Ron Ritzman wrote:
On 4/18/07, John Lee wrote:
(You might dispute the assertion that this philosophy will only let a tiny amount of bad apples in, but I can't think of many, sorry, any bad apples who didn't get in under our present Kafkaesque gauntlet at RfA that would have gotten in under an RfA operating under the "no big deal" thinking I'm advocating.)
Any thoughts on how the current "gauntlet culture" developed? One wild guess might be that some of the current voters might have some time in the past been "burned" by an admin who didn't have one or more of the attributes they are looking for. One example would be someone who spent a lot of time and effort writing an article just to have it speedied by some admin with most of his edits in policy areas quoting WP:THIS or WP:THAT. An admin with experience with a project would be less likely to go decimate somebody else's project. (think webcomics)
In short, an admin with lots of experience writing "articles" would be less likely to nuke somebody else's hard work. Just a guess.
I don't think it's a matter of experience writing articles. It's more about an excessive zeal to protect their own firmly held points of view about what is right.
Even more, it's about a screwed up decision making system that does not scale well into such a large community. A number of people begin with what they honesly feel is a valuable proposal, and set about writing rules about it. They are able to convince a small number of others that these rules are valuable, and a partisan crowd builds around that rule, willing to protect it. Most of the rest of us have other things to do than to be constantly on the alert about the new rules, and tend to ignore them until somebody tries to enforce the rule. In theory, some of these rules could sit there for years before most of us know about them. Some rules go so far as to discourage anyone from informing the community that the rules are being changed. This is most likely to affect those who would disagree with the rule. Votes taken without the community being properly informed about them do not reflect the will of the community.
At other times the rule changes come in a series of small increments which individually might take place without objection, but which collectively can have a profound effect.
Unless and until rule making can be seriously reformed we can expect the kind of harmful rigidity that pervades RfA and deletion processes to continue. Beyond our fundamental root principles absolutely no rule should be set in stone. When a rule has been adopted (under whatever rule adoption procedure is followed) no-one be able to sit back and feel the relief of being able to say, "That's one more problem out of the way."
Many of us grow up in the real world with a set of rules already there, rules about which we had no influence. Similarly, newbies come to us and are confronted with a set of rules about which they had no influence. We need a mechanism that allows anyone at any time to have a meaningful say in the future of a rule. Even a newbie should have an influence on a rule that was adopted long ago.
Ec