Wikinews:Requests for permissions/Removal/Diego Grez (sysop)

Diego Grez
Closed - Rights retained, speedied per Brian McNeil's suggestion. Not enough weight to warrant a desysop at this time. BarkingFish (talk) 18:37, 26 January 2011 (UTC) (closing admin voted in this RFP/R, second set of eyes welcomed)

[ Express your view on this user ] (comments) Nominated on 

– I feel that Diego Grez is, at this time, not suitable for the administrator flag on the English-language version of Wikinews. There is not one singular reason why I feel this is the case, but rather several minor issues that add up to make a large problem. N.B.: As a non-administrator, the contents of the deleted pages are based on what I was told on IRC; they may be completely wrong.
 * Deletion
 * The deletion summary of Duoderry (a spam article), was simply 'NO!'. This is unacceptable: the delete-reason dropdown exists for a reason. It would have been far more appropriate to pick 'Advertising/spam' from the combo box and leave the additional fields blank.
 * The deletion summary of Talk:Bfvmmgmvbmgh was also inappropriate: insulting a user is unacceptable, and in direct contravention of What Wikinews is not.
 * Bhagat Mahasabha's summary of 'Bye' was inappropriate -- as a press release, using the combo box would have been more appropriate. Falkland Islands announce they are 'satisfied' with their defence also was sent off with a farewell. That particular article was tagged 'abandoned', yet deleted within a day, again in contravention of our deletion policy (that states three days, although the sources were well out of date).
 * The deletion summary of Nate's Birthday was extremely inappropriate. 'Fuck off' is never an acceptable summary for anything, especially not a press release of, I am told, a charity event, issued in good faith by someone who is unfamiliar with our ruleset.
 * Democracy Now! – now under a Creative Commons license was told to '[g]et back to where you once belonged' (granted, with an appropriate drop-down).
 * Odisha,india has a rather condescending deletion summary.
 * OWN was 'OWNED'. Regardless of the topic of the deletion, it's not helpful to start screaming memes at people.
 * Comments:Lady Gaga has a pointless deletion summary.
 * File talk:Information.svg is a completely inappropriate edit summary which should never have happened. The former WMF Legal Counsel says hi.
 * Art exhibition announcement: sending any article to 'hell' isn't encouraged either.


 * Blocking
 * Irate was blocked indefinitely with a rather unhelpful block summary. Blocking a user can be confusing for the recipient; being told that they were blocked for not being a plane is inappropriate, regardless of how justified the block was -- telling the user that they were being blocked as a sockmaster would have been more appropriate.
 * Blocking ངག་དབང་བསོད་ནམས། is particularly aggravating. Telling a user that the language they speak is one that 'nobody knows' is rather bad form. Would you like it if I turned round and said "I don't speak Spanish. Why should I? Nobody knows it.". Considering Diego Grez's penchance for using the wrong language in edit summaries, rendering it incomprehensible to 93% of the world's population.


 * Protection
 * Protection summaries are fine -- but a few have no edit summaries, and others have summaries in the wrong language.

*Diego gave BarkingFish's review bit back unilaterally against consensus and against the user's wishes. '''Removed. Don't drag me into this. It was dealt with.'''
 * Rights
 * Edits
 * A request for deletion was closed today with the edit summary of 'fuck off': inappropriate, not only for the expletive, but for the fact that the corresponding request was closed after two days with only one vote.

For what it's worth, Diego is a good content writer, and this shows pretty good mediation skills. But I do not feel that Diego is suited for the rôle overall. — μ 22:08, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

Perhaps I was overzealous with my desysop proposal: having trawled through 2,800 of Diego’s edits, I can find little in the way of evidence for why Diego should be desysopped (the few examples, to my discredit, are too long ago to have any freelance). I have no idea if I had completely misjudged Diego’s edits when they were first made & later found that they were completely benign; or whether the edits are concealed in talk pages of stale articles (of the ‘what do you mean my article has fallen off the review queue’ variety; I’m speculating). Regardless, it appears evident that the desysop proposal as it stands lacks water. I honestly thought that it would be a rather trivial task to find diffs for what I thought was a major problem (various ‘rants’ [if you forgive the POV word], such as the one below, unbecoming of an administrator).
 * Addendum

I feel quite uncomfortable with the allegations that Diego makes below. I haven’t tried to deliberately disrupt the project -- I honestly thought I was saying what needed to be said, echoing other user’s opinions. As for the idea of me stalking him: all I did was trawl through the logs, something I do for many requests for adminship, and something I’d regard as standard protocol. To follow up the diff directly linked to in his comment, I had learned from my awful, embarrassing immature RfA at English Wikipedia in 2007 that adminship isn’t an entitlement, nor a reward. People who constantly request adminship perhaps don’t understand the meaning of the word. With regards to adminship, a bit of a Catch-22 comes into play people who want power certainly aren’t suited to it. I’ve had experience with users that have made obscene numbers of RfAs; I was basing my oppose on the candidate as it stood, not as the candidate until the end of time. My sentiment was perhaps faintly echoed by Tempo’s oppose.

As for Pitsilemu, I was annoyed with the bot. It wasn’t just me; other users in the channel were finding it annoying. Irrespective of that, I do not have operator privileges on #wikinews, and so I feel that it is unfair to pin the eventual +q mode assignment on me. As for the ‘since January’ comment, it’s a logical fallacy.

In response to Amgine’s comment that I withdraw the request: as much as I may wish to, I do not feel that I am in a position to do so, for the same reason I dislike people that ‘withdraw their nomination’ on deletion requests -- I have nothing against the candidate no longer wishing to stand for adminship (as without the user consent, adminship cannot take place), but once a discussion begins for almost anything else, it is not a single user’s place to determine the outcome of a discussion, nor to cut the discussion short, simply because they happened to be the one to initiate it. With regards to the Spanish language comment, I feel bound to state that I have edited the above nomination from 98% to 93% after the comment was made -- it was a simple typo (8 and 3 look very similar). Regardless, the point still stands -- Spanish shouldn’t be used on an English-language wiki when communication is paramount. (In a pointless deviation, I only added the statistic to add flavour; for comparison, English is approximately spoken by 11% of the world population, and about 27% of the Internet [Spanish is 36%].) — μ 12:29, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

General comments
Requests for removal for this user: 
 * Links for Diego Grez:

''Please keep discussion constructive and civil. If you are unfamiliar with the nominee, please thoroughly review his contributions before commenting. Unhelpful comments or votes may be removed at any time.''

Discussion

 * It was funny to me to read this. It really seems that this guy has been, stalking what I do. Yes, most times I don't say things right, but I never do it with a bad intention, but Microchip seems to not have a sense of humor, as far as I see. The nomination seems to be a huge w:WP:IDONTLIKEIT, in the sense that Microchip never EVER wanted me to be a sysop. If the community considers that I don't have to be a sysop anymore, that's okay, it's not the end of the world to me and I have better things to do in my real life, but this has just confirmed to me that certain person here is not really well-intentioned. They even got annoyed (poor him) about an innocent bot who only said a "lol" after a "heh" they did on IRC. It's good to note the bot had been from, say, January in the #wikinews channel, until they made it rest in peace. Is that good? No, I don't think so. Bad... bad... bad. That's all, three-four, over and out. Diego Grez return fire 22:29, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Respectfully, attacking the person making allegations instead of the allegations themselves, doesn't really look very good imho. Bawolff ☺☻ 00:12, 24 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Clarifying:
 * None of the comments I did in the deletion reasons were made with bad intention, I did them 'joking', and nobody had said anything about it until now. Why?.
 * When I gave BarkingFish his reviewer right back, I swear I did it because he's a good person, and I did not expect he would be reluctant to that, my fault, yes.
 * --Comment, don't worry about it, Diego. I know you did it with the best intentions, I just wasn't ready for it considering the reason I surrendered it in the first place. A nice thought, appreciated, just the wrong time. Don't blame yourself for it.  It was resolved, end of. BarkingFish (talk) 05:15, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
 * His "Considering Diego Grez's penchance for using the wrong language in edit summaries, rendering it incomprehensible to 98% of the world's population." statement is completely wrong. Spanish is the third most spoken language in the world, and way more than just a 2 per cent of the people speaks it.
 * Is not using the default summaries for deletion, or protection wrong now? Why can't I have the freedom to say whatever but, anyway the deletion/protection is justified, don't you think?
 * Diego Grez return fire 00:24, 24 January 2011 (UTC)


 * Some of the arguments presented above have merit. The vast majority do not. Some are as callous and inaccurate as those attributed to Diego Grez (e.g. the 93% comment, citation List of languages by number of native speakers.) But, fundamentally, not one nor the combined collection amount to a de-sysop justification. And not one effort, so far as I have seen, was made to alleviate the issues raised prior to this request. De-admining should not be the first action taken; it should always be the last after all other possible avenues (including ArbCom) have been exhausted. The request, imo, appears more disruptive than the issue it purports to resolve. I assume it was made in good faith, but I would encourage the nominator to withdraw it as I feel it is both divisive and unlikely to pass with the necessary majority. -  Amgine | t 05:11, 24 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Note my remarks further down about preliminary discussion before nominations for removal of access. I don't agree that de-sysop should systematically go to Arbcom before it comes here, but here definitely shouldn't be where it comes first; we need explicit words on the removal sections, about preliminary discussion between prospective nominator and nominee.  Without explicit guidance, the mistake of sudden nom for removal is way too easy to fall into.  --Pi zero (talk) 06:43, 24 January 2011 (UTC)
 * I think a large part of the problem is we don't have sufficient dispute resolution infrastructure. Dispute resolution hasn't been used successfully in a very long time. Bawolff ☺☻ 06:47, 24 January 2011 (UTC)
 * The label "dispute resolution" is a problem in itself. What is wanted is not limited in scope to what happens after a dispute already exists.  --Pi zero (talk) 07:03, 24 January 2011 (UTC)


 * presents the log of constructive usage of the sysop rights by DiegoGrez. Again, I have to say it one more time - the concerns raised are serious, but quite similar and not major; just leaving a note at the talk page should be enough for this case. Gryllida 08:22, 24 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Re Microchip's addendum to the nomination:
 * There would have been multiple advantages to discussing these matters with Diego before nominating (or, for that matter, asking someone else to do so if you felt Diego would take it better from someone else). Downstream, by the time of nomination the discussion might already be well established on an all-around respectful footing.  Up-front, your concerns would be given a more thorough vetting beforehand, either resolving them without the need for a nomination, or giving them more focused and refined substance with which to move forward.  So the nomination, if it happened at all, would run more smoothly.  I learned the "discuss first" lesson the hard way myself, hence my frustration that the removal request sections fail to pass on that lesson, and people just keep having to relearn it for themselves (as I did, and you are doing).


 * I've had the impression myself in recent... months?... that Diego has gotten somewhat over-casual in his approach to the tools. They're serious things, after all, and a deadpan delivery is never out of place (whereas joking, swearing, or some combination of the two in one's summaries can easily go awry; it's not dissimilar to the cliched observation that everyone looks good in uniform).  I've gotten the impression, a time or two, that Diego was a bit on the high-handed side when reviewing requests for unblock, too; it seems simply asking once isn't grounds to block ability to edit xyr talk page, no matter how obnoxious xe might have been to incur the block in the first place.  If (as I think I remember) I saw such an incident going by, of course I should have remarked on it to Diego at the time... though I probably hesitated because I dislike leaving notes of criticism on people's talk pages, which is always difficult to do tactfully and usually creates tension if not annoyed retorts.  My sense is, come to think, that the most concerning thing in Diego's recent attitude has been his reaction to criticism, of which his initial reaction to this nomination is suggestive.


 * But all that is only vague impressions on my part &mdash; and in any case, even if all those impressions were dead accurate and backed up by diffs, they wouldn't rise to the level of a de-sysop nom. They would rise to the level of a constructive-criticism note on Diego's talk page, though.  --Pi zero (talk) 14:55, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

Support

 * 1) (removal of rights): The diffs speak for themselves. Sorry Diego, you're an excellent writer and editor, but perhaps a little immature for adminship at the moment. Δεν δοδγε  t\c 22:34, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
 * 2) I'm sorry Diego, but Dendodge and MC8 bring up good points. Being an admin does require a level of maturity (you are, after all, role models to the community) and that hasn't been displayed by your actions. Sorry, ~YTT T 22:39, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
 * 3) Noting the user's reply. Has been a good article writer in the past, and we all acknowledge that I think; but valid criticism, even if over the top and harshly phrased, should be taken on board calmly. --Killing Vector (talk) 22:42, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

Oppose

 * 1) . DiegoGrez has not been warned about the inappropriate summaries and other (quite similar) concerns at his talk page; those concerns are not excessively disruptive to the project. I think he understands his error and will do it right; just a warning as been given here would be enough in this case. Gryllida 22:47, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
 * It's just disruption from that certain person... don't they have anything else to do? Ah, right, it's winter over there... Diego Grez return fire 22:54, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
 * 1) Desysop for failure to use the dropdown box?! Would you care to advise me of the policy requiring edit summaries? The policy requiring use of the dropdown? I don't remember supporting them.  Blood Red Sandman  (Talk)   (Contribs) 07:43, 24 January 2011 (UTC)
 * 2) Concerns aren't complete phantoms, but don't rise to the level of dy-sysop (per my comments above).  --Pi zero (talk) 15:01, 24 January 2011 (UTC)
 * 3) Agree with Amgine and Pi Zero. Bawolff ☺☻ 17:36, 24 January 2011 (UTC)
 * 4) I agree with Pi Zero.  There are a couple of concerns, but nothing which in any way warrants Diego to have his administrative rights withdrawn.  For what its worth, I don't appreciate a private matter which was nobody else's concern but mine and Diego's being used as a reason to desysop him.  That was resolved entirely, he apologised for it, end of.  Don't drag my issues into your problems, Microchip. BarkingFish (talk) 13:33, 25 January 2011 (UTC)
 * 5) There's no compelling reason to desysop him. Diego may sometimes act a little ... hostile, but he can keep himself in check and knows what to avoid.  — fetch · comms   16:35, 25 January 2011 (UTC)
 * and strongly suggest this be speedily closed and archived. The weak argument in favour of this discussion/poll seems to have involved a far more significant amount of effort than many people's article contributions. Now, get back to work! --Brian McNeil / talk 07:49, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

Neutral

 * 1) Yes, those aren't things we would like to see in Wikinews and I definitely would not condone this behaviour but Diego is an exceptional author, mediator and reviewer. He is active as an admin and performs time-consuming tasks (some of which others wouldn't like to do) such as dealing with spam. ~YTT T 22:22, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
 * According to the deletion logs, the phrase "spam" appears in his summaries fifteen times: in my mind, not enough to warrant keeping the bit in its own right. Anyone can edit, and any reviewer can review. One does not have to be an administrator to do so. — μ 22:36, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

Comment
I am opposed to deadmining for anyone but inactive users. We have arbcom for a reason after all. Arbcom's remit includes de-admins as they are always controversial and are normally resulting out of a community depute - hence why we introduced arbcom. I feel that that body is the way to go. Community filed deadmins should not exist. Brian | (Talk) | New Zealand Portal 23:04, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Removal noms do not necessarily arise from community disputes &mdash; though they tend to cause them, about which I'll say more below. Limiting de-admin actions to Arbcom places the bar for such actions much too high, and, to my mind, abuses the Arbcom device.  Arbcom should be exclusively a last resort: there should not be any broad class of problem for which Arbcom is the only recourse.


 * That said, we should develop recommendations to make removal noms go more smoothly. To be placed at the top of the removals sections here and at FR/RFP.  Prior to nomination, the nominator should seek to maturely discuss the substance of the nomination with the nominee on the nominee's talk page.  It's not properly "dispute resolution", because there might not be any dispute (beforehand), and resolution, though pleasant were it to happen, isn't the point.  The point is that, for the good of the community, all sides of a removal nomination should conduct a mature discussion throughout, and that means beginning as we mean to go on, with a mature dialog.  --Pi zero (talk) 03:31, 24 January 2011 (UTC)