As an outsider the accusation "Canvassing" seems like a double edged sword. Similar to Reddits "Brigading" but without the hostile intention. It's not clear to me, how Wikipedia prevents this rule from being used inappropriately to silence people.

▲

palmotea 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> It's not clear to me, how Wikipedia prevents this rule from being used inappropriately to silence people.

It doesn't. Wikipedia rules are often abused and selectively enforced.

▲

robertsky_ a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There is a scale, sorta...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Canvassing

▲

rzwitserloot 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Let's not conflate these two issues. For this specific case there is absolutely no confusion.

A quote, from his own talk page, written by himself:

> But as of fall 2025, I have returned, with the aim of helping Wikipedia in various ways to reform.

This is somebody who (re)started their wikipedia editor career with one goal in mind, and set up a project to reach this goal, and then canvassed for that project.

There is no doubt about any of those 3 things. Specifically, he wants this project to get accepted, he is not all that interested in anything else, and it was him, himself, canvassing for this project in ways that wikipedia policy clearly delineate are not allowed.

This is specifically what the 'no canvassing' rule was written for. One can make quite a few remarks about how the 'no canvassing' rule can be abused, but this isn't an example case, at all. Quote the contrary: This is a textbook case for why the rule exists, and serves as a trivial slamdunk case as to when it should be applied.

Your point stands as an interesting debate, but it has no meaningful effect on Larry Sanger's banned status. It would have been interesting if, for example, somebody else started this project, and Larry Sanger started canvassing for the project. Banning Larry Sanger as an editor would then be an obvious community decision (banned for canvassing), but do you ban the project at that point? The cat's out of the bag, and, indeed, if you adopt the policy of: "If anybody on any social media anywhere canvasses for project X, then that automatically means project X gets canned without any further vote", then one can trivially can any project by canvassing for it.

But none of that is relevant here.

▲

TZubiri 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Correct, and Administrators (and users invoking administrators) will often selectively use rules to pursue editorial purposes.

I learned about wikipedia rules before learning about actual law, it's interesting to see exactly how the mechanisms of modern democracy protect against the specific ways in which Wikipedia fails:

1- Separation of powers between rulemakers and judges. In practice many Administrators who have the power to enforce rules and bans are actually editing articles themselves!

2- Ignore all rules, certainly crazy, it makes the rules an afterthought, it reminds me a bit of the Common Law focus on Case Law as opposed to Napoleonic Civil Law's focus on codified laws, but way stronger.

3- No or weak procedure. Imagine you are in a legal fight with another editor, and you say a bad word, woops, turns out that's a 2 day ban. Maybe there's a parallel with contempt of court? But what happens in wikipedia is that the whole edit war is lost on that technicality, Administrators don't rule in favour of one edit or the other, they distribute penalties to one part or the other and if one party is temp banned, they can't edit the article anymore and the article state the other party desires has a stability and consensus advantage. The only exception are protected articles, in which case administrators can emit an official ruling on what the article content should be.

▲

amiga386 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

While Admins do have a lot of power, at the same time their power is checked by ArbCom. Admins are held to a higher standard than general users and are kicked out of the role and banned from reapplying if they're found to have abused their privileges (as well as being given topic bans or complete bans from editing).

Merely inactive admins are automatically deadminned, because if you don't need it, you don't get it.

There is also something analogous to the political world: users can petition for an administrator recall, if the issue is a rogue admin abusing their privileges, or even just the admin is trying to hold onto their privileges when it's clear to others that they don't actually need them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:RECALL

So while I don't think Wikipedia is perfect, it does better than your summary implies.

▲

robertsky_ a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 1- Separation of powers between rulemakers and judges. In practice many Administrators who have the power to enforce rules and bans are actually editing articles themselves!

There is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators#Invol...

While admins do have the rights to block users or protect pages, many a times, they leave it to other admins to carry out the administrative actions on the users or pages they are involved with. The editors have recalled or reported admins who had overstepped such boundaries one too many times as well.

	▲	FireBeyond a day ago \| parent [-]
		And many a time, they'll use mailing lists (even on WP servers, though those mostly are gone now) to coordinate with friendly fellow admins to "take a look at user xyz" and a solid quid pro quo of "and I'll be happy to handle the admin actions you'd like to handle on the pages you like to frequent".

▲

tux3 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

>1- Separation of powers between rulemakers and judges. In practice many Administrators who have the power to enforce rules and bans are actually editing articles themselves!

Separation of judge and party is enforced pretty consistently, it is official policy that people shouldn't participate in a decision if they were involved in the kerfuffle in any way. You can edit articles and enforce rules, as long as these are separate. And then, rules can be proposed by anyone, but they're not just created on the fly because it's convenient. That would obviously be objectionable.

In fact this isn't limited to admins, regular users have the power to decide on a ban. An administrator is only needed to close and enact the decision, and this is what happened to Larry Sanger here.

>The only exception are protected articles, in which case administrators can emit an official ruling on what the article content should be.

Admins don't have a special power to decide what should be in important protected articles. It is not like a government where people are elected, and then citizens don't have any say until the next election.

The community tries to reach a consensus, and admins are part of the community. They get an input like everyone else plus special powers to enact decisions. But any "ruling" better reflect consensus, or you better bet you will wake up to the Noticeboards on fire with about 50,000 words of heated complaints and discussion.