----- Original Message ----- From: "Matthew Jacobs" sxeptomaniac@gmail.com To: wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2012 6:02 PM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] VIP Treatment
Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2012 15:12:49 -0400 From: Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] VIP Treatment
Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2012 11:07:03 -0600 (MDT) From: "Fred Bauder" fredbaud@fairpoint.net Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] VIP Treatment
why should they bother politely pointing someone to OTRS, much less spend time and effort
trying
to be diplomatic themselves?
Sxeptomaniac
Because they are decent capable people, take pride in doing a good job, and are concerned about the accuracy and reputation of Wikipedia.
Fred
on 9/12/12 2:58 PM, Matthew Jacobs at sxeptomaniac@gmail.com wrote:
Oh really? So why do we have to desysop admins? Were they "misusing their tools" in a "decent capable" way? Was it part of "doing a good job"? Were they desysopped for being "concerned about the accuracy and reputation of Wikipedia"?
I can understand if you think I'm overstating the problem, but I find it ridiculous that you would deny the obvious: some people are drawn to adminship for the wrong reasons, and some maybe even for the right
reasons,
but choose to act on them in a short-sighted way. No RFA process, no
matter
how good, will ever be able to fully weed out people who really shouldn't be admins. The problem is, WP has no mechanism for dealing with those who turn out to not exemplify what an administrator should be, but stop short of actually breaking rules.
Sxeptomaniac
Agreed. But how could such a mechanism be created given the existing structure of the Project?
marc Riddell
I've seen a lot of complicated RfA proposals, as well as community desysop
procedures, and I really think the simplest solution would be for Adminship to no longer be a lifetime appointment. Make it for terms of one or two years, with no limit on the number of terms, and no requirement to re-apply. It simply means that admins remain accountable to the community, giving them an incentive to remain polite and fair, to the best of their ability. I don't buy the arguments that "good admins will never be re-appointed", as good admins may make a few enemies, but they'll gain even more supporters. I also believe that the community could easily adapt to manage the increase in RfAs.
To be clear, there is no perfect solution, but I think that instituting admin terms would be a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, I also don't think the community will ever accept such a major change, as it's become far to conservative regarding policy.
This isn't a new idea, and has been proposed, and rejected, more than once: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Perennial_proposals#Reconfirm_adminis...
As you point out, it is open to abuse by enemies the admins may have made- which is only to be expected if they're doing their job properly, since some people, sadly, will never accept authoritative statements of WP policy. Worse (as in my case), they might receive death threats on a daily basis.