complains where someone jumps inot the chatroom and begins demanding the removal of a specific user, or, as you did, on forums. To investigate every single complaint with absolute certain accuracy would take so much time on the hands of Staff that they might as well forget maintenance altogether. Furthermore, Staff are subject to their own bias's as they are humans too. They may misinterpret a situation, and, while they are totally allowed to run this place as they want since they own it, obviously don't want to go down that road. On top of that, people often have issues with authority, and it isn't hard to imagine that a vast majority of individuals on the internet with the ability to say whatever they want with little to no real-world reprecussions will overstay their welcome. For every single admin who's ever been complained about to be a problem, wikia might as well just shut down all wiki's and run everything by themselves, which would be impossible.

Now if the whole community complains, then it's obvious that the admin is a problem. It's no secret to anyone that that admin is upsetting everybody. However, if it's just one extremely angry user with a chip on their shoulder, getting angry at everyone who disagrees or generally just being angry and throwing a fit at the people 'siding with fascists', then it's safe to say that it's much better to wait for the storm to cool and see if anyone else complains over taking immediate rash action.

On top of that, if a user is going to come on here and make crass statements like the staff sides with 'fascists', staff will be polite about it, but they're still people and probably don't appreciate that, and are much less likely to follow a request when being insulted.