Hi,
Thirteen years after I wrote about the emergence of a Wikigeneration gap between Wikipedia's admins and its editors, I have revisited the topic, recalculated the gap and published a new signpost article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2023-08-15/Specia...
To I expect few people's surprise, the admin cadre is still overwhelmingly drawn from editors who started editing in Wikipedia's exponential growth phase (2001-2007), Half from 2003-2005.
WSC
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.
And this even though the majority of admin work that needs doing hasn't changed significantly from 2003-2004.
This is not a strongly held opinion though and I certainly could be wrong about the day to day work that most of the admins do.
On Tue, Aug 15, 2023, 4:53 PM WereSpielChequers werespielchequers@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
Thirteen years after I wrote about the emergence of a Wikigeneration gap between Wikipedia's admins and its editors, I have revisited the topic, recalculated the gap and published a new signpost article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2023-08-15/Specia...
To I expect few people's surprise, the admin cadre is still overwhelmingly drawn from editors who started editing in Wikipedia's exponential growth phase (2001-2007), Half from 2003-2005.
WSC _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list -- wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to wiki-research-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
The iron law of gaps...
On Tue, Aug 15, 2023 at 5:44 PM The Cunctator cunctator@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
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@gmail.com wrote:
The iron law of gaps...
On Tue, Aug 15, 2023 at 5:44 PM The Cunctator cunctator@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 _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list -- wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to wiki-research-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
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.
I've written thousands of en.wiki biographies and noticed that the hardest people to find sources for are lawyers (and by extension judges) because these people scrupulously keep their private life private to reduce the chances that they can be challenged as not impartial or having a conflict of interest. It doesn't stop them from having interests or being partial, of course, they're only human and after the fact these come out, often in an obituary.
A case in point is Patsy Reddy, who when appointed Dame had so few online sources that she didn't qualify as notable on en.wiki (I spent a whole day looking when the honours were announced). Two years later she was made governor general. There are now > 50 sources in her article, but only the tiny primary-source print-only "New Zealand Who's Who Aotearoa 2001" is prior to her being appointed Dame. She did a metric buttload of stuff, but in a way to keep out of the public / press eye.
We have built a system that does exactly the same in adminship --- ruthlessly select for the kinds of people and kinds of lived experience that keep themselves off the internet except in the most innocuous of ways. The system literally selects for wiki-lawyers who keep their wiki-lawyering quiet.
THIS is why so few candidates are coming forward for RFA / why so many are scared to put themselves forward. It may be an inherent property of all quasi-legal systems, I'm not sure.
[Disclaimer: I'm currently T-BANNED from BLPs on en.wiki] [Disclaimer: I'm from the cohort recruited from then-competitor everything2 where I'd been editing since prior to the founding of wikipedia; I'm more part of the 'system' than most.]
cheers stuart -- ...let us be heard from red core to black sky
On Thu, 17 Aug 2023 at 00:31, WereSpielChequers werespielchequers@gmail.com wrote:
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@gmail.com wrote:
The iron law of gaps...
On Tue, Aug 15, 2023 at 5:44 PM The Cunctator cunctator@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 _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list -- wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to
wiki-research-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
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