Recently, a user was nominated for adminship because
thought " . . he needs to be rewarded for all the hard
work and dedication." <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Requests_fo…
Though the user in question was very well qualified
for adminship, I am disturbed by the trend that
adminship is some sort of "reward" or "vote of
confidence" in the name of the community, however, in
reality adminship is a vote of confidence and reward
for making a great deal of edits and behaving well in
the process.
I propose that the community start issuing awards of
merit to users that will be voted upon by the
community over a period of a week. Some of the ideas I
kicked around were...
the <i>Wikipedia Peace Prize</i> - for users who have
worked to resolve conflict in the community.
the <i>Gutenberg Award</i> - for users that have
extensively improved the main-namespace content of
Wikipedia
As such, we will be able to stroke the egos (and
hard-working motivation) of users, while seperating
adminship from the equation. I hope that in such a
situation, the community will finally be able to give
certain users a resounding vote of confidence when
adminship would be inappropriate.
--H. Cheney