On 3/31/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
Then would it make sense to relax some of the requirements for future admins, or at least ask voters to consider relaxing them? Is adminship really something that cannot be "learnt on the job"?
All admins learn on the job. It's not skill at doing the technical duties of an admin that matters, it's competence in using administrative powers responsibly that is being selected for. RfA has proven to be relatively poor at discriminating against people who should not be admins, because the criteria that most people are applying when they vote are not really very good proxies for "will not abuse administrative privilege" and in some cases are actually proxies for "will abuse administrative privilege".
Unfortunately, I don't have any better proxies for "will not abuse administrative privilege". But I do think it would be a good idea to have admin selection be more deliberative and less of a popularity contest, as it is today. But the best solutions to accomplish that all involve creating special "administrator selection committees" or similar such bodies, which will be roundly decried as anti-democratic and cabalistic by people who are more interested in Wikipedia as an social experiment. And while this latter group is smaller than the group of people who are interested in Wikipedia as an encyclopedia, this smaller group is disproportionately represented amongst those who participate in community processes, thereby skewing "consensus" toward the "social experiment" point of view.
I wish I had a solution to THAT problem.
Kelly