Charles Matthews wrote:
Andrew Gray wrote:
Would it be useful at this point to have some
idea of how other
projects do it? I know some have a "normal" deadminning process, but
I'm not sure how this works - do some have a request-based system,
some have regular reconfirmation, what?
It's hardly going to be useful to adopt a "doesn't scale"
type system -
imagine reconfirming (or not) 1000 admins annually, and then ask what
else could have been done with that investment of the community's time
to improve the 'pedia. I think part of the answer lies here.
If anything it seems like it'd make it worse. My impression is that RfA
as currently constituted has a tendency to select for rules lawyers,
because it's such a heavyweight process full of requirements to be
familiar with, well, other Wikipedia processes. Idealists who're
interested in writing a good encyclopedia, and see Process as a
necessary evil to organize collaborative encyclopedia-writing (a means,
not an end!), are often turned off by the whole thing and don't bother.
Several of my Wikipedia-editing-professor acquaintances occasionally
could use an admin bit to do things like merging histories or
move-over-deletion, but they IM or email me asking me to do it on their
behalf, and wouldn't even consider asking for adminship through some
process that requires them to conduct a multi-stage interview proving
their familiarity with dozens of arcane policy pages.
If I were forced to "reconfirm" my admin status I'd probably decline,
because the downside of not being an admin (loss of a few useful
functions like being able to merge histories) is less than the downside
of spending more of my Wikipedia time on things that aren't related to,
you know, writing an encyclopedia. I'd just become one of those people
who emails my Wikipedia-admin acquaintances pestering them to merge
histories on my behalf.
-Mark