Mgm,
I could agree with that. I think that maybe there ought to be multiple
grades of admin, who have specific abilities. Part of the problem right now
is that so many admins wield what might as well be "absolute power" when
compared to a normal user.
For instance, why not have a "first grade" admin who have the power only to
semiprotect articles (to protect from systemic anon-ip/newuser vandalism),
not to lock talk pages at all (including user talk pages) and to impose
blocks up to 48 hours but no longer? Make them ask for help if they see
anything that needs anything longer or appears to be a problem?
You could have a lot more of those less-powerful admins handling many of the
issues without worry about whether they went nuts, because even if they went
nuts, there's be a lot less permanent damage they could do.
Parker
On 10/6/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Some adminship requests get opposed because the user aren't familiar in a
specific field of administrator work. If we could specifically give people
the tools they have the knowledge for, more requests would succeed.
Perhaps
it's time to run that plan to give people separate admin tools.
Mgm
On 10/6/06, daniwo59(a)aol.com <daniwo59(a)aol.com> wrote:
Originally, I planned to answer Parker Peters's email. I wanted to say
something, at least, but I didn't want it to be trite. I didn't want to
defend
some admin actions while agreeing with him about others. There will be
(have
been?) plenty of people to do that. In the end, all of that is
irrelevant,
because it is his perception of the problem that
really matters, not
whether the
problem is truly relevant in particular instance X or Z. It is a
macro-issue,
and it deserves macro-answers, or alternately, macro-changing in
our thinking.
I think the real issue can be boiled down to a single statement:
"Wikipedia
is big ... really, really big." As of yesterday, Alexa ranks us the
number
12
website in the world, and we are still climbing. In English alone, we
have
close to 1.5 million articles and 6 million
total pages. We have over
2.4
million users and close to 600 thousand images. I
don't know how many
edits we
are getting per day, per hour, per second, but I can only assume that
it
is a
very substantial number.
No single person, or even small group of people, can tend to something
this
big, or even familiarize themselves with all its nooks and crannies. Yet
we
have to. That is the challenge.
There are 1,015 people with admin powers, and for various reasons it is
assumed that the burden of responsibility lies with them (it really
doesn't,
since it should rest on the entire community, but that is a different
story). Of
these thousand or so people, some are more active than others. Some can
be
found patrolling the projects every hour of
every day, while others pop
in for a
few minutes every few months, and still others are gone for good.
As such, the burden is overwhelming. There is so much to do, so much
that
needs tending, but we've grown faster than
our admnistrative structure,
and the
fissures are beginning to show. By piling on the load, it is only
natural
that admins (and here I mean people who perform
admin tasks, whether
they
are
admins or not) begin to feel frustrated and burn out. It is especially
onerous
when every action is going to be viewed by people who will challenge
it--and
the admin--any way they can. Do you risk making all the rapid decisions
that
need to be made, one after the other, even if it means that some bad
decisions will inevitably be made? Do you risk maintaining old
procedures, which once
worked quite well but are starting to buckle under the weight, or do
you
experiment with something new and untested? If
there is to be change,
what are
the priorities? If there is to be discussion about change, at what
point
do we
end the talking and decide to act?
These are some of the real issues that Parker Peters is raising. Note
that
they are dilemmas, and the nature of a dilemma is
that there is no right
answer, except perhaps from the safety of hindsight. And yet, decisions
have to be
made.
Danny
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