Probably the biggest change to the process came with the unbundling of
rollback in 2008, at least that was when the biggest drop came in RFAs, and
"good vandalfighter" ceased to be sufficient to pass RFA. You also had to
show some contribution to building the pedia. We now have over six thousand
rollbackers and less than 900 admins, so I think that unbundling did make
it easier to get Rollback.though arguably Rollback itself is now a
redundant userright as anyone can just opt in to tools like twinkle.
I wasn't around in the early years, I started editing in 2007 towards the
end of the exponential growth era and only started to pay attention to RFA
in 2008. Though I have looked at quite a few earlier RFAs. I think that
the criteria haven't changed much in a decade - maybe there has been an
increase in the requirements for tenure and or edits, or rather someone
with 3,000 to 4,000 unautomated edits can expect a few opposes as would
someone with between one and two years active editing. What I can't explain
is why we appointed 121 new admins in 2009 but averaged less than 20 new
admins a year for the last ten years. I really don't think that the de
facto criteria for adminship are very different now compared to 2009:
There are people who care about the deletion button and don't want someone
who will be to soft or harsh with it.
There are people who care about the block button, including those who don't
want someone blocking the regulars who hasn't gone through the process of
building content.
There are people who think that all admins should be legally adult
And there are those who want to stop certain long term problems returning
in a new guise. One assumption made here is that the mask will slip if one
of those editors tries to make nice for an entire year in order to make
admin.
Given that the total size of the community is stable or slowly growing, I
don't see why so few candidates are coming forward for RFA.
WSC
On Wed, 16 Aug 2023 at 03:24, Samuel Klein <meta.sj(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The iron law of gaps...
On Tue, Aug 15, 2023 at 5:44 PM The Cunctator <cunctator(a)gmail.com> wrote:
IMHO: The amount of jargon and legalistic booby
traps to navigate now to
become an admin is gargantuan, and there isn't a strong investment in a
development ladder.
Yes. More generally, a shift towards a Nupedia model (elaborate seven-step
processes, focus on quality, focus on knowing lots of precedent and not
making mistakes, spending more time justifying actions than making them) is
making sweeping, mopping, and bureaucracy generally more work, less fun,
and more exclusionary.
Perhaps asking everyone to adopt someone new, or sticking "provisional"
tags on a family of palette-swap roles that are Really Truly NBD
<Wikipedia:Pencils_are_no_big_deal> We Mean It This Time, would help stave
off the iron law in a repeatable
<https://longnow.org/ideas/long-term-building-in-japan/> way//
SJ
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