On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 8:19 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
2009/2/11 David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com:
It might be reasonable for all active admins for whom there is not an AfD to be reconfirmed.
You mean RfA, yes? I think it's perfectly reasonable to invoke the principle of "time immemorial" and not worry about it.
Sometimes. I tend to think of the way articles that passed FAC (featured articles candidate) years ago are brought up to today's standards by FAR (featured article review). If there were reasons to think an admin was operating as if it was still 2002, 2003 or 2004, and was not aware of the standards of 2009, then maybe there would be good reason to question whether a review was needed. Certainly many of the admins from the mailing list period, if not all, would easily pass a reconfirmation RfA. There is no practical reason why they should, and many good reasons why they shouldn't, but I'd be impressed if someone who had been around that long recognised that maybe there is something in the idea, and did so anyway.
It's another of those perennial ideas that doesn't gain much ground. But consider this. The number of admins (actually, looking at the editors would be more interesting) remaining from very early on is not that high. But in five years time, how many of the admins from 2005, 2006 and 2007 will still be around? Will things have changed even more? Will there be 50+ admins from that era, or even more? How many of them will have adapted and changed? Is adapting and changing a requirement of admins (let alone editors)? I know 12-18 months (or something) is considered the average time people spend in an online community, but what about those who have been around for years, in a few years time some will have been around for a whole decade.
That's quite frightening, actually. Is it really only two years until Wikipedia has been around for 10 years? When are we projected to reach 3 million articles (currently 2,736,436), when can we get to 5000 featured articles (currently 2,420)? When is someone going to do another statistical analysis or history of Wikipedia?
Sorry, got a bit off-topic there! :-)
Carcharoth