On 5/29/07, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/29/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/29/07, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
I am far more worried that one of Merkey's anon detractors claims that they just got past RFA with another as-yet-unnamed account ...
Quite a few groups are claiming to have succeeded in getting RfAs through, and in some cases more than one admin account per person, because the process has become almost completely formulaic. It's one of the reasons I don't like to see high article edit counts (with minor edits) and low talk-page interaction, because that's one of the ways they claim to get them through. (And that's not a comment on Gracenotes, before anyone interprets it that way.)
I don't know what the solution is, because a large chunk of the community still argues that adminship's no big deal, which means there's no will to check who's being given it.
The real problem is that there's no time to check who's being given it. I spend a moderate amount of time, 5-10 min or so, perusing a candidate, unless I already know them extensively. This compares rather negatively with the several hours it takes me to ferret out details in serious abuser / sockpuppeteer cases and track all the relevant stuff down. And even in those cases, unless I RFCU on them, I am left with a lingering feeling that I don't know enough about them.
There's no time to check thoroughly, but there are ways of cutting down on the obviously easy routes. It's a trivial matter to use a semi-automated script to get you up to 3,000 vandalism reverts. That, combined with very few talk page edits, and with AfDs being the only project space contribs, is a known formula. It makes sense to check carefully when you see one of those approaching. But there's no will to do this, and the result is that we're a top--ten website with no idea how many admins we have. We know how many accounts, but not how many people, and we don't know whether they include banned users.