This mirrors my own experience on Wiki, which dragged on for months after admins were caught removing content for internal political purposes and alienating tens of thousands (according to objective metric) who used those pages. Conflict resolution there is centered almost entirely on people-drama and almost never on content or _anything_ of substance which is rather the point of an encyclopedia. This is plainly evident from reading any of their notice/resolution boards which are often little but favor-currying.

Wiki-lawyering (citing policies in purposefully cryptic and usually erroneous ways) is rampant, and all these problems exists because admins aren't appointed due to domain expertise (or any sort of expertise for that matter) but being in the good graces of other admins. This conflicts with most wiki content editors, who are often domain experts rather than bureaucrats/politicians. I ended up being banned for doing a reasonably popular reddit AMA about all this, and apparently violating the rule to never talk about wiki administrating outside of wiki.

In sum, the system only works because talented and intelligent people want to create encyclopedic material, and there generally aren't enough admins to stymy this.

Would you care to share the page(s) in question and/or the AMA?

AMA: http://www.reddit.com/r/MMA/comments/13govr/hi_rmma_im_one_o...

You can find plenty of wikidrama at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Agent00f and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment...

That was my experience too.

I now run my own niche wiki, and it's shocking the number of people that come across it and say

"Oh man, I tried to contribute to wikipedia and ended up having all my stuff reverted and I got yelled and I kicked out. I'm never touching wikis again."

I personally think Wikipedia is giving open wikis a bad name, and I go out of my way to tell people my wiki is nothing like wikipedia in that regard.

> said admin sneakily changes said policy to confirm his views

How can actions be sneaky when the history tab is just right there. If the policy got changed without discussion, revert it and open up a new subject on the talk page. If no one comments in a few days, then reach out to people through rfc or the village.

This is true for most community projects. Send a push request to the kernel and get denied by a gatekeeper? Talk to the community. Got a policy issue with debian? Talk to the community. Wikipedia is a community project, plain and simple. You got to interact with the community if you want to fix something.

> circumvent ban to protest, get banned for circumventing the ban.

Well yes. you do indeed get banned for circumventing a ban. If I get banned on HN, any circumvention of the ban will result in me get more banned. Same goes for any community, website with logins, and any social groups for that matter.

Wikipedia has a system for lifting bans. If that doesn't work, send a email to the foundation. If that too doesn't work, then ... blog about it. at some point, either the community agree with you or it don't.

The best thing you can do is write this up, with details. Put it on the net.

that is a legitimate counterpoint.

though in a dickish format, to be sure.

If being nice solved the problem, he never would have gotten to that point then, would he? It would've been a polite, "excuse me, I believe this was wrongly reverted and doesn't clash with any WP policy" followed by a polite, "Gee, you're right; sorry about that; I'll fix it."