Guettarda wrote:
On 2/15/07, Gary Kirk <gary.kirk(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
I don't agree with users who don't have
sysop- or above (in the
'hierarchy') level access viewing deleted revisions.
How many users would have this permission, and how would they get it?
Autoconfirm-style number of good edits + time on project = 'editor'
level?
I am inclined to agree with Gary. If the bar for adminship has been raised
too high, then lets do something to lower it - but having a discussion here
isn't the way to do it. It needs to be among the regular RFA voters, and
there needs to be some sort of broad consensus of what adminship should be.
Coming up with a new status won't help - unless there is broad consensus,
the same people are likely to vote in the same way they do now.
The "standards" for admins isn't something that can be changed top-down.
It
has developed in a bottom-up fashion in the community. The only way to
change it is to change opinions in a bottom-up manner
I can understand where someone active in the RfA process would want
policy revision discussions in a place that would primarily attract
those who would support the status quo. This is consistent with having
winning as a superior goal to getting things right. The discussions on
this mailing list are much less favorable to the status quo. Broad
consensus requires a broad base. Although I have never asked to be an
admin on this project, this does not mean that I never considered the
possibility. When I first did consider this one of the requirements
for being an admin was to join the mailing list. Admittedly, given our
large niumber of admins, this would no longer be practical.
I do not consider familiarity with a lot of rules for dealing with
problem people to be essential to an admins job. Not everyone who wants
to be an admin wants to spend his time shovelling that kind of muck.
Some will indeed use the new tools in very limited circumstances to
improve an area of interest where there will be a perfectly happy
consesnsus to delete certain articles in favour of others, and they will
do it without recourse to some kind of general list dimninated by those
who have neither interest in nor understanding of the subject. There
are other possibilities that are not some kind of police work.
Sometimes the most depressing thing about democracy (which, as has been
repeatedly stated, Wikipedia is not) is watching it in action. It so
often ignores the fundamental principles for why it exists in the first
place, and becomes paralyzed because of that. I do not hide nor make
any apologies for my clearly leftish political sentiments, and yet I can
find more common cause with some of the right wingers around here about
the governance and future of Wikipedia than I can with some of those who
purport to want a more democratic system.
We haven't yet figured out how to make broad consensus scale, and until
we do (probably not in my lifetime) we still need leadership. This may
sometimes seem to be a top down construct, but the enemy on the other
side is stagnation. Consensus is not achieved by moving the discussion
into a forum where your view will prevail. The wise leader will always
leave open the possibility that he may be in error, and as a consequence
will take his actions with that in mind.
You say that changes should be brought about from the bottom up.
Philosophically I agree, but at some point life has to go on. Saying
that decisions need to be made from the bottom up does not alone succeed
in bringing about those changes, because there will always be new
objections.
Could we start perhaps, when we speak of "coming up with a new status",
stop using the word "status", and think in terms of "privilege"?
Ec