On 8/22/07, Steven Walling <steven.walling(a)gmail.com> wrote: What people say in their vote and why they actually voted are 2 different things. If you're new to the process you wouldnt notice it. I can call my golden retriever a tabby cat all I want, wont make her a feline. That said, RfA itself isnt broken, but its implementation doesnt scale. Take the same concept behind adminship, work out a better system for granting bits from that concept.. -- -Brock

On 23/08/07, John Lee <johnleemk(a)gmail.com> wrote: Actually, the problem is Wikipedia's decision-making apparatus in general. It's allegedly "by consensus" - but if it really were, there would be paralysis (as most of the time, there are dissenters who don't back down - or even quite simply a clear lack of consensus - contributors to the particular decision-making discussion split pretty evenly two or more ways). It's allegedly not by voting (although that begs the question, why there are frequent votes), by majority or supermajority (although realistically, often decisions are taken on the basis of "most contributors to the discussion support it"). Despite idealists chosing to believe it doesn't happen, frequently the status quo is just determined by a small but persistent group, or even an individual. Considering people on the project are volunteers, no-one should have their impact on decisions decided solely by how much time they can afford, and so frequently contributors choose not to participate in decision-making (plenty of people like myself have stepped back from regular contribution due to the hassle it entails). Zoney -- ~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...

Admin powers should be granted automatically to users who have been around a while, basically. On 8/23/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Any reasonably designed mechanism would properly ensure that the number of good actors vastly outnumbers the number of bad actors. On 8/23/07, Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote:

On 8/23/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: No, you just remove the admin powers. I really don't know what you mean by that. Rich Holton proposed this back in February: Select at random 100 editors who meet some minimal criteria* and make them admins. Make it clear to them that they may turn down adminship without prejudice. Then, we watch these 100 "probationary" admins for 3 months. If they abuse their admin powers in that time, their admin status is removed. Otherwise, we treat them as regular admins. The only difference with a "probationary" admin is the level of scrutiny they receive. If this works, then after 3 months we do it again. And again every three months. Soon, adminship loses almost all of its "status" appeal. It's just something you'll get if you hang around and keep your nose clean. Of course, you can still apply through RfA. But I predict that RfA will quickly become much less political and controversial. *My suggestion for "minimal criteria": At least 50 edits to at least 10 different non-own-user pages for each of the past three months, and No blocks in the past three months Essentially, just enough to give a good indication that the user is involved and isn't a trouble-maker. Nothing more.

On 23/08/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: When on the three months' probation. Though unblocking is at other admins' discretion, and there's lots of back-and-forth on WP:ANI if an admin doesn't seem to have a feel for the spirit of the blocking policy. (Not to mention here.) - d.

On 23/08/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: I'm not sure the 'crats want the headache ;-) - d.

On 8/23/07, The Cunctator <cunctator(a)gmail.com> wrote: I support this strongly. If our goal is actually to have good admins then we must be willing to remove the powers from people who misuse them. If we are already doing that, then we have no reason to worry about giving adminship to someone who will misuse it, since we could just reverse their actions and remove the adminship. So long as we make the minimal criteria high enough to require a substantial investment of productive time. We don't want people minting tons of admin accounts for the purpose of defacing the main page. We can avoid this if we make the time investment long enough that the 20 second long main page defacement won't justify the many hours of work required to get adminship. [snip] Too easy to just mint accounts. If we are going to take a fixed number of probationary users, we should use criteria like: *Account is not an admin, and has no arbcom ruling preventing them from being an admin. *Account is at least 6 months old. *Account has had no blocks in the last three months *Account has at least 50 edits to non-userspace in each of the last three months. *Account has edits to at least 10 distinct non-userspace pages in each of the last three months. Then we make a list of accounts meeting that criteria, order them by number of non-userspace edits, and pick 100 people at random from the top 50%. This final step means that the criteria to get accepted depends on the activity level of all the other non-admins. I'd gladly produce a list of users if we have a 'crat that wants to try this.

On 8/23/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: ... They should also recognize that the best way to make deadminship less of a big deal is to allow it to become necessary a little more often.

What about "semi-adminship"? The power to block, delete, and view deleted articles, but not to unblock, undelete, edit while blocked, or edit while protected? Maybe the block power could even be time limited. Where are the biggest backlogs that make more admins necessary in the first place?

On 8/23/07, Eugene van der Pijll <eugene(a)vanderpijll.nl> wrote: I strongly disagree with your characterization of those powers as "destructive" and "constructive". All admin powers are capable of being both "destructive" and "constructive". I don't know, I think it really comes down to a question of where the backlog is. The backlog is probably in the area of making sound judgements (especially in deciding whether or not to delete). This can be done without adminship at all, though.

On 23/08/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: That should be "aren't", of course.

On 8/23/07, Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote: And here it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_process "Non-administrators closing discussions" According to this, non-admins can close keep results, but shouldn't close delete results. They can even close high disputed keep results, but they are discouraged from doing so if they "are not familiar with deletion policy or the workings of deletion discussions". The rationale for saying that non-admins shouldn't close delete results is that "they lack the technical ability to delete pages". But that ignores the fact that the vast majority of the work of deletion is deciding what to do, not in hitting the delete button.

On 8/23/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: Perhaps, but policy which contradicts things that are written down is much easier to change :)

Well yes, uncontroversial keeps can be closed by anyone. My point still stands, though.

Thomas Dalton schreef: No, it makes more sense for semi-admins to be able to act against admins. Admins are better equiped to handle "hostile" acts, and should have enough experience to handle semi-admins who do something wrong.[0] We cannot expect that from new users, and it is they who must be protected against less well thought out actions of inexperienced admins. Eugene [0] In theory.

On 23/08/07, Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote: Suggested hundreds of times in hundreds of different forms, and rejected every time. Also, admins can't edit while blocked, they can, however, unblock themselves, so it's generally a moot point. While there are certainly reasons for introducing such a system, and I may even support if done right, I don't think we would get a consensus to do so. To be honest, I don't think there are any excessive backlogs. I think we have enough admins as it is. I think admin numbers are increasing roughly linearly, while everything else is increasing roughly exponentially, so we may run into problems eventually, but at the moment, things are working. That's the major point people complaining about RfA seem to miss (and a point I made earlier in this thread).

On 8/23/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: Actually things are no longer increasing exponentially. At least, number of articles isn't, and hasn't been since about September 2006. New articles per day has been holding steady in the 1750 range for months now (down from a peak of around 2400/day in August 2006). We'll probably end up with fewer new articles in 2007 than there were in 2006. Anecdotal evidence suggests that a similar leveling off has happened in terms active users; the active user pool may (or may not) still be growing, but I don't think it's growing exponentially anymore, either. (I don't know if we keep good data on edit rates, but I think it's the same story there as well.) -Sage (User:Ragesoss)

On 8/23/07, Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote: None. Current requirement for admin actions could be trivialy met by existing admins. In practice it is met by a group of less than 100. 11K actions would get you into the top 50 most active admins of all time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Misza13/admin_actions Snapshots over a shorter time period show an even more extream patturn of a small number of admins carrying out most of the admin actions. We don't /need/ the majority of existing admins as admins. -- geni

On 8/23/07, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: The vast majority of the admin actions of which you speak are anti-vandalism ones. We need the majority of existing admins as admins not because we need that many to do the load, but because better decisions get made the more admins there are and the more time an admin has to fix a problem. Looking purely at numbers ignores the fact that some admin actions are made with little thought, while some require complex decision-making. IMO, a good number of of the '100 most active admins' are those most likely to burn out. In fact, in some respects, the concentration of admin actions is a PROBLEM; IMO, it shows that too many admin actions are being done too quickly. -Matt

On 8/23/07, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: [snip] The actions which get done are the mindless ones.. We don't need more admins doing those. (we need some admined bots, but thats another matter). Actions which are more complicated and require more thought are the ones don't do quite so well. It's hard to tell what the real need is since our need seems to scale to match our resources.

Sorry, I should clarify that. It's rarely necessary, so most requests should be ignored, so we make it hard to weed out those ignorable requests.

The same at the criteria for a block. Violating policy. When such a violation requires action and what action is required should be at the discretion of the crat, just as it's at the discretion of the admin for blocks.

I agree, the main thing stopping relaxing adminship requirements is the lack of an easy way to desysop people when we make mistakes. However, even with an easy way to desysop, I don't think there would be net gain from relaxing requirements as much as you are suggesting. We could go with something inbetween. How about: 1) User requests adminship 2) Other users have a week to give reasons why they shouldn't be promoted, and respond to other people's reasons. No '''Support''' votes, support is the default. 3) After the week, a crat comes along, reads the reasons, and if, based on their personal judgement, there is not a good reason to withhold the mop, they promote the user. The main thing is getting rid of support votes. You do away with them, and you remove any semblance of a vote. I've been trying to come up with a slightly stricter suggestion along these lines which involved coming to a consensus (or possibly just voting) on each reason not to promote, but I couldn't think of any way that would actually work. Just leaving it up to the crat makes it much easier (informal guidelines would probably arise naturally, and be ignored where appropriate). It requires trusting crats a little more than we do now, but I think RfB works reasonably well (and shouldn't change much, if at all), so that shouldn't be a problem.

On 23/08/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: That's what I meant by "respond to other people's reasons". Just saying an objection is specious would be rather unhelpful, of course, reasons should always be given. "You are talking complete nonsense" may be an acceptable reason in some cases, of course.

This has been addressed before; The standard perhaps should be relaxed, a little. Navou -----Original Message----- From: wikien-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Skyring Sent: Sunday, August 26, 2007 8:15 PM To: English Wikipedia Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] No RFAs in progress... On 8/24/07, The Cunctator <cunctator(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yikes, I can think of any number of long term editors who shouldn't be admins. Hang on. Most of them are... -- Peter in Canberra _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l