User talk:EatsShootsAndLeaves/When doing the right thing fails

Background
A couple of months ago, I started a brouhaha.

It wasn't intentional, it was out of simple exasperation: I told someone to "grow the fuck up" on Wikipedia.

It's a statement that's been said hundreds of times on the project by hundreds of editors, in one variation or another. While the statement itself does not violate our policy on personal attacks, in most cases wouldn't even end up on the wrong side of our core concept of civility, and indeed the simple fact that the community has upheld time and time again that cursing in and of itself is not blockable, it still caused a major ruckus.

That's right: a non-blockable "offense" ended up on the Wikipedia founder's talkpage with calls for my head, right arm, left leg, and firstborn son. There were more pitchforks than "farm implement sale days" at Home Depot.

Why? Because of the example that was being set for others by an administrator.

Because of this example, I received an extremely painful admonishment from the Founder of Wikipedia that truly struck to the core of my being. Part of that admonishment was a recommendation to voluntarily resign my admin tools for a period of time, until I was ready to return to setting the right example to others.

(No, I was not admonished for saying "fuck" or other cursing in the past. No, I was not admonished for incivility)

The challenge
Admins are chosen because of their contributions to the project, and what appears to be their personality - including "how do they act when provoked". But there's in interesting thing that happens once one does become an admin - I'll call it the "bizarre double-standard".

(I could expand upon the phrase "what appears to be their personality", but someone I know wrote a treatise on internexistentialism that says it much much better than I, so I won't - let's just say that many people act differently towards others thanks to the anonymity of the internet than they would to someone who they actually met in person. Indeed, On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog).

By "bizarre double-standard", I refer to the fact that editors state time and time again that they do not want "robotic, 100% according to the rules, no if's and's or but's" admin-type work; they want humanity and flexibility. However, whenever an admin shows humanity and - *gasp* - fallibility, all hell breaks loose. It's a conundrum: we do and do not want humanity in our electronically-mediated interactions.

What happened next
I took Jimmy Wales words to heart. Rather than request the de-sysop of my admin account, I resurrected an old, basically unused account. As it had never been used, it had no enhanced rights. As it was a valid alternate account, another admin increased its permissions on request, and a member of the Arbitration Committee was a) made aware of the alternate account, and b) advised that there would not be a direct link between the two accounts for a short period of time. This was never intended to avoid scrutiny, it was a temporary response to the the real life threat/risk issues of using one's real name.

Both were acknowledged by the member of ArbComm, however the accounts were quickly linked after all to ensure that they met the requirements of policy. It became just a normal account, properly and validly linked to my regular account, only without Administrator rights. The majority of the community (or at least those who care) knew it was me anyway.

There were three primary reasons for not requesting desysop of the User:Bwilkins account:
 * 1) User:7SeriesBOT is a performing admin functions, and would also need to be desysopped, as per policy - it would therefore be unable to continue its work (don't look at its contribs, look at its logs)
 * 2) This was a voluntary decision (based on a strong recommendation from the Jimbo and the community)
 * 3) A perceived benefit (see "And so" below)

'''In short, I did the right thing. I did what was asked of me: voluntarily stop using the admin tools.'''

A note about alternate accounts
Many people have them. Many are valid. Admins often have them if, for example, they tend to also edit from unsecured locations like a library, and do not want to run the risk of possibly having an administrator account password compromised (see WP:SOCK under "security").

Alternate accounts that are not used abusively are permitted by policy.

I have a few others: User:3SeriesBOT, User:5SeriesBOT, User:7SeriesBOT - one of which is an in-use AdminBot, the others are placeholders for future possible bot tasks, but also created to prevent impersonation.

Some people create alternate accounts that closely match their original username (such as this closely matching this). Others do not. There's no formal requirement to have them match - just a recommendation. You might even say that my bot-alt names don't seem to match - until you remember that I used to sign everything with my real initials "BMW" ... and they suddenly do make sense :-)

Indeed, when I first created User:EatsShootsAndLeaves many years ago, the intent was to use it to edit articles that might be controversial - as a somewhat public figure who uses their real name, the privacy concept was being invoked (see WP:SOCK under "privacy"). Obviously, when privacy issues are invoked, you would not want the account names to be similar, or else it would defeat the valid and allowed purpose. However, I didn't use it, and forgot about it for a long time.

And so
When I began to use User:EatsShootsAndLeaves, I made no attempts to hide that this was an valid alternate account (except for a couple of permitted days, as noted above).

One of my perceived benefits of having a name that was not immediately recognizable compared to my original admin account is that most people would not recognize the fact that I'm an admin. Why is this a benefit? Because I believe that the strength of the argument should override the status of the editor who makes the argument. Adminship is WP:NOBIGDEAL - it's a couple of extra buttons, and recognition that you have more-than-a-basic understanding of a few of the hundreds of policies. Reality is, of course, that you're an admin no matter what account you're using - those that knew, knew - those that didn't could simply look at the policy-based arguments provided, and go from there (or, they could follow the easy-to-click link on my userpage and find out).

However, it turns out that a lot of people (even our admin cadre), including some of the people for whom I have great amounts of respect do not understand WP:SOCK, or indeed, WP:SOCK. I have had accusations of WP:SOCK, admins edit-warring on my userpage, ANI filings, threats, insults, formal harassment ... dare I say another shipment of pitchforks?

What next
Some day (based on the e-mails I'm getting this may be sooner rather than later) I will return to using my primary account with the admin rights. I will continue to use User:EatsShootsAndLeaves as a valid alternative account, as per WP:SOCK.