Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Next issue/Op-ed

Op-ed

On the backrooms

By Tamzin

The Signpost reached out to me recently and asked if they could republish this essay that I initially published in June, which I had recorded about a month after I resigned as an administrator. There's an irony in running it now, as I recently returned to adminship. As you will hear or read below, I considered but quickly dismissed the idea that I might change as a person in some way that altered my tolerance for the problems I'd identified with our backroom culture. I was wrong about that, for reasons that are both very pleasant and not very interesting to anyone but me, and so I now find myself an admin again, if with some trepidation. I stand by the rest of what I said, though.

The original format of this essay is audio, and I think it comes across best in that medium, but a full transcript is presented as well, lightly annotated.

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I've been wanting for a while to write up my thoughts on the circumstances that led me to resign as a Wikipedia admin at greater length than I did at the time, and I keep finding that I just can't find a way to structure what I want to write. So I figure if I talk into a microphone for long enough, I will eventually make the points I want to make.

I guess I'll start with a personal clarification that I'm very grateful to people who have said that they hope to see me back as an admin someday or something like that, but that's (sigh). I don't want to say there's no chance of that happening, 'cause maybe there could be some radical changes to how Wikipedia works or maybe radical changes to how I work, although I think I've had all the big ones, dare I tempt fate there, but I don't foresee a plausible future where I would ever want to return to Wikipedia adminship.

And a lot of that, to be clear, has to do with who I am as a person, with radical changes that I have experienced in my personality—all for the better—that were just making me feel like... In short, I don't like being in charge of other people. And that's a big part of this, and I certainly don't want this to seem like it's all you, not me. No, it's you, Wikipedia, and it's me.

But let's talk about the cultural criticism I have. One thing I realized a while ago on Wikipedia, before I even became an admin, was how much of everything revolves around social capital. We have these almost ritualized ways that we acquire, and trade, and spend social capital, some of which is proxied by things like edit count and number of GAs or FAs and user rights, but is all overall a fairly nebulous concept. But it disturbed me more and more as time went on in my admin career, how much people acted like the outcomes of our internal processes were always based on just what was objectively the right decision, as opposed to very often being based on social capital and nothing else. And one turning point experience for me was the user Ɱ, who was using bare URLs to account-walled pages in citations and got taken to AN/I over it. Now, astute observers might note that there's not actually a policy against either of those things, but he was kind of a jerk when they were taken to AN/I, maybe because they were taken to AN/I over something that there isn't a policy against maybe because they put a lot of effort into writing a lot of Wikipedia articles on things that people would normally think, "Oh, there's no way that you could get a whole article on this", and they would get, you know, multiple articles on that topic and get some of them to featured article. They'd put all this work in. Someone had a gripe about a relatively minute part of it.

And they didn't communicate well. But what happened was a bunch of people who spend a lot of their time critiquing how other people do their work, while often not doing a lot of work themselves, all came down on him and, you know, he got fed up and retired. And, to me that was so obviously a case of someone getting screwed over not for actually making the encyclopedia worse but for not really playing our social games, for not respecting the self-appointed gods of AN/I. That was an important step in my disillusionment from a lot of these processes. Then from there I got thinking, the longer I was an admin, about the dynamics behind blocks.

One thing I think a lot of people don't realize is that if you're making serious blocks—not vandalism blocks, not routine sockblocks, but you know, the type people write home about, the type that can wind up under noticeboard review, under ArbCom review, that get threads on Wikipediocracy—your main consideration isn't "Does policy justify this block?" It's "Does this block stick? Will this block stick?" And whether a block sticks will have much more to do with social capital than with anything. And I spent a lot of time staffing AN/I as an administrator. And I found so often you could just compare two threads on the same page of "Oh this user got indeffed for this comment and, you know, an experienced user commented, 'This is an absolutely unacceptable thing. I can't believe anyone would ever say this.'" And two threads down, here this thread was SNOW-closed against sanctions against someone who said something worse. There's a lot of that, and it's bullshit, and it's unfair, and especially given that like, let's be honest, like at least half of our editorbase is autistic and the other half is close enough to it, that's really unfair to them, right? They're trying to get a sense of what is acceptable to say and what isn't, and here's this thread where someone didn't get blocked and here's this thread where someone did, and it's all social capital!

So when I would make a block, you know, I, sure there's the question of "Is this a policy-compliant block?", but that's usually pretty easy to answer. The rest would be, "Do I have the social capital?" It's not, "Could some admin make this block?" It's "Could I make this block?" And then it's, "Okay, how much visible adminning have I been doing lately? If this is a content thing, how much content have I been doing lately?" If I've, like, gotten a couple GAs recently, that could look better for making this block of a content editor.

There's just a bunch of politics to follow and it felt like Agar.io, the Web game where you're just trying to be a bigger circle so you can eat the littler circles. And, you know, you'd see blocks get overturned because the admin was too small of a circle. Not because the person they were eating didn't do something wrong, but because the admin was a littler circle than the person they blocked. And this is unfair in both directions. Like, I stand by just about every block I ever made. I had two blocks overturned. Looking back I think, eh, they were marginal. I still don't know if they needed to be overturned but I probably shouldn't have made them. But that's it, out of like 2,000 I don't have any doubt that the blocks I made were good for the encyclopedia. But the fact that only two were ever overturned, I don't think is because they were good blocks. It's because I played the game well. I was visible. I did useful work. I was a known name.

Over time I got a bit of reputation for taking other admins to ArbCom—although, I will stress, never for overturning anything I did or anything like that, only for things I came upon. But still, I'm sure that was good for having social capital, good for making people not want to mess with my blocks. And so, yeah, the fact that all of my blocks but those two stand, or stood while they were active, is a reflection of my political acumen, not a reflection of my acumen at enforcing Wikipedia policy. And I would see this with other admins. I would see admins make obviously bad blocks that no one would want to challenge because "Oh, you know who that is? I'm not going to take that guy to AN/I. Even though he just blocked that person for a username violation for a username that I can point to a hundred people who have the same kind of username." So it's unfair against the people who get blocked. And then, you know, the maybe better-known side of this coin is the unblockables side, right? It's unfair for the people who have to deal with the ones who don't get blocked, where the community can't get a consensus to tell people that various, you know, insults are unacceptable because "Oh, we like the work they do." So that was another big part of my disillusionment, was the charade of our user conduct enforcement.

And then, the thing that, you know, finally made me say, "Okay, I've been thinking about this and I should just step away from this thing that's been a big part of my life" was my friend Vami_IV, who killed himself on February 13. Vami and I talked a lot over the years. We were joined, forever bonded, by these twin horrific RfAs that were linked a year apart. Because the controversy at my RfA was a comment I'd made at his RfA. Vami asked me, I want to say around November, "Do you ever go back and just read through your whole RfA?" And I said, "No, I don't." I'll be honest, I've never read the whole thing. (Chuckles) That's probably like one of the only things I've ever lied about, just outright lied about on Wikipedia. There's a couple times I said, "Oh I read every oppose." No, I stopped reading on like Day 6. Just, completely tuned it out. If you had a really thoughtful support or oppose in the last couple days of my RfA, sorry, I probably still haven't read it. But, that's what I said to Vami. And he said "Oh, you know I do it every few months. I go back and I read the whole thing." I'll be honest, I think what I said at that point was, "Yeah, if I want to self-harm I do it the old-fashioned way." (Pause) And I'm not trying to make any assumptions about what role that played in the deterioration of his mental health. I don't know. I genuinely have no idea. But I do know it was a major source of sadness in his life. And thinking about the impact that Wikipedia nastiness could have on someone way outside the Wikipedia sphere but really hurting them a lot as a person, and being I know it was one of the worst things that ever happened to him. He would have said that.

My RfA was one of the most difficult things I've ever done. I don't know if I would say worst. But it was, like, a notable life trauma. And I mean, I'm sure there are people who would say that I deserved that, or, you know, that he did. But, we're humans. We're humans here. And... I think we let ourselves be governed too much by bullies and maybe that's necessary. Maybe Wikipedia deals with so much bullshit—POV-pushing from every possible corner of the globe—that we need the assholes who will, you know, kick people when they're down, who will do what needs to be done to keep the encyclopedia safe. But I don't really believe that. I think we could be nicer. And we just aren't, because... maybe because sometimes being mean is fun. Like I'm not claiming I have a perfect record of always being nice to everyone. (Chuckles) That's what I said when I resigned! Was I felt like I wasn't being nice enough anymore. I was being too mean. And I think we could be nicer. I don't know a way to make that the case. I think maybe slowly the community's on a trajectory toward more niceness. That's like, the general thrust of things in my years of on-and-off interacting with Wikipedia as an editor. But I don't know if we're anywhere close to on-track to being a site without this kind of toxicity. And this isn't—I think the difficult thing to get with is, it's mostly not about individual people.

Like, sure, there's some people you could point to—like for instance, in the context of Vami's RfA, there's one editor, one admin who obviously, like, shouldn't be a part of this community, which you can see just from reading how that RfA went. But most of the time it's a structural issue. Our whole model is built on conflict. The BRD cycle that all of our collaborative editing revolves around is built on this idea of "Oh, you should revert people". But also, "Don't revert people the wrong way or we'll block you for edit-warring." And the line between refining each other's edits and edit-warring is not super clear and, oh yeah, has a lot to do with social capital. Other editing models are possible, right? You could imagine some sort of Git-style model, where it's more like putting in a pull request to an existing page? That would require us to at least in some cases abandon or strongly minimize the idea of no ownership of articles. But let's be honest, that ship sailed a long time ago. If you read "No ownership of articles", it's mostly about the situations in which people own articles. All it really means at this point is you can't say, "Hey, this article is mine. You need my permission!" So I think actual structural changes to how the wiki editing model works are worth some sort of dialogue about, blue-skies thinking.

And what I just said is just one of many ways you could potentially do either technical changes or normative changes to make that most basic unit of interaction more friendly. Instead I think what we have is this very, like, early-2000s Internet-libertarian way of doing it, just like, "Eh, conflict is inevitable." It's a very masculine way of looking at it. Call that stereotyping if you want, but the less masculine my personality has become, the less I've been comfortable with the levels of conflict we have on Wikipedia.

So I'm excited about the newer generation of editors, the post-COVID wave. They seem a lot more conscientious than your average old-timer, including me, probably. Again I'm not pretending I've always been nice. Maybe in years, years, they'll really be running this site and will take serious an idea not just of civility, but of collegiality. Because you know, I've been civil to Westboro Baptist Church members face-to-face. Civility is a fucking low bar, and maybe the reason that we never meet that bar is because it's so low. Collegiality isn't that high of a bar. It's not friendliness. It's not love.

I try to infuse my editing with friendliness and love, and I mostly fail, but I do try. But we don't need to make that the communal standard. But collegiality would be nice. So maybe in years, years, as these Zoomers take over Wikipedia, that will change. And hey, maybe then I'd want to come back as an admin, but I don't know if they'd want to have me by then! Because I'm kind of a dick sometimes. And kind of got into a lot of drama, and that's... (Pause)

I did all of that in a really calculated way to be clear. Like, I knew I would always be a controversial admin, and so I embraced that, and tried to effect serious changes that I wanted to see through that controversiality I have. And, again, I'm mostly proud of that track record. Some things I'd go back and do differently, but I was able to send a really clear message to ArbCom that the community cares about holding admins accountable, and I wouldn't have been able to do that without kind of being a loudmouth a lot. So, I'm proud of that, but it's also just not who I naturally am as a person.

I don't actually like doing it. I liked the results, but I recently saw a video of Ronnie O'Sullivan, the greatest snooker player of all time, immediately after cementing his status as such with this victory over the other best player currently in the game. On a hot mic, he hugs his children and says something like, "I can't keep fucking doing this. It's going to kill me." And there was a lot of, you know, discussion, of people saying, "Why would someone who's so good at something have that reaction to being good at it?" But I get it. I mean, I won't claim to have had—(Laughs)—anywhere near the prowess as a Wikipedia admin as Ronnie O'Sullivan has at snooker, but it's just, I was a good admin. I was a good SPI clerk. And no, I... Playing that part, of being the troublemaker who got important things done by causing drama in the right places, was exhausting and demoralizing and hurt my soul. And I'm glad I'm not doing that anymore. I feel a little guilty about it, because I still look around and see cases of "Oh, geez, if someone were to drop in the right bit of, you know, fire into this thread, it would really push things in the right direction". But—that ain't me. I don't... That's... That's not me anymore.

But anyway, what was I saying? Yeah, that, given all that background though, I would not be shocked if I'm not welcome on the hypothetical future super-collegial admin team. And very well! I started editing to write content. I thought, "I'll do a little antivandalism work first." I got sucked into that. Took a few years off. More antivandalism. When I finally, after like years, got to sit down and really set to what I'd meant to do when I was years old, which was just write articles, I loved it. And I still love it. And I'm gonna keep doing it as long as y'all will have me, I hope.

Wow. This is 26 minutes and 56 seconds right now. I'll probably cut it down if I can figure out how to do that. But um, whatever I cut it down to, I'm sure it will be long. So, if you've listened this far, thank you for listening.

And I hope this explains something. Happy editing.

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