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(a)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(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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