On 2/9/07, Taco Deposit tacodeposit@gmail.com wrote:
On 2/9/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 2/9/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
How does the Community define a "quality admin"?
Duh. 100% edit summaries. 3000 edits, well distributed across article space, project space and article talk space. Never having pissed anyone off. Ever.
And you can't have made the 3000 edits over too long or too short a period of time.
Because Heaven knows we wouldn't want people who had been hanging around the project for a long time to be admins.
KP's point, below, about only people who have lots and lots of time to edit becoming admins is a good one -- it means, for the most part, that people with very busy outside lives will never get the chance. We're losing a whole swath of potential admins this way.
The thing about adminship (to sort of address Marc's questions) is we don't really have any other "official" way to recognize editors. Sure, there are barnstars and the like; but these are pretty meaningless outside of a narrow context. There are cabals, but since TINC, well, you're out of luck :) Being able to say "I'm an administrator on the English Wikipedia!" is a kind of code for "I've devoted a lot of time to the project, and people recognize and value my contributions -- I'm an important person!"
It doesn't really matter what the actual work is. The current administrators on this list are talking about the pain and suffering of having to use the mop & bucket (which is, as far as I can tell, entirely true) but ignoring the fact that by having the sysop bit they have recognition within the project that it's not possible to get in any other way. There's no "trusted editor bit" that can be set. There's no "you've been editing for three years, now you're level x". You can make a tremendous number of valuable edits on the projects (or perhaps a smaller number of really good edits over a long time), but there's no way to up your privileges or even recognize you officially without making you an admin. And what if I want that recognition, but don't really have any interest in deleting speedys or mucking through endless policy? Perhaps then you get trouble, or at least an inefficient system where people play to "admin criteria" rather than "let's make this a good encyclopedia criteria".
I give a lot of talks on wikipedia to the outside world, and I get asked all the time if I'm an admin -- not because the people asking really have any conception of what that means, but because they assume that if I know a lot about the site I must be in the "in crowd" and the only thing they know about on Wikipedia that constitutes an "in-crowd" is adminship. We must change this, and find some other recognition mechanism for devoted, conscientious and level-headed editors that does not depend on their knowledge of what the heck "A7" means or whether they've made x number of edits to the wikipedia namespace.
-- phoebe (brassratgirl)