Edits != Trustworthiness. Edits don't even accurately represent how active a contributor you are, as you can see from any long standing revert war, someone with thousands of edits but only 1 or 2% of them new articles, or even an article like Peerage, which has some 200 (valid) edits by the same user). Edits just represent how many times you type some text in and click a button, and I think basing adminship, a symbol of the community's trust in a user, solely or even automatically on how many times you click that button is absurd. It would help to lessen sock puppetry, though I don't agree that it will eliminate it. I think that monitoring the quality of edits would help eliminate sock puppetry more effectively; not too many people will wait months while making valid contributions to the encyclopedia on a sock puppet and keeping their original account active at the same time.
Message: 6 Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2004 01:38:49 +0000 (GMT) From: Chris Green chris_r_green@yahoo.co.uk Subject: [WikiEN-l] Trusted users
To: wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Message-ID: 20040217013849.73205.qmail@web25107.mail.ukl.yahoo.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 To prove seriousness (i.e. real love of Wikipedia) and to prevent sock puppetry why not restrict the allocation of trust to those users who have edited x(500? 1000?) times?
I would think that this would resolve most problems.
You might have to make an exception for certain current sysops who don't really edit but have proved their worth to the community.
Sysop status would become automatic after x number of edits provided the user hadn't accumulated negative votes already from existing trusted users. You could keep the voting figures out of the public domain until the trigger figure is reached to prevent gamesplaying, since people would not know their voting score.
Over time sysop status could be revoked if votes against a user became weighted too negatively. For questionable cases you could call a vote.
Good behaviour conversely would inevitably lead to the regaining of trust as people change their votes and might lead to the regaining of sysop status.