"David Gerard" wrote
Please enlighten me as to why it is good for adminship to be a big-deal artificially scarce commodity.
I'm not aware of discussion (recent, anyway) of what would be an ideal number of admins. What are the criteria for that? One per 1000 articles as a rule of thumb?
Charles
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On 06/10/06, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
"David Gerard" wrote
Please enlighten me as to why it is good for adminship to be a big-deal artificially scarce commodity.
I'm not aware of discussion (recent, anyway) of what would be an ideal number of admins. What are the criteria for that? One per 1000 articles as a rule of thumb?
As I said, it'd be nice if most editors could get it without ever-increasing requirements on RFA. Should there be a requirement beyond "will not go batshit with the tools"?
(Now, that's an interesting question: how voting pages of this sort get ever-increasing requirements, and what to do about it. FAC is another.)
- d.
On 10/6/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
As I said, it'd be nice if most editors could get it without ever-increasing requirements on RFA. Should there be a requirement beyond "will not go batshit with the tools"?
Do we want to lower the requirements, though? We have 1,000 admins, most of whom aren't that active and don't need to be. The requirements need to be *right*, but that needn't mean lower. We're still promoting people who don't know the policies several months after promotion, and I'm talking about the basic ones e.g. don't block when you're involved in a content dispute. Against that, I saw someone lose an RfA (or he was losing the last time I looked), because he wasn't putting the correct tags on vandals' pages when he reverted them, which was absurd. So it's a question of drawing up sensible criteria. I don't like the "no big deal" thing, because it's prescriptive; the reality is that adminship *is* regarded as a big deal.
Sarah
On 06/10/06, Sarah slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
Do we want to lower the requirements, though? We have 1,000 admins, most of whom aren't that active and don't need to be. The requirements need to be *right*, but that needn't mean lower. We're still promoting people who don't know the policies several months after promotion, and I'm talking about the basic ones e.g. don't block when you're involved in a content dispute. Against that, I saw someone lose an RfA (or he was losing the last time I looked), because he wasn't putting the correct tags on vandals' pages when he reverted them, which was absurd.
Yeah. It's measuring the wrong things.
So it's a question of drawing up sensible criteria. I don't like the "no big deal" thing, because it's prescriptive; the reality is that adminship *is* regarded as a big deal.
I know it is, but it still *shouldn't* be. I realise that admin on Wikipedia is by its nature a bigger deal than board mod on some small web forum, but there's a lot of others to help and I'm glad to see there is peer pressure.
- d.
On 10/6/06, Sarah slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
in a content dispute. Against that, I saw someone lose an RfA (or he was losing the last time I looked), because he wasn't putting the correct tags on vandals' pages when he reverted them, which was absurd. So it's a question of drawing up sensible criteria. I don't
Heh, I remember that. Understanding of policy is far more important (but difficult to determine) than the stupid things many votes are based on: edit summary use, range of articles edited, distribution of edits, occasional uncivil or poorly thought out talk page messages...
Here's an idea: dramatically lower the bar, put the admin on 1 month probation, and hold the real RfA to see whether he keeps his admin rights. If he didn't do much good during his month, strip him of the rights and let him try again later. If he did bad, strip him and don't let him try later.
Steve
Based on some recent RFAr cases involving admins and that post about whoever leaving as a result of admin action, I think we should have some safeguard in place. If multiple admins go crazy with their tools people who need to take action won't be able to keep up. Arbitration cases usually take too long to conclude. We should have some well established central de-adminship procedure that is transparent to allow every sensible editor to contribute and not just make it an admin only event. That should take some heat off arbcom in the most stringent cases.
Mgm
Added note: Adminship shouldn't be too big a deal, but we need to be absolutely sure the people getting it know what they're doing. There's still people blocking when they're in a dispute using revertion to gain in edit wars and what-not.
Mgm
On 10/6/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
Based on some recent RFAr cases involving admins and that post about whoever leaving as a result of admin action, I think we should have some safeguard in place. If multiple admins go crazy with their tools people who need to take action won't be able to keep up. Arbitration cases usually take too long to conclude. We should have some well established central de-adminship procedure that is transparent to allow every sensible editor to contribute and not just make it an admin only event. That should take some heat off arbcom in the most stringent cases.
Mgm
David Gerard wrote:
As I said, it'd be nice if most editors could get it without ever-increasing requirements on RFA... (Now, that's an interesting question: how voting pages of this sort get ever-increasing requirements, and what to do about it. FAC is another.)
It's an interesting aspect of human nature. Those requirements *always* tend to creep. When you have people whose job it is to set and enforce policy, and once they've set and enforced a given level of policy, they *have* to raise the bar or invent new policies, to give themselves something to do. It's what they do.
If everything's humming along smoothly with the bar at a given level, and everyone is so used to it that there's hardly any enforcement to do, it's remarkably difficult to sit back and say, "Wow, everything's working so well, I guess we can go home early." It's hard to let a system just "sit there and work". There's an overwhelming urge to say, "Okay, what more can we do?"
Somehow, these proclivities are no less present when the regulators and monitors are volunteers whose available time for the task is limited and precious. And if anything, it's the self-appointed regulators and monitors who have the greatest tendency to get overly passionate about the job and go overboard with the requirements.
As I believe H.G. Wells once wrote, "The lawgiver, of all beings, most owes the law allegiance. He of all men should behave as though the law compelled him. But it is the universal weakness of mankind that what we are given to administer we presently imagine we own."
On 10/6/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
As I said, it'd be nice if most editors could get it without ever-increasing requirements on RFA. Should there be a requirement beyond "will not go batshit with the tools"?
My modest proposal that there even *be* a uniform set of requirements (without discussing what those requirements would be) was soundly rejected by the "RfA regulars". People want to make their own requirements. *All* requirements on any Wikipedia (non)voting process become stricter with time. It's an axiom or a maxim or something.
Steve