On 2/8/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
on 2/8/07 10:34 PM, Michael Snow at wikipedia@earthlink.net wrote:
We are supposed to be focusing on quality, not quantity, with respect to the encyclopedia articles. It's high time we did the same for administrators.
A resounding YES!
Marc
I'd have to say a resounding NO. The article quality philosophy says that we have enough articles and we should put higher priority on improving the ones we have than adding new ones. That philosophy isn't workable with admins. The more popular Wikipedia gets, the more crap there is to deal with. With a few notable exceptions, the people who do most of the admin work burn out in a few months. Managed well, they go back to being productive editors. Managed poorly, they quit the project. "Quality over quantity" would demand more of these people who are willing to do think kind of work, which would probably mean that they are more likely to quit than to return to the pool of editors (where they are still available to do admin tasks).
While I agree that admins can do an immense amount of damage (unintentionally or maliciously), we have raised some standards too high, while neglected others. Edit counts are almost meaningless, but the baseline keeps going up. That's fine for people who go AWB and get a few thousand edits moving the stub template below the cats & interwiki links and calling it "cleanup"...but that means that people who took the time to learn about the community by editing articles and interacting with people on talk pages, and thereby learning about policy and being socialised to the community, are at a disadvantage.
I know lots of people who have been around a couple years, accumulated 2-4000 edits over than time, who know policy and help out newbies, who contribute content...but who have little chance of being an admin because people expect huge edit counts. On the other hand, when the hyper-active editors, who do 2-3000 edits per month for 6 months become admins they (a) may not know policy all that well, and (b) may be reaching the end of their brief, hot flame of contributions.