G'day SV,
> There's also the issue of sockpuppet admin accounts being used in
> support of that person's other accounts by blocking opponents,
> protecting on the right version, and so on. The problem for us is that
> we have no idea of the scale of it. Does it happen at all? Rarely? A
Cabalism becomes much more worrisome when we face a "Cabal" with
only one real person!
> lot? We have no information. What I've noticed is that vandalism
> fighting is becoming an increasing issue at RfAs, and it has
> seemed to
> me (based only on my sporadic visits to RfA) that more and more people
> are being promoted on the basis of lots of minor edits, which is
> not a
> good thing for a number of reasons, the sock admin issue being one of
> them.
My greatest concern for vandal-fighter admins is that they can't be
judged by the usual (flawed, but once relatively accurate) metrics used
by the RfA Groupies. This is really two problems. First, we get admins
who look, walk, and quack like a duck but are in fact turkeys (the CVU
issue), and are nowhere near as mature as number of edits, name
recognition, etc. would imply. Accordingly, they're promoted to
adminship even though they aren't even close to Clueful enough to
succeed in the post. This is a problem I've banged on about for a while,
so I won't blame anybody if their eyes glazed over for this paragraph.
The second problem with the vandal-fighter admin thing is that the
metrics get artificially inflated. "Okay, it's trivial to get 1500 edits
quickly, so we'll force you to get 3000 edits". Users with Clue but only
1000 edits may be passed over for lack of experience, but some
superdick newbie biter gets a free pass.
Cheers,
--
[[User:MarkGallagher]]