On 3/31/06, Ilmari Karonen nospam@vyznev.net wrote:
Well, no, the part about going on a vandalism spree was hyperbole. It's more about protecting ourselves against users who might use their admin povers for more subtle undesirable things, such as POV pushing, or for ends incompatible with the project (like the folks who think the best thing about Wikipedia are the userboxes), or who might simply use them carelessly or thoughtlessly, say, by rangeblocking all of Europe.
And we are going to detect such users by ensuring we only select admins who use edit summaries 95% of the time and have made at least 1500 distinct edits in the minimum 6 months they have had an account at en?
False metrics are worse than no metrics :(
I think I'd rather that each RfA required a neutral person to review the person's entire edit history, noting the number of edit wars, whether edit summaries were accurate, their apparent stance on controversial topics like userboxes etc, then publishing those facts for everyone to decide on. Rather than (incorrectly) assuming that each person voting does such a review for themselves.
That said, even vandalism _is_ a concern, if an unlikely one. Besides the obvious opportunities, like replacing MediaWiki messages with genitalia, a malicious admin could really have a field day with the ability to edit the sitewide javascript files. Unfortunately that does make adminship a big deal in some ways.
Has that ever happened?
Steve