On 6/21/05, Alphax alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
This is why I look forward to graduated user rights levels. The abilities to block, delete, protect, and revert should all be assigned individually, not as a lump sum just for "doing a few hours RC patrol, having a bajillion edits and working on a featured article". Sure, those things make a person a good Wikipedian, but does that justify adminship?
Actually, yes.. and no. Adminship should be granted to everyone who has the ability to correctly use the admin functions correctly almost all of the time. This means never using them as a favor, to add bias, or to slant power in a dispute. This is a pretty low bar and it's the only bar we need over those functions to keep wikipedia working well. I'm not sure that granular access will help all that much as most people who can be trusted to use any one of them could probably use them all without issue (cept perhaps the revert button).
For practical reasons we can't just give adminship to all editors and only take it away from the abusers: because abusers would keep inventing new identities to keep getting adminship.
But that doesn't leave us with holding a near popularity contest as the only option: We could require that once a user demonstrates a substantial time and effort investment in the main namespace they are automatically admined absent any preexisting strong evidence that they are already a problem editor. (So even if a troll wants to keep getting adminship to abuse it, he must do a kiloedit or two to the actual articles, ... sounds like a fair trade even it means occasionally we get a troll admin that causes a little damage before we deadmin them). We could control the influx of new people causing a lot of work for those monitoring their behavior by only adding a fixed number every month, selected at random from the top 10% by edit count of eligible nonadmin users) . I know many think that edit count is a poor judge, but if you only count the main namespace I think the sort of people who will make good users of the admin fuctions will tend to rack up the edits (by doing rc partol and such).
Once a user abused their administrative powers, it should be revoked... with the usual allowances for minor screwups and human nature. It has been pointed out elsewhere, that adminship shouldn't be a wonderful award. As a result we probably should deal with adminship behavioural burps by temp-deadmining, but rather by a temp block.
I think there is also the room for setting aside special titles and roles to recognize our appreciation of substantial contributors of all forms... But it is silly of us to conflate this honor with the award of some technical functions.