What can be done about an admin on Wikipedia that abuses their power?
First, sorry for the long post. If reading one page is something you don't like to do, you can skip this. This post is directed specifically toward editors and other public knowledge enthusiasts, who may have been disillusioned by the way things are at Wikipedia, yet aren't free to talk about it openly over there for fear of being blocked on Wikipedia indefinitely.
I've been an editor for a few years now, and I've noticed some bad behaving Wikipedia admins, but Aoidh seems particularly dangerous because on the surface he is very good at presenting himself as a fair and honorable editor. This admin seems to be in the top Wikipedia editors as far as control of English Wikipedia goes. The problem is he is bias, unfair, and acts improper on Wikipedia using his admin power. He often assists in deletions, reverting of edits, and does so with very short unsatisfactory reasons and statements, and behind the scenes non-transparent communications with other ally admins that he maintains strategic partnerships with. His action summaries often are about one short sentence and he doesn't allow real discussion about it. Sometimes, he will go to the article talk page and pretend to have a fair discussion briefly. Even when he is clearly in the wrong according to Wikipedia policy, he digs into his position even more and refuses to fix what he has deleted. He's very quick to block any dissenters. Then once an editor is blocked by him (fairly or not), it is often indefinite because an appeal or a series of appeals often goes nowhere and he likes harsh expiration dates including literally indefinite blocks. Then Aoidh slurs the person repeatedly calling them only by "sockpuppet" and refuses to even discuss the merits of any good arguments they raised. In other words, he's found that if he just blocks them, he can wrongly consider them discredited and dismiss everything they said with no need to properly react to good arguments. It's dehumanizing behaviour. This is partially due to the clout Aoidh has built up for himself being a member of Wikipedia so long, and by him being a member of the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee, a position which gives him almost limitless access to private data which he further uses to his advantage. Due to his clout, almost nobody will correct him or reign his behavior in. He should be demoted from Admin and I believe he should be blocked for all those people he threw away like they were nothing.
The overharsh blocks by Aoidh and a few of his allies are the equivalent of capital punishment for stealing a stick of gum. It's extreme overuse of undeserving and unnecessary power, and the worst part is that the blocked editor accused of stealing a stick of gum may be innocent but there was no fair trial. It's just Aoidh said so, and there goes another editor who disagreed. We never see them back again. You can go to their Talk Pages and see they were blocked five years ago, they appealed twice, but were denied. Aoidh just blocks the editor, and if they come back later no matter how polite or well behaving under a new account looking for a fresh start, Aoidh treats them like condemned slaves, less than human, just a worthless slur to him, that 'sockpuppet'. Why? Because Aoidh said so. He has blocked so many users like this, and it's just on his opinion. He might sometimes quote a rule in Wikipedia as he does it, but there is no trial and no jury to prove that editor has broken that rule, and it's all at the drop of a hat based on Aoidh's feeling and interpretation which is deceptive. He uses rules as excuses to get his way for actions based on his more personal bias. He's very clever at this deception and due to his status as an admin and english Wikipedia committee arbitrator and the relationship he maintains with a few other bullying admins, it goes unchecked at the expense of every editor he does this to.
More disturbing about Aoidh, is he seems to be another person who spends all day trolling the site obsessively, and this has literally gone on for years as if he has very limited nonWikipedia responsibilities to attend to. If you look closely at his edits, he's very political too. He has helped control article editing regarding many political subjects he seems to have bias opinions about. He feverishly injects himself into politically related articles because of a personal interest to control it. When he's not monitoring those pages to ensure nothing happens without his approval, he has an unusual focus on editing pages about k-12 schools, mass shootings including school shootings, serial killers with the most kills, espionage, lock picking, and any article remotely notable about Buford Georgia and Gwinnett County, cyber network penetration, among other creepy combinations of editing patterns. He even created Articles related to Buford which are not notable in the slightest, but because of Aoidh's clout on Wikipedia, those non notable articles remain on Wikipedia. Then there's a bazaar egotistic mix of controlling Wikipedia information regarding the origin, pronunciation, and spelling of Aoidh, McKoy, and McKay. Much of the remaining editing he has done shows deceptive techniques, like editing on two schools with the same name, one of personal interest to Aoidh, and the other just to confuse the trail. One example of his odd editing is mass amounts of possibly false interest in anything Buddha. In other words, he will edit on those obsessed subjects of personal interest which I listed above, then make a series of insignificant edits to a particular chosen subject. For example, these masking edits might be like he changed one letter of a word to be capitalized. Then on the very next edit, he may flip two words around. It will go on an on. He could have just done all of this with one simple edit, but he spaces them out to fill his logs and possibly inflate his edit count, another statistic which may be of egotistic interest to him.
Another thing I noticed is that Aoidh has a tendency to delete entire histories of his actions which are where the more egregious admin acts by him exist and particularly dangerous because it's the unseen, like a glacier base below the water's surface. In other words, for his worst actions on Wikipedia, Aoidh was able to and has aggressively deleted much evidence using his administrative powers on the site. For example, he has 'Rollback' power, meaning he can essentially delete log history and any page history against anyone who has called him out. When he wants a user erased, he goes to the point of blanking their user pages upon blocking them. If they've had an interaction with him on some arbitrary article's talk page, Aoidh will even blank or partially blank that article's talk page for that user's part of the discussion like it never happened, which hides their legitimate arguments to and about Aoidh's behaviour leading up to his block of that editor. One example is his handling of the Gimp software article which Aoidh deleted mass portions of its Talk Page to hide what was said about him and his actions. Another example is Aoidh's own user Talk page. Any admin with as much activity as Aoidh usually has a list of atleast 5-10 different topics going on at their Talk Page, which will usually include editors asking questions about why something they recently worked on was deleted or reverted. They're supposed to have the opportunity to talk about it and atleast get some reasoning or advice and maybe some outside opinion for a consensus. However, Aoidh's user Talk Page is the only Admin user Talk Page I've ever seen where it's blank. He keeps his own user Talk Page blanked. He has even added unnecessary security to his user page and talk page using his admin powers and quickly removes any questions or complaints to him. It goes to show you how much interest Aoidh has in having a discussion with any non administrators. Aoidh is not a controversial celebrity or hotly debated news event. He has no good reason if he is treating the public fairly to have all those restrictive protections on his user page and talk page or to not allow ongoing discussion with him. Aoidh should not be an admin or on the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee, but he goes virtually unchecked especially since he slid onto the committee because nobody wanted to speak up against him. Is there anything that can be done about this, and if so, what can be done?
#asknostr
First, sorry for the long post. If reading one page is something you don't like to do, you can skip this. This post is directed specifically toward editors and other public knowledge enthusiasts, who may have been disillusioned by the way things are at Wikipedia, yet aren't free to talk about it openly over there for fear of being blocked on Wikipedia indefinitely.
I've been an editor for a few years now, and I've noticed some bad behaving Wikipedia admins, but Aoidh seems particularly dangerous because on the surface he is very good at presenting himself as a fair and honorable editor. This admin seems to be in the top Wikipedia editors as far as control of English Wikipedia goes. The problem is he is bias, unfair, and acts improper on Wikipedia using his admin power. He often assists in deletions, reverting of edits, and does so with very short unsatisfactory reasons and statements, and behind the scenes non-transparent communications with other ally admins that he maintains strategic partnerships with. His action summaries often are about one short sentence and he doesn't allow real discussion about it. Sometimes, he will go to the article talk page and pretend to have a fair discussion briefly. Even when he is clearly in the wrong according to Wikipedia policy, he digs into his position even more and refuses to fix what he has deleted. He's very quick to block any dissenters. Then once an editor is blocked by him (fairly or not), it is often indefinite because an appeal or a series of appeals often goes nowhere and he likes harsh expiration dates including literally indefinite blocks. Then Aoidh slurs the person repeatedly calling them only by "sockpuppet" and refuses to even discuss the merits of any good arguments they raised. In other words, he's found that if he just blocks them, he can wrongly consider them discredited and dismiss everything they said with no need to properly react to good arguments. It's dehumanizing behaviour. This is partially due to the clout Aoidh has built up for himself being a member of Wikipedia so long, and by him being a member of the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee, a position which gives him almost limitless access to private data which he further uses to his advantage. Due to his clout, almost nobody will correct him or reign his behavior in. He should be demoted from Admin and I believe he should be blocked for all those people he threw away like they were nothing.
The overharsh blocks by Aoidh and a few of his allies are the equivalent of capital punishment for stealing a stick of gum. It's extreme overuse of undeserving and unnecessary power, and the worst part is that the blocked editor accused of stealing a stick of gum may be innocent but there was no fair trial. It's just Aoidh said so, and there goes another editor who disagreed. We never see them back again. You can go to their Talk Pages and see they were blocked five years ago, they appealed twice, but were denied. Aoidh just blocks the editor, and if they come back later no matter how polite or well behaving under a new account looking for a fresh start, Aoidh treats them like condemned slaves, less than human, just a worthless slur to him, that 'sockpuppet'. Why? Because Aoidh said so. He has blocked so many users like this, and it's just on his opinion. He might sometimes quote a rule in Wikipedia as he does it, but there is no trial and no jury to prove that editor has broken that rule, and it's all at the drop of a hat based on Aoidh's feeling and interpretation which is deceptive. He uses rules as excuses to get his way for actions based on his more personal bias. He's very clever at this deception and due to his status as an admin and english Wikipedia committee arbitrator and the relationship he maintains with a few other bullying admins, it goes unchecked at the expense of every editor he does this to.
More disturbing about Aoidh, is he seems to be another person who spends all day trolling the site obsessively, and this has literally gone on for years as if he has very limited nonWikipedia responsibilities to attend to. If you look closely at his edits, he's very political too. He has helped control article editing regarding many political subjects he seems to have bias opinions about. He feverishly injects himself into politically related articles because of a personal interest to control it. When he's not monitoring those pages to ensure nothing happens without his approval, he has an unusual focus on editing pages about k-12 schools, mass shootings including school shootings, serial killers with the most kills, espionage, lock picking, and any article remotely notable about Buford Georgia and Gwinnett County, cyber network penetration, among other creepy combinations of editing patterns. He even created Articles related to Buford which are not notable in the slightest, but because of Aoidh's clout on Wikipedia, those non notable articles remain on Wikipedia. Then there's a bazaar egotistic mix of controlling Wikipedia information regarding the origin, pronunciation, and spelling of Aoidh, McKoy, and McKay. Much of the remaining editing he has done shows deceptive techniques, like editing on two schools with the same name, one of personal interest to Aoidh, and the other just to confuse the trail. One example of his odd editing is mass amounts of possibly false interest in anything Buddha. In other words, he will edit on those obsessed subjects of personal interest which I listed above, then make a series of insignificant edits to a particular chosen subject. For example, these masking edits might be like he changed one letter of a word to be capitalized. Then on the very next edit, he may flip two words around. It will go on an on. He could have just done all of this with one simple edit, but he spaces them out to fill his logs and possibly inflate his edit count, another statistic which may be of egotistic interest to him.
Another thing I noticed is that Aoidh has a tendency to delete entire histories of his actions which are where the more egregious admin acts by him exist and particularly dangerous because it's the unseen, like a glacier base below the water's surface. In other words, for his worst actions on Wikipedia, Aoidh was able to and has aggressively deleted much evidence using his administrative powers on the site. For example, he has 'Rollback' power, meaning he can essentially delete log history and any page history against anyone who has called him out. When he wants a user erased, he goes to the point of blanking their user pages upon blocking them. If they've had an interaction with him on some arbitrary article's talk page, Aoidh will even blank or partially blank that article's talk page for that user's part of the discussion like it never happened, which hides their legitimate arguments to and about Aoidh's behaviour leading up to his block of that editor. One example is his handling of the Gimp software article which Aoidh deleted mass portions of its Talk Page to hide what was said about him and his actions. Another example is Aoidh's own user Talk page. Any admin with as much activity as Aoidh usually has a list of atleast 5-10 different topics going on at their Talk Page, which will usually include editors asking questions about why something they recently worked on was deleted or reverted. They're supposed to have the opportunity to talk about it and atleast get some reasoning or advice and maybe some outside opinion for a consensus. However, Aoidh's user Talk Page is the only Admin user Talk Page I've ever seen where it's blank. He keeps his own user Talk Page blanked. He has even added unnecessary security to his user page and talk page using his admin powers and quickly removes any questions or complaints to him. It goes to show you how much interest Aoidh has in having a discussion with any non administrators. Aoidh is not a controversial celebrity or hotly debated news event. He has no good reason if he is treating the public fairly to have all those restrictive protections on his user page and talk page or to not allow ongoing discussion with him. Aoidh should not be an admin or on the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee, but he goes virtually unchecked especially since he slid onto the committee because nobody wanted to speak up against him. Is there anything that can be done about this, and if so, what can be done?
#asknostr
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