Angela wrote:
On 7/31/05, kelvSYC kelvsyc@shaw.ca wrote:
Although I strongly believe that you shouldn't nominate yourself for bureaucratship, rather have someone else nominate you for the post, it's a welcome move nonetheless. [[User:Aya]] should be more effective in implementing widespread sweeping changes to policy as well.
Bureaucrats should have no more control over policy than any other user. Bureaucratship is just a technical access level that allows a user to make other admins. It should not be seen as a position of authority, and should not be used to justify "sweeping changes to policy" without the normal requirements of community consensus on those policies.
Angela.
I'm going to defend Aya on this one, however. There is an excellent policy discussion page that has been put off Aya's user page, and there has been quite a bit of discussion about it (or at least parts of it) in the Staff Lounge. This isn't a dictitorial change but rather an implementation of user concensus. The #1 issue that was resolved with Aya becoming a bureaucrat was simply an effort to get more admins made. That capability is now present, but unfortunately it was more social than technical in terms of getting it implemented. As far as changing policies, it is also an effort to protect and unprotect (or at least edit from an admin capacity) the actual policy pages of Wikibooks. These are the "sweeping policy changes" that are most likely going to be made, and certainly the changes will be made as a community decision... as it should be. Aya wants to get involved at that level, and I say the job should be turned over for that area of Wikibooks. It is also easy to monitor if it gets out of hand in a real hurry.
In retrospect it would have been nice to have Aya be an admin for awhile. I was going to nominate Aya myself for adminship, but I was also watching the fight over Geocachernemesis and try to see just was going to happen to turn him into an admin before I put up the name for Aya. As far as how quickly things normally take to get resolved on Wikibooks, the nomination and actual implementation of Aya to become a bureaucrat was lightning fast... in some ways too fast for Wikibooks. Still, that was a fairly large general community support for bureaucratship by regulars who monitor that page.... particularly since it happened over the course of just a few days. It wasn't as if Aya demanded and got bureaucratship without any community support.
Time scale is precisely why there is a "Book of the Month" rather than the "Book of the Week" on Wikibooks. It just seems to take longer for everybody to get their voices heard, and longer for a user to find their way outside of a pet "project book" and to get involved in the community in general. Staff Lounge discussions last a couple of months as well before they are archived. That may change, but for now is the case.