While casually browsing through old RfAs recently, I found a comment I'd made about adminship being no big deal. I basically expressed my philosophy as that if you won't do harm (or, more precisely, the harm you do is so minuscule that it is vastly outweighed by your positive contributions) with the mop and bucket, you deserve it.
I also realised, from looking at other comments made on that RfA, and from reading the opinions of people in present-day RfAs, that this philosophy isn't one adopted by many. People look for reasons to oppose, even if they don't have much to do with harm. For example, why should writing an FA or not doing enough vandalfighting be impediments to adminship? This is not evidence that the candidate will do harm with the tools, or that by approving the candidate, we will be harming Wikipedia.
It is true, of course, that these issues have nothing to do with some other problems with RfA and its culture. But this thing I'm raising seems very basic to me - adminship is no big deal in the sense that if you want it, you can have it, unless there is proof that significant harm will be done if you have the tools. Would it be worth noting this in big red <h1>-sized letters on RfA, so that at the very least, we won't reject people for silly reasons.
Just to pick one random example, many (half?) of the opposes at [[Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Navou 2]] (still ongoing) are literally along the lines of this neutral vote: "I would love to support you, as you are an established and experienced editor. However, as Tellyaddict has pointed out. You do not have enough edits in the section "mainspace"."
Bloody hell. The whole point we have standards for time and edit count is to have some measure of experience. If the guy knows his stuff sufficiently, why should having "only" a thousand mainspace edits, or "only" five months of experience be an impediment?
I don't know who Navou is - and there are valid concerns raised about him/her. My comments here are not comments on him/her, but general comments about the sorry state of RfA. The whole point of RfA is this: TO WEED OUT PEOPLE WHO DO HARM WITH THE MOP AND BUCKET. If there is no evidence that the candidate will do harm (assuming, of course, that the user has made enough contributions for there to be enough data to evaluate him/her), the candidate should pass.
We could get the 'crats to disregard opinions that do not pay heed to this basic principle of adminship being no big deal. I wouldn't rule that out. But this seems to be symptomatic of a basic problem with the culture of RfA, and the culture of many people caught up in our processes.
Coercion is pointless if it only addresses the symptoms, and not the cause. We disbanded Esperanza because it was reforming out of coercion, rather than an actual change in the culture it represented. We need to address this fundamental problem with RfA's culture - or rethink our entire process of appointing admins.
Johnleemk
On 4/15/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
While casually browsing through old RfAs recently, I found a comment I'd made about adminship being no big deal. I basically expressed my philosophy as that if you won't do harm (or, more precisely, the harm you do is so minuscule that it is vastly outweighed by your positive contributions) with the mop and bucket, you deserve it.
Given the number of de-facto inactive admins we already have I don't see much benefit in that approach.
It is true, of course, that these issues have nothing to do with some other problems with RfA and its culture. But this thing I'm raising seems very basic to me - adminship is no big deal in the sense that if you want it, you can have it, unless there is proof that significant harm will be done if you have the tools. Would it be worth noting this in big red <h1>-sized letters on RfA, so that at the very least, we won't reject people for silly reasons.
Not silly reasons from their POV.
Just to pick one random example, many (half?) of the opposes at [[Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Navou 2]] (still ongoing) are literally along the lines of this neutral vote: "I would love to support you, as you are an established and experienced editor. However, as Tellyaddict has pointed out. You do not have enough edits in the section "mainspace"."
You want admins who don't know the value of content?
I don't know who Navou is - and there are valid concerns raised about him/her. My comments here are not comments on him/her, but general comments about the sorry state of RfA. The whole point of RfA is this: TO WEED OUT PEOPLE WHO DO HARM WITH THE MOP AND BUCKET. If there is no evidence that the candidate will do harm (assuming, of course, that the user has made enough contributions for there to be enough data to evaluate him/her), the candidate should pass.
Non active admins siting around is a risk.
We could get the 'crats to disregard opinions that do not pay heed to this basic principle of adminship being no big deal.
How? The crats don't answer to you.
I wouldn't rule that out. But this seems to be symptomatic of a basic problem with the culture of RfA, and the culture of many people caught up in our processes.
Coercion is pointless if it only addresses the symptoms, and not the cause. We disbanded Esperanza because it was reforming out of coercion, rather than an actual change in the culture it represented. We need to address this fundamental problem with RfA's culture - or rethink our entire process of appointing admins.
People have been saying this for years now. So far they are yet to come up with a system that either:
a)can be made identical to the current one through the use of trivial legal fictions b)takes power away from the community. c)results in a significantly increased overhead d) some combination of the above.
On 15/04/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/15/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
While casually browsing through old RfAs recently, I found a comment I'd made about adminship being no big deal. I basically expressed my philosophy as that if you won't do harm (or, more precisely, the harm you do is so minuscule that it is vastly outweighed by your positive contributions) with the mop and bucket, you deserve it.
Given the number of de-facto inactive admins we already have I don't see much benefit in that approach.
1. It would reduce the harmfulness to the community of the present RFA. 2. "De-facto inactive admins" do not harm the project.
- d.
David Gerard wrote
On 15/04/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/15/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
...adminship being no big deal... if you won't do harm... with the mop and bucket, you deserve it.
Given the number of de-facto inactive admins we already have I don't see much benefit in that approach.
- It would reduce the harmfulness to the community of the present RFA.
- "De-facto inactive admins" do not harm the project.
3. We could probably use more admins who are merely reasonable, mop-and-bucket people, without limiting ourselves to those zealots and maniacs with the fortitude to navigate an insane gauntlet.
(Who was it who said, wrt politicians, that those who most ambitiously desire power are the last ones we should give it to?)
Given the number of de-facto inactive admins we already have I don't see much benefit in that approach.
- It would reduce the harmfulness to the community of the present RFA.
- "De-facto inactive admins" do not harm the project.
- We could probably use more admins who are merely reasonable,
mop-and-bucket people
4. If we didn't have quite such high expectations of admins (if all aspects of adminship weren't so politicized, if every decision didn't presume infinite familiarity with Byzantine mazes of policies and processes), perhaps fewer of our admins would be inactive.
On 4/15/07, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
- If we didn't have quite such high expectations of admins
(if all aspects of adminship weren't so politicized,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:AIV http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Non-commercial_use_only_images_for_spe... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_with_no_copyright_tag http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_with_unknown_source
tend not be very polticial.
if every decision didn't presume infinite familiarity with Byzantine mazes of policies and processes),
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_with_unknown_copyright_status
8 day backlog. Policy can be (and is) explained in one paragraph.
Steve Summit wrote:
David Gerard wrote
On 15/04/07, geni wrote:
On 4/15/07, John Lee wrote:
...adminship being no big deal... if you won't do harm... with the mop and bucket, you deserve it.
Given the number of de-facto inactive admins we already have I don't see much benefit in that approach.
- It would reduce the harmfulness to the community of the present RFA.
- "De-facto inactive admins" do not harm the project.
- We could probably use more admins who are merely reasonable,
mop-and-bucket people, without limiting ourselves to those zealots and maniacs with the fortitude to navigate an insane gauntlet.
Police officers who do not meet their traffic ticket quota are clearly not doing thir jobs. :-)
Ec
On 15/04/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 15/04/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Given the number of de-facto inactive admins we already have I don't see much benefit in that approach.
- It would reduce the harmfulness to the community of the present RFA.
- "De-facto inactive admins" do not harm the project.
I have never understood why Geni considers "paper admins" (a phrase he has used a number of times since I've been reading this list) to be harmful. Geni, would you care to explain?
On 4/15/07, Earle Martin wikipedia@downlode.org wrote:
On 15/04/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 15/04/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Given the number of de-facto inactive admins we already have I don't see much benefit in that approach.
- It would reduce the harmfulness to the community of the present RFA.
- "De-facto inactive admins" do not harm the project.
I have never understood why Geni considers "paper admins" (a phrase he has used a number of times since I've been reading this list) to be harmful. Geni, would you care to explain?
1)lowers the social pressure on admins to be active.
100 admin actions a month can be less than an hour a month depending on what you are doing. If we could get that our of people our backlogs would be shorter. At the moment we have maybe 300 admins who are active at that rate.
The upshot of this lack of expectations is that people can get the social benefits of adminship without doing the work. It would be nice to change that.
2)Results in a large group of admins who don't really know their way around policy/process. the effect of this is that when they do get involved they tend to cause trouble with the hyper-actives and thus reduce their work rate.
3)there is no benefit in designing processes to be comprehensible to those who don't use them regularly. If you have 20 people doing 90% of the work in one area (say a sub aspect of deletion) there is little point in worrying about the needs of that 10% when setting up the process. This is why process may appear incomprehensible to outsiders. No benefit in doing otherwise.
4)splits in the admin community between those who do large amounts of work and those who don't. Split would be lessened if the majority of admins were fairly active (~>100 admin actions a month) obviously there is always going to be something of a split between the hyper actives and other admins but that split would be smaller if most admins were fairly active
5)security risk (admin accounts getting hacked) without the gain.
6)reduces the practical size of our reserves. Fairly active admins have less problem stepping up their admin action rate than the in actives. They already know the ropes so it is simply a matter of doing more stuff.
7)gives a misleading picture of our admin resources. In theory we had 849 active admins as of March 3, 2007. The real figure is closer to 400.
geni wrote:
3)there is no benefit in designing processes to be comprehensible to those who don't use them regularly. If you have 20 people doing 90% of the work in one area (say a sub aspect of deletion) there is little point in worrying about the needs of that 10% when setting up the process. This is why process may appear incomprehensible to outsiders. No benefit in doing otherwise.
I'm not sure I'm following the logic here. A handful of people are stuck doing the majority of the work in some area, and they're of necessity familiar with the abstruse (albeit efficient) mechanism for doing it. But since they're the only people doing the work, there's no point devising a more hand-holding mechanism which would let more people participate (but which the "experts" would presumably have no use for)? Isn't this just a little bit circular?
On 4/15/07, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
I'm not sure I'm following the logic here. A handful of people are stuck doing the majority of the work in some area, and they're of necessity familiar with the abstruse (albeit efficient) mechanism for doing it. But since they're the only people doing the work, there's no point devising a more hand-holding mechanism which would let more people participate (but which the "experts" would presumably have no use for)? Isn't this just a little bit circular?
No because the "more people participating" will have such a low work rate is is not worth the loss of efficiency it would cause the admins doing most of the work.
On 4/16/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
No because the "more people participating" will have such a low work rate is is not worth the loss of efficiency it would cause the admins doing most of the work.
So really we should be reducing the number of admins to iron out the inefficiencies?
On 4/15/07, Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com wrote:
So really we should be reducing the number of admins to iron out the inefficiencies?
There is no way to logically get that from what I wrote.
On 4/15/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
5)security risk (admin accounts getting hacked) without the gain.
Could someone tell me why this always comes up in discussions like these? The same thing came up in a discussion about inactive bot accounts. We have over a thousand admins. If every single one of them had passwords long enough and with a great enough variety of characters to prevent them from being easily hacked (according to all the websites with minimum requirements for these things) I would be very surprised. Yet not once in the entirety of the history of Wikipedia has a single admin account been hacked. Is there some technical flaw in the software that reduces the security of admin accounts in general if there are too many of them or what?
On 15/04/07, Dycedarg darthvader1219@gmail.com wrote:
Is there some technical flaw in the software that reduces the security of admin accounts in general if there are too many of them or what?
No. This is a red herring, plain and simple.
On 15/04/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
2)Results in a large group of admins who don't really know their way around policy/process.
{{fact}}
I've seen a lot of this project's policy and process. That doesn't necessarily mean I'd get involved with all of it should I become an admin.
the effect of this is that when they do get involved they tend to cause trouble with the hyper-actives and thus reduce their work rate.
{{fact}} again.
Everyone has to learn the ropes. That's not a disruptive process; it's a natural part of a growing community. If the system as it exists can't cope with a higher influx of administrators, then new procedures for training need to be implemented. Anyway, the more users that become admins, the greater the chance that you will find more "hyper-actives" who will offset this dubious effect of new admins.
3)there is no benefit in designing processes to be comprehensible to those who don't use them regularly. If you have 20 people doing 90% of the work in one area (say a sub aspect of deletion) there is little point in worrying about the needs of that 10% when setting up the process. This is why process may appear incomprehensible to outsiders. No benefit in doing otherwise.
What has this to do with quiet admins being harmful to the project?
4)splits in the admin community between those who do large amounts of work and those who don't. Split would be lessened if the majority of admins were fairly active (~>100 admin actions a month) obviously there is always going to be something of a split between the hyper actives and other admins but that split would be smaller if most admins were fairly active
Are you trying to imply that factions would develop in the admin community based on how much work people do? Sorry, but I think that's ridiculous.
5)security risk (admin accounts getting hacked) without the gain.
This is conjecture and scaremongering.
6)reduces the practical size of our reserves. Fairly active admins have less problem stepping up their admin action rate than the in actives. They already know the ropes so it is simply a matter of doing more stuff.
What is this need to "step up [one's] admin action rate"? Why can't our admins continue what they're doing? If we end up with some admins who are all-out gung-ho types and a bunch of slow admins... we still end up with more admins. All of whom are doing /something/. This is not a problem.
7)gives a misleading picture of our admin resources. In theory we had 849 active admins as of March 3, 2007. The real figure is closer to 400.
This is a non-issue. Nobody's forced to use the total number of admins to refer to anything. Stats on activity exist, and can be quoted, as you yourself have done here.
On 4/15/07, Earle Martin wikipedia@downlode.org wrote:
On 15/04/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
2)Results in a large group of admins who don't really know their way around policy/process.
{{fact}}
I've seen a lot of this project's policy and process. That doesn't necessarily mean I'd get involved with all of it should I become an admin.
Don't need to be involved in all of it.
the effect of this is that when they do get involved they tend to cause trouble with the hyper-actives and thus reduce their work rate.
{{fact}} again.
See [[WP:AN]] and [[WP:AN/I]]'s archives.
Everyone has to learn the ropes. That's not a disruptive process; it's a natural part of a growing community. If the system as it exists can't cope with a higher influx of administrators, then new procedures for training need to be implemented. Anyway, the more users that become admins, the greater the chance that you will find more "hyper-actives" who will offset this dubious effect of new admins.
People learning the ropes can be dealt with. It is the people learning then not realising they have forgotten or that things have changed that cause issues.
What has this to do with quiet admins being harmful to the project?
If you had a large body of fairly active admins such issues would be less likely to arise.
Are you trying to imply that factions would develop in the admin community based on how much work people do? Sorry, but I think that's ridiculous.
So you are suggesting that there will be no split between those with actual practical experience and those who do not? That goes against almost the entire history of human activities.
5)security risk (admin accounts getting hacked) without the gain.
This is conjecture and scaremongering.
No basic maths.
Chance of admin password being acquired for any given admin is X. Now we have no reason to think that low activity admins have more secure passwords than active admins. So we will assume that the mean value of X will remain constant regardless of the number of admins.
So the chance of an admin password being acquired = mean x*number of admins.
What is this need to "step up [one's] admin action rate"? Why can't our admins continue what they're doing? If we end up with some admins who are all-out gung-ho types and a bunch of slow admins... we still end up with more admins. All of whom are doing /something/. This is not a problem.
We can't promote at a high enough rate to deal with bumps in need for admin actions. the only way to meet these is for admins to become more active. fairly active admins would appear to be the best candidates for increase action rate.
On 4/15/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
No basic maths.
Chance of admin password being acquired for any given admin is X. Now we have no reason to think that low activity admins have more secure passwords than active admins. So we will assume that the mean value of X will remain constant regardless of the number of admins.
So the chance of an admin password being acquired = mean x*number of admins.
Mathematically speaking, this is flawed reasoning. A hacker, in order to obtain a password, has to hack the database to get it. This is obvious. All he would need to do is find a single admin account with a weak password, and obtain said password via his hacking. Seeing as there is no reason to assume that increasing the number of admin accounts would alter the ratio of accounts with strong passwords to accounts with weak passwords, increasing the number of accounts would not improve the chances of the hacker finding a weak account to hack. Simple math dictates that if the ratio of one thing to another in a given pile of things does not change, increasing the number of the things lying there will not improve your chances of picking the thing you want. If anything, the greater number of accounts would reduce the probability of finding one you want.
On 4/15/07, Dycedarg darthvader1219@gmail.com wrote:
Mathematically speaking, this is flawed reasoning. A hacker, in order to obtain a password, has to hack the database to get it. This is obvious.
And false. Other attack line would be key loggers, brute force dictionary attacks and since login is not encrypted it would be possible to intercept the password in transit.
All he would need to do is find a single admin account with a weak password, and obtain said password via his hacking. Seeing as there is no reason to assume that increasing the number of admin accounts would alter the ratio of accounts with strong passwords to accounts with weak passwords, increasing the number of accounts would not improve the chances of the hacker finding a weak account to hack. Simple math dictates that if the ratio of one thing to another in a given pile of things does not change, increasing the number of the things lying there will not improve your chances of picking the thing you want. If anything, the greater number of accounts would reduce the probability of finding one you want.
No. The problem is that you are assumeing the cost of mounting 2 attacks is twice as great as mounting one attack. This is not the case.
On 4/16/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/15/07, Dycedarg darthvader1219@gmail.com wrote:
Mathematically speaking, this is flawed reasoning. A hacker, in order to obtain a password, has to hack the database to get it. This is obvious.
And false. Other attack line would be key loggers, brute force dictionary attacks and since login is not encrypted it would be possible to intercept the password in transit.
Well... wouldn't that mean that it's the active admins who are the real risk, and not the inactive ones? Only active admins log in and type on their keyboards.
On 4/15/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/15/07, Earle Martin wikipedia@downlode.org wrote:
the effect of this is that when they do get involved they tend to cause trouble with the hyper-actives and thus reduce their work rate.
{{fact}} again.
See [[WP:AN]] and [[WP:AN/I]]'s archives.
I'd say this fails to be specific. Also, all you can prove here is that such issues have occurred - not that they are prevalent. Assessing something by only number of failures without taking into account total number of actions is an invalid metric. In other words - do less-active admins make more mistakes with the tools than more active ones, either per-admin or per-thousand-admin-actions or whatever?
I think you also fail to answer whether less active admins do sufficient good for the project by having the admin bit - I say that they do.
I'd also submit that the very active admins, in my opinion - they 'hyper-active' in your definition - are the ones headed for burnout, the ones likely to be giving insufficient time and consideration to each admin action, the ones most likely to be applying policy mechanistically rather than with judgment, and quite often the ones making a greater rate of errors.
The latter, I should qualify, not generally being 'misunderstanding the process' errors, but poor judgment, insufficient consideration, over-aggressive use of admin tools, biting the newbies, and basically acting like a killer adminbot on crack.
I think, Geni, that you over-consider the damaging effects of not understanding process, and under-consider the damaging effects of those other problems.
-Matt
On 4/16/07, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
In other words
- do less-active admins make more mistakes with the tools than more
active ones, either per-admin or per-thousand-admin-actions or whatever?
Define mistake.
I think you also fail to answer whether less active admins do sufficient good for the project by having the admin bit - I say that they do.
I'd also submit that the very active admins, in my opinion - they 'hyper-active' in your definition - are the ones headed for burnout,
Yup. But unless the paper admins become fairly active there isn't much to be done about that.
the ones likely to be giving insufficient time and consideration to each admin action, the ones most likely to be applying policy mechanistically rather than with judgment, and quite often the ones making a greater rate of errors.
Not really since the system is set up so that for the most part the relevant policy can be applied mechanistically.
The latter, I should qualify, not generally being 'misunderstanding the process' errors, but poor judgment,
Given the number of actions involved and the level of complaints that seems unlikely.
insufficient consideration,
I can tell if something has a source in about 2 seconds. I see no need for further consideration unless I notice something odd (past revisions or image content).
over-aggressive use of admin tools,
Strangely no. You don't rack up those kind of numbers in the areas where actions are likely to be viewed as aggressive.
biting the newbies,
Again no. Most of the work is away from newbies.
and basically acting like a killer adminbot on crack.
Acting? You think that there are not people running adminbots?
I think, Geni, that you over-consider the damaging effects of not understanding process, and under-consider the damaging effects of those other problems.
Damage/Risk vs gain. What do we gain from paper admins?
On 16/04/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
I think, Geni, that you over-consider the damaging effects of not understanding process, and under-consider the damaging effects of those other problems.
Damage/Risk vs gain. What do we gain from paper admins?
This is the core of your misunderstanding/misrepresentation of the issue. The question is, what damage do they do? If you are not able to provide a provable answer to this question, then the answer is none, and your objections are proved entirely groundless.
On 15/04/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
What has this to do with quiet admins being harmful to the project?
If you had a large body of fairly active admins such issues would be less likely to arise.
You have yet to convince me that these "issues" are in fact real issues. People learn. The project goes on.
Are you trying to imply that factions would develop in the admin community based on how much work people do? Sorry, but I think that's ridiculous.
So you are suggesting that there will be no split between those with actual practical experience and those who do not? That goes against almost the entire history of human activities.
You're answering a question with a question, and one that distorts what I actually asked you in the first place. I hate having to do this in discussions, but it seems to be time to drag out the dictionary:
faction, n.: 1. a group or clique within a larger group, party, government, organization, or the like: a faction in favor of big business. 2. party strife and intrigue; dissension: an era of faction and treason.
or
A group of persons forming a cohesive, usually contentious minority within a larger group.
(http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/faction)
My question to you was whether you are saying that factions will develop, not whether there will be "a split", which only implies a difference. It certainly appears that this is what you are saying. This suggestion, as I see it, is absolute hogwash.
5)security risk (admin accounts getting hacked) without the gain.
This is conjecture and scaremongering.
No basic maths.
[math nusked]
So the chance of an admin password being acquired = mean x*number of admins.
The chance of an admin password being acquired is the chance that of someone simply downloading the list of admins right /now/ and managing to crack one of those users' password. Even if no more admins were ever created, this chance increases over time as more and more crackers will try their hand at it. What you are doing is trying to recast an existing failure of our code's security model as somehow being the fault of admins for... being admins.
In fact, now I think of it, you are implying that we should have /less/ admins, because that reduces our chance of being violated. Well done for losing your adminship, then; you have increased the security of our project.
I also fail to see why you attach such significance to admin access being obtained; Wikipedia has a spectacular backup system at multiple levels of granularity, and the damage that one compromised admin account could do is insignificant compared to the methods available to fix it after the account is killed. (Don't bother telling us now that you know how you could bring the site to its knees; seriously, we've heard it before, and we know how much you love dropping hints about it.)
If an account is compromised, the techies will implement additional security to make it that much harder next time (https logins, anyone?) and life will go on.
In a reply to someone else, you wrote:
Fails to provide protection against key logging and in transit interception.
It also fails to provide protection against criminals who kidnap you and put a gun into your mouth to make you give them your password. So what? It doesn't matter, for the reason I outlined above.
We can't promote at a high enough rate to deal with bumps in need for admin actions. the only way to meet these is for admins to become more active. fairly active admins would appear to be the best candidates for increase action rate.
Or a big increase in the number of admins. As others have commented, you seem to be expecting that the current crop of keen admins become robots. This is not a sustainable concept, and you shouldn't expect it to happen.
What will happen is that RfA will change, and there will be more and more admins, of all levels of activity. If you don't believe me, wait and see.
On 4/16/07, gjzilla@gmail.com gjzilla@gmail.com wrote:
STEP 1: USE A PASSWORD WITH A COMBINATION OF LETTERS, NUMBERS, AND SYMBOLS.
Fails to provide protection against key logging and in transit interception.
STEP 2: CHANGE IT FREQUENTLY.
Um no really bad idea since people tend to respond by either following fairly simple formulas or writing the thing down.
There. Problem solved.
No. Although people's belief that it is under this conditions is another security flaw (I'm increasingly convinced that passwords as a whole are a security flaw but wikimedia is not really in a position to fix that).
geni wrote:
On 4/16/07, gjzilla@gmail.com gjzilla@gmail.com wrote:
STEP 1: USE A PASSWORD WITH A COMBINATION OF LETTERS, NUMBERS, AND SYMBOLS.
Fails to provide protection against key logging and in transit interception.
These are useless against an inactive account since by definition the user isn't logging in any more.
Really, if adminship is so valuable to vandals and Wikipedia's passwords so vulnerable to attack, why hasn't an admin account ever been hijacked before? This entire line of reasoning seems a bit paranoid to me.
The current RFA situation is such a hardcore gauntlet that I'm not surprised the number of candidates has not gone up with the increasing amount of users. Wikipedia will end up with a lot more problems once there aren't enough admins. To me, having too many admins would be a dream come true.
How much do we need admins? Let me count the backlogs....oh look, every admin page except for RFP and AIV appears to be backlogged!
In part, I blame myself. I don't participate in enough RFAs, and I've only nominated one editor for adminship in all of my time here. But still, this is a zeitgeist we're talking about. It's controlled by the community, and we're taking ourselves in the wrong direction.
On 16/04/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
No. Although people's belief that it is under this conditions is another security flaw (I'm increasingly convinced that passwords as a whole are a security flaw but wikimedia is not really in a position to fix that).
OK. So we need not to have any more admins until the problem with passwords is solved!
- d.
On 4/15/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/15/07, Earle Martin wikipedia@downlode.org wrote:
On 15/04/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 15/04/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Given the number of de-facto inactive admins we already have I don't see much benefit in that approach.
- It would reduce the harmfulness to the community of the present
RFA.
- "De-facto inactive admins" do not harm the project.
I have never understood why Geni considers "paper admins" (a phrase he has used a number of times since I've been reading this list) to be harmful. Geni, would you care to explain?
1)lowers the social pressure on admins to be active.
100 admin actions a month can be less than an hour a month depending on what you are doing. If we could get that our of people our backlogs would be shorter. At the moment we have maybe 300 admins who are active at that rate.
The upshot of this lack of expectations is that people can get the social benefits of adminship without doing the work. It would be nice to change that.
"Social benefits of adminship"? Wikipedia ain't a club.
On 4/16/07, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
"Social benefits of adminship"? Wikipedia ain't a club.
Maybe but people will generaly be nicer to admins than they might otherwise be.
On 4/15/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/16/07, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
"Social benefits of adminship"? Wikipedia ain't a club.
Maybe but people will generaly be nicer to admins than they might otherwise be.
Some will. Other people are quicker to assume bad faith from an admin.
Also, IMO, social 'big deal'-ness of adminship is simply created by stupid hoops one has to jump through to get adminship.
-Matt
On 16/04/07, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/15/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
The upshot of this lack of expectations is that people can get the social benefits of adminship without doing the work. It would be nice to change that.
"Social benefits of adminship"? Wikipedia ain't a club.
If Geni's theory that the "active admins" should /increase/ their work rate is correct, then the "social benefits" will actually be negative ones, because they will then no longer be able to have a social life at all.
On a more serious note, I must comment that I am disturbed at the notion of "social benefits of adminship" at all. People do not become admins for "social benefits". If they do, and succeed in their attempts, it shows that the RfA system as it exists has finally and irrevocably failed.
On 17/04/07, Earle Martin wikipedia@downlode.org wrote:
On a more serious note, I must comment that I am disturbed at the notion of "social benefits of adminship" at all. People do not become admins for "social benefits". If they do, and succeed in their attempts, it shows that the RfA system as it exists has finally and irrevocably failed.
There are serious opposes to current candidates for "sorry, you weren't very active in February." Could those who consider that admins might *benefit* from having, y'know, lives, care to go to WP:RFA and comment accordingly on said statements?
- d.
On 17/04/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
There are serious opposes to current candidates for "sorry, you weren't very active in February." Could those who consider that admins might *benefit* from having, y'know, lives, care to go to WP:RFA and comment accordingly on said statements?
Unfortunately, judging from responses you've had so far, this seems only to attract people accusing you of trying to tell the bureaucrats what to think. I will however try and comment on the most egregious examples of bad opposes.
On 4/18/07, Earle Martin wikipedia@downlode.org wrote:
On 17/04/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
There are serious opposes to current candidates for "sorry, you weren't very active in February." Could those who consider that admins might *benefit* from having, y'know, lives, care to go to WP:RFA and comment accordingly on said statements?
Unfortunately, judging from responses you've had so far, this seems only to attract people accusing you of trying to tell the bureaucrats what to think. I will however try and comment on the most egregious examples of bad opposes.
Yeah, this is why my proposal was to put up a statement in big red letters along the lines of "The only criterion for adminship is whether the candidate can be trusted to handle the tool well". RfA is not a referendum on how good or brilliant a user is. It's a referendum on whether he/she has the clue to handle the tools well. The onus is on opposers to show why "more involvement in the deletion process" or "more edits" will make a significant enough change for them to trust the candidate with the tools.
It's impossible to know everything about WP. There are a lot of areas of policy I'm not familiar with. Does this make me unqualified to handle my tools? Of course not - because I have enough clue to consult the relevant policy areas before doing something stupid. It's all about *trust* - not about experience. Experience is an indicator of whether the user can be trusted, but it is a means to the end of determining trustworthiness. Experience is not an end in itself.
Johnleemk
on 4/18/07 9:15 AM, John Lee at johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
The onus is on opposers to show why "more involvement in the deletion process" or "more edits" will make a significant enough change for them to trust the candidate with the tools.
Yes, the burden of proof needs to be on the opposition. A person is OK until proven otherwise.
Marc Riddell
On 18/04/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
Yeah, this is why my proposal was to put up a statement in big red letters along the lines of "The only criterion for adminship is whether the candidate can be trusted to handle the tool well". RfA is not a referendum on how good or brilliant a user is. It's a referendum on whether he/she has the clue to handle the tools well. The onus is on opposers to show why "more involvement in the deletion process" or "more edits" will make a significant enough change for them to trust the candidate with the tools.
Note that the querulous opposers are now trying to attack prospective bureaucrats in this way.
A collective statement from the bureaucrats may be appropriate at this point.
- d.
David Gerard wrote:
Note that the querulous opposers are now trying to attack prospective bureaucrats in this way.
Are the support voters being handled in the same way?
-Jeff
On 18/04/07, Jeff Raymond jeff.raymond@internationalhouseofbacon.com wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
Note that the querulous opposers are now trying to attack prospective bureaucrats in this way.
Are the support voters being handled in the same way?
As you would have noticed if you'd read above, oppose voters need a decent justification for opposing, as candidates are assumed not dangerous unless opposed with a decent reason. So the cases are not symmetrical.
If that wasn't the point of your question, please clarify at greater length.
- d.
On 18/04/07, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
D the G wrote:
Note that the querulous opposers are now trying to...
Idle curiosity question: Are these "querulous opposers" themselves admins? Or just random kibitzers, doing it because they can?
Wikipedia Review contributors and other such pillars of the community, undoubtedly contributing their opinions in the best of faith.
- d.
On 4/18/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
It's impossible to know everything about WP. There are a lot of areas of policy I'm not familiar with. Does this make me unqualified to handle my tools? Of course not - because I have enough clue to consult the relevant policy areas before doing something stupid. It's all about *trust* - not about experience. Experience is an indicator of whether the user can be trusted, but it is a means to the end of determining trustworthiness. Experience is not an end in itself.
Johnleemk
Well, is it about "community trust" or "general trustworthiness"? The first can be easily determined by voting (opinion poll with one question "do you trust XY with the admin tools?"). The second is much harder to prove or disprove, and might be impossible to determine objectively, as it is independent of many available objective criteria.
Kusma
Geni, it's surprising that none of the seven arguments register even a small amount of resonance with me. You seem to equate dormant users giving "rise" to passive problems, yet this does not make any sense in this volunteer, peer-production community.
The only one that had validity:
5)security risk (admin accounts getting hacked) without the gain.
This has been a strong argument for HTTPS login screen for Wikipedia, which should be a high priority.
-Andrew
On 4/16/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/15/07, Earle Martin wikipedia@downlode.org wrote:
On 15/04/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 15/04/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Given the number of de-facto inactive admins we already have I don't see much benefit in that approach.
- It would reduce the harmfulness to the community of the present RFA.
- "De-facto inactive admins" do not harm the project.
I have never understood why Geni considers "paper admins" (a phrase he has used a number of times since I've been reading this list) to be harmful. Geni, would you care to explain?
1)lowers the social pressure on admins to be active.
100 admin actions a month can be less than an hour a month depending on what you are doing. If we could get that our of people our backlogs would be shorter. At the moment we have maybe 300 admins who are active at that rate.
The upshot of this lack of expectations is that people can get the social benefits of adminship without doing the work. It would be nice to change that.
2)Results in a large group of admins who don't really know their way around policy/process. the effect of this is that when they do get involved they tend to cause trouble with the hyper-actives and thus reduce their work rate.
3)there is no benefit in designing processes to be comprehensible to those who don't use them regularly. If you have 20 people doing 90% of the work in one area (say a sub aspect of deletion) there is little point in worrying about the needs of that 10% when setting up the process. This is why process may appear incomprehensible to outsiders. No benefit in doing otherwise.
4)splits in the admin community between those who do large amounts of work and those who don't. Split would be lessened if the majority of admins were fairly active (~>100 admin actions a month) obviously there is always going to be something of a split between the hyper actives and other admins but that split would be smaller if most admins were fairly active
5)security risk (admin accounts getting hacked) without the gain.
6)reduces the practical size of our reserves. Fairly active admins have less problem stepping up their admin action rate than the in actives. They already know the ropes so it is simply a matter of doing more stuff.
7)gives a misleading picture of our admin resources. In theory we had 849 active admins as of March 3, 2007. The real figure is closer to 400.
-- geni
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David Gerard wrote:
On 15/04/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/15/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
While casually browsing through old RfAs recently, I found a comment I'd made about adminship being no big deal. I basically expressed my philosophy as that if you won't do harm (or, more precisely, the harm you do is so minuscule that it is vastly outweighed by your positive contributions) with the mop and bucket, you deserve it.
Given the number of de-facto inactive admins we already have I don't see much benefit in that approach.
- It would reduce the harmfulness to the community of the present RFA.
- "De-facto inactive admins" do not harm the project.
The inactive admin argument is a red herring. I would not object to de-sysopping long absent admins providing that if they come back the status could be reinstated on request without any fuss. If they behaved themselves while they were here before, why should they fe forced to run the RfA gauntlet again.
It would really be nice to see some real statistics about the damage caused by inactive admins. Does anyone have this information?
Ec
On 15/04/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
- "De-facto inactive admins" do not harm the project.
It would really be nice to see some real statistics about the damage caused by inactive admins. Does anyone have this information?
There isn't any so far. Just conjecture.
- d.
On 4/15/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/15/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
While casually browsing through old RfAs recently, I found a comment I'd made about adminship being no big deal. I basically expressed my
philosophy
as that if you won't do harm (or, more precisely, the harm you do is so minuscule that it is vastly outweighed by your positive contributions)
with
the mop and bucket, you deserve it.
Given the number of de-facto inactive admins we already have I don't see much benefit in that approach.
Increasing the number of admins -> increasing the numbers of both active and inactive admins. The latter might be bad, but I think it's really neutral; the costs associated with it are minimal. The former, however, would yield great benefits.
It is true, of course, that these issues have nothing to do with some other
problems with RfA and its culture. But this thing I'm raising seems very basic to me - adminship is no big deal in the sense that if you want it,
you
can have it, unless there is proof that significant harm will be done if
you
have the tools. Would it be worth noting this in big red <h1>-sized
letters
on RfA, so that at the very least, we won't reject people for silly
reasons.
Not silly reasons from their POV.
So basically if there's this guy who is competent and qualified to be an admin, but he hasn't written an FA/reverted 100 vandals/made 5000 edits, he should automatically be rejected? That's the reasoning I'm seeing on RfA at the moment. This relativism that all viewpoints are valid is simply wrong.
Just to pick one random example, many (half?) of the opposes at
[[Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Navou 2]] (still ongoing) are literally along the lines of this neutral vote: "I would love to support you, as you are an
established
and experienced editor. However, as Tellyaddict has pointed out. You do
not
have enough edits in the section "mainspace"."
You want admins who don't know the value of content?
A thousand article edits is substantial. Short sniping remarks don't contribute much to the discussion.
I don't know who Navou is - and there are valid concerns raised about
him/her. My comments here are not comments on him/her, but general
comments
about the sorry state of RfA. The whole point of RfA is this: TO WEED
OUT
PEOPLE WHO DO HARM WITH THE MOP AND BUCKET. If there is no evidence that
the
candidate will do harm (assuming, of course, that the user has made
enough
contributions for there to be enough data to evaluate him/her), the candidate should pass.
Non active admins siting around is a risk.
A minuscule one, outweighed by the benefits of active admins.
We could get the 'crats to disregard opinions that do not pay heed to this
basic principle of adminship being no big deal.
How? The crats don't answer to you.
They answer to the community, do they not?
I wouldn't rule that out.
But this seems to be symptomatic of a basic problem with the culture of
RfA,
and the culture of many people caught up in our processes.
Coercion is pointless if it only addresses the symptoms, and not the
cause.
We disbanded Esperanza because it was reforming out of coercion, rather
than
an actual change in the culture it represented. We need to address this fundamental problem with RfA's culture - or rethink our entire process
of
appointing admins.
People have been saying this for years now. So far they are yet to come up with a system that either:
a)can be made identical to the current one through the use of trivial legal fictions b)takes power away from the community. c)results in a significantly increased overhead d) some combination of the above. --
So we should just stop trying, eh?
geni
Johnleemk
On 4/16/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
Increasing the number of admins -> increasing the numbers of both active and inactive admins. The latter might be bad, but I think it's really neutral; the costs associated with it are minimal. The former, however, would yield great benefits.
If we could increase the percentage of fairly active admins many of our current problems would cease.
So basically if there's this guy who is competent and qualified to be an admin, but he hasn't written an FA/reverted 100 vandals/made 5000 edits, he should automatically be rejected? That's the reasoning I'm seeing on RfA at the moment.
Generally the reasons are a bit more sophisticated than that.
A thousand article edits is substantial. Short sniping remarks don't contribute much to the discussion.
1000 edits could be adding cats and interlang links. With the various semi-automated editing tools around 1000 doesn't appear to have the value it used to. Personally I would different on that point but then I accept I tend to be rather old fashioned on theses things.
They answer to the community, do they not?
Despite some proposals that currently appears to be the case.
So we should just stop trying, eh?
Well given several years by a large number of wikipedians has yielded sod all it would appear to be a fairly logical approach.
On 4/15/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/16/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
Increasing the number of admins -> increasing the numbers of both active and inactive admins. The latter might be bad, but I think it's really neutral; the costs associated with it are minimal. The former, however, would yield great benefits.
If we could increase the percentage of fairly active admins many of our current problems would cease.
True, but that actually argues for a very different solution than trying to death-march existing admins into higher levels of activity.
People in volunteer organizations give the time to a project that they want to and feel that they need to. A lot of people who are less-than-completely-focused on Wikipedia as a way of life will contribute less, but can do so in a completely helpful manner.
If what you want is to get more people whose driving ambition it is to make WP better as their primary life goal doing admin stuff, you need to recruit active users who aren't admins, convince them that they need to be admins, and then do whatever it takes to get them through the RFA process.
Others are giving the time and energy that they have. Their jobs, spouses/significant others/kids, social lives won't go away if they become admins. And they shouldn't; an organization that demands more from people on a continuous basis burns them out, and is a horrible place to work. That doesn't make them bad admins. It makes them good people.
Wikipedia being your life's focus doesn't make you bad people, but a lot of people living that life will burn out on it. We can't operate the organization by burning out the most prolific among us on a regular basis.
Everyone who can help should be allowed and encouraged to do so. The more it's shared the better everyone is. An admin who makes one block a day, carefully considered and with excellent comments and warnings, is helping the project. And in an emergency, they may well be able to step up and do much, much more for a few minutes, hours, or days. Having that reserve capacity may save us some day.
Suggesting that we need quotas is silly, IMHO.
On 16/04/07, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
Others are giving the time and energy that they have. Their jobs, spouses/significant others/kids, social lives won't go away if they become admins. ... That doesn't make them bad admins. It makes them good people.
Everyone who can help should be allowed and encouraged to do so. The more it's shared the better everyone is. An admin who makes one block a day, carefully considered and with excellent comments and warnings, is helping the project. And in an emergency, they may well be able to step up and do much, much more for a few minutes, hours, or days. Having that reserve capacity may save us some day.
Bravo, sir.
On 4/16/07, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
Others are giving the time and energy that they have. Their jobs, spouses/significant others/kids, social lives won't go away if they become admins. And they shouldn't; an organization that demands more from people on a continuous basis burns them out, and is a horrible place to work. That doesn't make them bad admins. It makes them good people.
100 actions can be done in less than an hour.
On 17/04/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/16/07, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
Others are giving the time and energy that they have. Their jobs, spouses/significant others/kids, social lives won't go away if they become admins. And they shouldn't; an organization that demands more from people on a continuous basis burns them out, and is a horrible place to work. That doesn't make them bad admins. It makes them good people.
100 actions can be done in less than an hour.
This ignores the question raised in the post you're responding to, which is whether they should be. These are people, not processed cheese slices.
- d.
geni wrote:
On 4/16/07, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
Others are giving the time and energy that they have. Their jobs, spouses/significant others/kids, social lives won't go away if they become admins. And they shouldn't; an organization that demands more from people on a continuous basis burns them out, and is a horrible place to work. That doesn't make them bad admins. It makes them good people.
100 actions can be done in less than an hour.
So what? If in that hour a person works on only a single problem, and does it well, why should that be any less valuable? Unless and until admins are paid it is completely inappropriate to impose work quotas on anybody. You seem to attach more value to quantity than quality.
Ec
On 4/17/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
So what? If in that hour a person works on only a single problem, and does it well, why should that be any less valuable? Unless and until admins are paid it is completely inappropriate to impose work quotas on anybody. You seem to attach more value to quantity than quality.
We were talking about the case of hurried admins. Generally there is going to be little crossover between that group and the group doing things taking an hour (confirming socks and the like).
Work quotas would of course be unmanageable however we ran the 3RR long enough by social pressure I see no reason why we could not get a higher percentage of fairly active admins the same way.
On 17/04/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Work quotas would of course be unmanageable however we ran the 3RR long enough by social pressure I see no reason why we could not get a higher percentage of fairly active admins the same way.
You mean, rather than just lower the now-ridiculous requirements at RFA?
- d.
On 4/17/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:>
You mean, rather than just lower the now-ridiculous requirements at RFA?
That approach has a record of at least 2 years of total failure.
On 17/04/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/17/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:>
You mean, rather than just lower the now-ridiculous requirements at RFA?
That approach has a record of at least 2 years of total failure.
Sorry, your pithy one-liners were coming across as you saying that (more admins) would be a bad idea. Please write more stuff for clarity.
- d.
On 4/17/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Sorry, your pithy one-liners were coming across as you saying that (more admins) would be a bad idea. Please write more stuff for clarity.
RFA will not increase it's promotion rate whatever you do unless we reach the point of very near fall over due to lack of admins. People have been trying for 2 years and it hasn't worked yet.
So we look at maximising our current admin resources. Most of our current processes are about efficient as they can be without introducing a large number of admin bots.
The hyper-actives are already likely doing all they can.
I would rather not be trying to push fairly active admins into being hyper-actives
Thus we are left with two options:
Bots Get more admin work out of the near inactive as admins admins.
The first has been historically rejected by the community whenever anyone has asked.
The second has not really been tried. Getting those who are not using their admin powers at this time to temporarily step down would have the added benefit of producing an identifiable group of respectable non admins hopefully lowing the significance of adminship in people's minds.
On 17/04/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
RFA will not increase it's promotion rate whatever you do unless we reach the point of very near fall over due to lack of admins. People have been trying for 2 years and it hasn't worked yet.
Danny's RFA gives precedent for bureaucrats to just ignore irrelevant oppose reasons. To that end, I've started noting when a given oppose is irrelevant to the question "is this person likely to cause damage with the admin tools?" and suggest it be ignored.
Others, e.g. you, are welcome to do so as well. This alone should help reduce stupid overrequirements.
- d.
geni wrote:
On 4/17/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
So what? If in that hour a person works on only a single problem, and does it well, why should that be any less valuable? Unless and until admins are paid it is completely inappropriate to impose work quotas on anybody. You seem to attach more value to quantity than quality.
We were talking about the case of hurried admins. Generally there is going to be little crossover between that group and the group doing things taking an hour (confirming socks and the like).
Work quotas would of course be unmanageable however we ran the 3RR long enough by social pressure I see no reason why we could not get a higher percentage of fairly active admins the same way.
How's it working for you so far?
-Rich
John Lee wrote:
I also realised, from looking at other comments made on that RfA, and from reading the opinions of people in present-day RfAs, that this philosophy isn't one adopted by many. People look for reasons to oppose, even if they don't have much to do with harm. For example, why should writing an FA or not doing enough vandalfighting be impediments to adminship? This is not evidence that the candidate will do harm with the tools, or that by approving the candidate, we will be harming Wikipedia.
I'm not sure that this is actually a philosophy that's good for the project anymore. We have a number of them that are probably antiquated and should be tossed by the wayside, but won't be.
-Jeff
On 4/15/07, Jeff Raymond jeff.raymond@internationalhouseofbacon.com wrote:
John Lee wrote:
I also realised, from looking at other comments made on that RfA, and
from
reading the opinions of people in present-day RfAs, that this philosophy isn't one adopted by many. People look for reasons to oppose, even if
they
don't have much to do with harm. For example, why should writing an FA
or
not doing enough vandalfighting be impediments to adminship? This is not evidence that the candidate will do harm with the tools, or that by approving the candidate, we will be harming Wikipedia.
I'm not sure that this is actually a philosophy that's good for the project anymore. We have a number of them that are probably antiquated and should be tossed by the wayside, but won't be.
I don't see how this philosophy is bad. People shouldn't be forced to run a Kafkaesque gauntlet to be able to help out with the occasional problem. I have not seen any problems caused by inactive or relatively quiet admins ( e.g. myself) to justify the claim that the risks of appointing more admins outweighs the costs. Adminship is a big deal in the sense that we must be able to trust the person with the tools - but in that case, it's always been a big deal. And adminship is no big deal in the sense that if you're qualified and trusted to hold the tools, you shouldn't need to meet some silly requirements like an arbitrary number of edits to get the mop and bucket.
Johnleemk
My whole take on the current crop of RFA voters is that they don't buy the "no big deal" myth and I think on that point they are right. Adminship is a big deal despite all the effort to claim it isn't. Ironically, the RFA gang themselves make it even more of a big deal with with their strict requirements. Anybody who successfully runs the RFA gauntlet must really be "shot hit".
On 4/15/07, Ron Ritzman ritzman@gmail.com wrote:
My whole take on the current crop of RFA voters is that they don't buy the "no big deal" myth and I think on that point they are right. Adminship is a big deal despite all the effort to claim it isn't. Ironically, the RFA gang themselves make it even more of a big deal with with their strict requirements. Anybody who successfully runs the RFA gauntlet must really be "shot hit".
Let's define what a "big deal" is. Is it sufficiently a big deal that if we agree this fellow is competent to hold the tools, and his past behaviour has shown him to be trustworthy, we should reject him anyway because he fails some requirement like insufficient vandal reverts or not writing enough FAs? Learning on the job is not harmful in the long run, because we can infer from a user's past behaviour as to how long it takes them to learn something, and how much trouble they cause through this learning process. If someone's taken months to adapt to NPOV and basic editing policies/guidelines, obviously he's not suited for adminship. But if he's picked them up quickly and with little fuss, it's safe to presume he can pick up new skills like vandal reversion easily.
We have to stop this idea that learning on the job is impossible or that admins need to be well-versed in a multitude of areas. The most important thing about an admin is that an admin can be trusted - trusted to handle the tools well, and trusted to learn how to use them properly. If we can trust someone, why make him jump through hoops?
Johnleemk