On 4/15/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
While casually browsing through old RfAs recently, I found a comment I'd made about adminship being no big deal. I basically expressed my philosophy as that if you won't do harm (or, more precisely, the harm you do is so minuscule that it is vastly outweighed by your positive contributions) with the mop and bucket, you deserve it.
Given the number of de-facto inactive admins we already have I don't see much benefit in that approach.
It is true, of course, that these issues have nothing to do with some other problems with RfA and its culture. But this thing I'm raising seems very basic to me - adminship is no big deal in the sense that if you want it, you can have it, unless there is proof that significant harm will be done if you have the tools. Would it be worth noting this in big red <h1>-sized letters on RfA, so that at the very least, we won't reject people for silly reasons.
Not silly reasons from their POV.
Just to pick one random example, many (half?) of the opposes at [[Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Navou 2]] (still ongoing) are literally along the lines of this neutral vote: "I would love to support you, as you are an established and experienced editor. However, as Tellyaddict has pointed out. You do not have enough edits in the section "mainspace"."
You want admins who don't know the value of content?
I don't know who Navou is - and there are valid concerns raised about him/her. My comments here are not comments on him/her, but general comments about the sorry state of RfA. The whole point of RfA is this: TO WEED OUT PEOPLE WHO DO HARM WITH THE MOP AND BUCKET. If there is no evidence that the candidate will do harm (assuming, of course, that the user has made enough contributions for there to be enough data to evaluate him/her), the candidate should pass.
Non active admins siting around is a risk.
We could get the 'crats to disregard opinions that do not pay heed to this basic principle of adminship being no big deal.
How? The crats don't answer to you.
I wouldn't rule that out. But this seems to be symptomatic of a basic problem with the culture of RfA, and the culture of many people caught up in our processes.
Coercion is pointless if it only addresses the symptoms, and not the cause. We disbanded Esperanza because it was reforming out of coercion, rather than an actual change in the culture it represented. We need to address this fundamental problem with RfA's culture - or rethink our entire process of appointing admins.
People have been saying this for years now. So far they are yet to come up with a system that either:
a)can be made identical to the current one through the use of trivial legal fictions b)takes power away from the community. c)results in a significantly increased overhead d) some combination of the above.