Hi, Time for hiercharchies of admins? Give "rollback" powers to anyone with half a clue. Save temporary block powers for people with a whole clue. Save permanent block/ban powers for people with demonstrated good judgement, preferably on the previous levels.
Not to make it a prestige thing, of course...
Steve
On 1/4/06, Jake Nelson duskwave@gmail.com wrote:
All this discussion of admin standards is pretty funny, when so many of the longtime admins who end up pontificating on policy got their post within virtually no support votes at all... hell, look at mine, not that I consider myself that much of an oldtimer: 3 votes. That's it. I'd been on Wikipedia all of two months, with only ~600 edits. Even then (which was late 2003), there was some discussion of how it might be too HARD for people to become admins, as we then (and much, much, much more now) needed more people able to fight vandals effectively.
It's often underappreciated just how important that little rollback link is for efficiently removing vandalism from a large number of pages. And we need more people to have it. Many times, I'll set Recent Changes to hide logged-in users, 500 edits to a page, and 'diff' everything on that page... and while all those edits will have scrolled off the view of anyone else trying that by the time I'm done, there'll still be a bunch of uncaught blatant profanity edits that slipped through. It's like a firehose sometimes. (I'm inclined to make some strained simile involving strainers or buckets and not enough, etc... but I won't.) It's simple: WE NEED MORE ADMINS.
I do agree with the 'admin status is no big deal' line of thought. If we invest too much in it, it gets hard to get people on the team rolling back vandalism and taking care of speedy-delete material (though a standard policy of simply blanking pages instead of worrying about deletion would help on that score). Furthermore, it fosters the very annoying trend to drag every admin into ever more arcane WikiPolitics and layers of bureaucracy... the powers are there to be a janitor, not a legislator. They're unrelated. (I don't enjoy spending my time on talkpages... if I want to have a discussion with someone, I use email or MUX, not a wiki page... and VFD is a bilious slimefest I'd be happy to see gone entirely.)
Maybe giving people block/ban powers is a big deal, however. Since the proposals for bureaucrats, Arbitrators, and the like eventually did go through, maybe block powers can be split off of adminship and given to some other userclass, and we can thoroughly establish once and for all that an admin's job is maintenance. Maybe even rename the label: 'Maintainer', 'Janitor', etc. I don't really care what you call it, but apparently 'Administrator' gets people thinking too much about it meaning you're the boss... and I have to admit it gets heavily misinterpreted outside WP: If I tell someone that I'm an administrator on Wikipedia, they think I'm saying I'm on the Foundation board, or a siteadmin, or a developer. As WP's public pfoile continues to rise, that'll be more of an issue as "Wikipedia Administrator" J. Random Wikipedian gets quoted in a news article as an authoritative source of official opinion.
Further, when we find there's a bad admin, this doesn't mean "we need to make it harder for people whose main contribution is vandal-fighting to be an admin", it means, fire their ass, deadmin them, and then get someone else. If all they do is get in fights with other uses or throw their weight around on talkpages, they don't need the anti-vandal tools.
-- Jake Nelson _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l