At 05:21 AM 6/1/2010, Charles Matthews wrote:
I think this is something to untangle. We need to get
to the bottom of
the community's fears about "overpowerful" admins, by talking through
and delineating what a single admin can expect to face in awkward
situations.
Yes.
I've never been in favour of restricting admin
discretion,
which is really what is being proposed.
It's not what I'm proposing. Discretion should be almost unlimited as
to primary action; however, there should be much better guidelines so
that admins can know what to expect. WP:IAR is a fundamental and very
important principle, but that doesn't negate that if one ignores
rules, one should be prepared to face criticism and be required to
explain why or face warning and possible suspension of privileges.
We can't anticipate the
challenges the site will face (even though it may appear that there is
little innovation from vandals and trolls).
There are structural devices which can make vandalism and even
editorial review much more efficient, and there are trends in that
direction. When Wikipedia starts valuing editorial labor, and sets up
systems to make it more efficient and reliably effective, it may get
over the hump. I've suggested that it may be appropriate to start
channeling labor into what I've called "backstory," i.e.,
documentation of why an article is the way it is. Then, if a new
editor disagrees, that editor can quickly come up to speed on the
history, see all the arguments and evidence organized, and would not
be imprisoned by that, but rather might be encouraged, if some
argument there is defective, to show that, to expand the consensus
there. And then that can be taken back to the article. Articles
should not slide back and forth, that is incredibly wasteful. They
should grow, such that consensus is always that they have improved by
a change. Flagged revisions is a piece of this puzzle.
I do think admins can be
held to account for their use of discretion. Right now it seems that a
piece of the puzzle is missing: admins don't know clearly how they stand
in relation to the actions of other admins.
I developed, early on, a sense of how Wikipedia worked, and it made a
great deal of sense in terms of the organizational theory I was
familiar with. And then I discovered that only some administrators
seemed to understand it. Others believed that the structure was
something else. I saw no disruption coming from administrators who
understood the concepts that seemed obvious to me. It came from the
others. Recusal policy should be far more clear. But that's not the
first priority. The first priority is establishing consensus process
that is more efficient; the inefficiency discourages participation
and causes proposals that might actually help to go nowhere. "No consensus."
That should be a clear suggestion for "refer to committee." That's
what successful organizations do when faced with a problem where the
response is not clear. (And then committee composition and rules and
process become very important.)