On 4/15/07, Earle Martin wikipedia@downlode.org wrote:
On 15/04/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 15/04/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Given the number of de-facto inactive admins we already have I don't see much benefit in that approach.
- It would reduce the harmfulness to the community of the present RFA.
- "De-facto inactive admins" do not harm the project.
I have never understood why Geni considers "paper admins" (a phrase he has used a number of times since I've been reading this list) to be harmful. Geni, would you care to explain?
1)lowers the social pressure on admins to be active.
100 admin actions a month can be less than an hour a month depending on what you are doing. If we could get that our of people our backlogs would be shorter. At the moment we have maybe 300 admins who are active at that rate.
The upshot of this lack of expectations is that people can get the social benefits of adminship without doing the work. It would be nice to change that.
2)Results in a large group of admins who don't really know their way around policy/process. the effect of this is that when they do get involved they tend to cause trouble with the hyper-actives and thus reduce their work rate.
3)there is no benefit in designing processes to be comprehensible to those who don't use them regularly. If you have 20 people doing 90% of the work in one area (say a sub aspect of deletion) there is little point in worrying about the needs of that 10% when setting up the process. This is why process may appear incomprehensible to outsiders. No benefit in doing otherwise.
4)splits in the admin community between those who do large amounts of work and those who don't. Split would be lessened if the majority of admins were fairly active (~>100 admin actions a month) obviously there is always going to be something of a split between the hyper actives and other admins but that split would be smaller if most admins were fairly active
5)security risk (admin accounts getting hacked) without the gain.
6)reduces the practical size of our reserves. Fairly active admins have less problem stepping up their admin action rate than the in actives. They already know the ropes so it is simply a matter of doing more stuff.
7)gives a misleading picture of our admin resources. In theory we had 849 active admins as of March 3, 2007. The real figure is closer to 400.