[WikiEN-l] Analysis of Request for Adminship

[Kelly Martin]

On 3/31/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> Then would it make sense to relax some of the requirements for future
> admins, or at least ask voters to consider relaxing them? Is adminship
> really something that cannot be "learnt on the job"?

All admins learn on the job.  It's not skill at doing the technical
duties of an admin that matters, it's competence in using
administrative powers responsibly that is being selected for.    RfA
has proven to be relatively poor at discriminating against people who
should not be admins, because the criteria that most people are
applying when they vote are not really very good proxies for "will not
abuse administrative privilege" and in some cases are actually proxies
for "will abuse administrative privilege".

Unfortunately, I don't have any better proxies for "will not abuse
administrative privilege".  But I do think it would be a good idea to
have admin selection be more deliberative and less of a popularity
contest, as it is today.  But the best solutions to accomplish that
all involve creating special "administrator selection committees" or
similar such bodies, which will be roundly decried as anti-democratic
and cabalistic by people who are more interested in Wikipedia as an
social experiment.  And while this latter group is smaller than the
group of people who are interested in Wikipedia as an encyclopedia,
this smaller group is disproportionately represented amongst those who
participate in community processes, thereby skewing "consensus" toward
the "social experiment" point of view.

I wish I had a solution to THAT problem.

Kelly