On Feb 15, 2007, at 13:10, Rich Holton wrote:
Sorry, but I have to disagree. The only real criteria I can figure is that we want to avoid admins who go completely zonkers and start systematically working against the aims of Wikipedia. If we can be reasonably sure someone won't do that, then there's no reason to keep them from becoming an admin.
Of course, we need to be willing (and able) to de-admin someone when they consistently demonstrate the sort of behaviors you mention (or worse). But the whole wiki concept is one of self healing and resilience, not pre-approval. What we don't want to have is a class of users (admins) who are placed into the spotlight every time they make a mistake, or every time one of them turns out to be less than desirable.
I respect the concerns of those who want to avoid granting large blocks of admin rights to what end up as sock-puppets intent on destruction. Perhaps we do need a sizable class of users whose sole role is granting and revoking admin rights--but these users should not be themselves admins. These people should be very carefully selected, and should for the most part stay out of controversy.
-Rich
Just for clarification: my post was to discuss the role of adminship, not the merits of making people admins easier or whatever the other thread was dedicated to. :] I'm not thinking of the one or two people who might be inclined to make huge swaths of sockpuppets, but rather those whose own personal biases prevent them from acting in the best interests of others. These are the people who I think should not be given a general managerial role such as admin, but who are perfectly adept at making Wikipedia a wonderful place.
I think the idea is that of consensus: the community agrees to delete, block, protect and the admin is only doing what the community wants. Or preempting it as the case may be, but that's more tricky. We want admins who will follow consensus; not all people do this naturally, while all people correct errors naturally.
What I think we don't want is admins who put their own input into what they do, and delete things they want deleted, and protect things they want protected. We /do/ very much want people to edit things they want edited, change things they want changed. Deleting and editing are not quite the same thing and thus shouldn't work quite the same way.
Also, I don't see how your comments were in response to mine, but it's all good. :] --keitei