On 6/18/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/18/07, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
On 6/18/07, Slim Virgin slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
What I am arguing here and elsewhere is that one of the very obvious niches is that people can get to be admins by hitting revert for a few months. I think we need to put a stop to that.
I think if you do put a stop to that, Wikipedia won't have enough admins to handle the tasks at hand.
We already have too many admins. Every time this has been looked into, we find that's it a relatively small number of admins who are active. If we want to keep on promoting others, especially in such large numbers, we should start desyopping the inactive ones.
The admin backlogs seem to me to be long enough to indicate that there aren't enough active admins. And the recent discussion over speedy deletions indicates to me that admins could use more time to perform their current actions already. Maybe there are too many inactive admins, but that's a problem which can't really be solved by not promoting accounts who do nothing other than reverting.
But that doesn't touch on the main issue: that we're promoting accounts who've done little or nothing but spend months reverting.
I really don't see how that's a main issue. It could be argued to lead to certain problems, but so far I haven't been convinced of that argument.
An analogy to the situation we're in is an airline acknowledging that 100 percent security is impossible, and therefore they might as well get rid of all security measures. It's an irrational position.
I don't think that's a particularly appropriate analogy, because Wikipedia has not gotten rid of all security measures. Rather, Wikipedia has recognized that it will always be possible for bad people to become admins, therefore Wikipedia has created a system where the damage which can be inflicted by admins is quite minimal.
Even with regard to the ability to view deleted pages it's unlikely that having a few or even many rogue admins will cause any real harm which wouldn't be possible already anyway. Anyone who wants can download the entire history dumps, and anyone evil enough to post private information on Wikipedia could just as easily post that private information on some rogue site directly.