On 6/14/06, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: This shows an extremely short-range view of 'always' I was hitherto unaware of. -Matt

On 6/14/06, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote: Quod erat demonstrandum :-) -- Sam

On Thu, 15 Jun 2006 09:10:05 +1000, "Stephen Bain" <stephen.bain(a)gmail.com> wrote: Superb! Worthy of the mop all by itself :-) Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

On Thu, Jun 15, 2006 at 12:56:46PM +1000, Mark Gallagher wrote: Entirely agree. I took a look at that RfA and thought "Why the hell do people apply to be admins. Nobody needs to put up with that much crap". i The process needs improving. -- Brian Salter-Duke (Brian Duke) b_duke(a)octa4.net.au Post: 626 Melbourne Rd, Spotswood, VIC, 3015, Australia Phone 03-93992847. http://members.iinet.net.au/~linden1/brian/ Honorary Researcher Fellow, Dept. of Medicinal Chemistry, Monash Univ.

On 6/15/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote: No but it is generaly considered polite to do so. That would generaly be considered to be one of those things you should just know. After Cyde it is understandable that people are going to be a little twitchy about that one. Pretty good reason in fact. Admin powers should go to as many users as we can trust with them. The ability to avoid doing stupid things is something I like to se in admins. Or you could encourage people to use my system of only voteing for people they already know about. -- geni

On 6/15/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote: And what good would that do? No but not useing us to produce several thousand links to whatever would be nice. Have you ever tried to get someone desysopped? In any case it doesn't matter. In past conflicts it didn't really matter how many admins you had on your side other than as part of the more generaly numbers you had. In the case of userboxes the number of admins you had on your side and who were ready to throw around their admin powers and wheel war was absolutely critical. Assuming they have been around long enough to establish a pattern of not doing stupid things sure. Go to RFA once or twice a week. Scan list. Vote on anyone you already know. Go back to dealing with other stuff onwiki. -- geni

On 6/15/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote: No I just accept that admins pretty much have teniture. You can remove them but it isn't easy I would be unlikly to vote over a single issue like that but I would view it as evidence they they had not read the admins reading list prior to either nominating or accepting the nomination. Strong opinions per say have not historicaly been a problem. Strong opinions on the way wikipedia should be run tend to be more of a problem Yup. Probably able to work with other people (getting things to FA without working with other people is posible but not in a subject area as popular with pokemon) and the person will understand at least part of our fair use rules. Not really. Adminship should be as widely held as posible. Not a massive fan of guidlines (no one seems to read them unless they are hopeing to use them against someone) so probably not but I would support the general idea. -- geni

On 6/15/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote: Except the shear number of guidelines means that there is normaly something with says that technicaly you should not be doing whatever you are doing. Fortunetly there is such a high level of internal contradiction that it is normaly posible to get around any such suggestions. -- geni

On 6/15/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote: Policies tend to be somewhat better. There are fewer of them, they have to reach a higher standard to be aproved and generaly somewhere along the line they have had someone go through and word them to limit the damage rule lawyers can do. -- geni

On 6/15/06, Brian Salter-Duke <b_duke(a)octa4.net.au> wrote: There are a number of "RfA regulars". They, IMHO, tend to be the most demanding, tend to throw their weight around the most, and are the most resistant to any idea of reducing the discretion given to voters in RfA. With apologies to an RfA regularl here - there are also at least one or two who do a very good job. Steve

I have 2x-4x as many edits as everyone currently on the RFA, and I've been here a year longer. How am I not an admin? =( mboverload On 6/15/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net> wrote:

Heh, I was mostly joking, but no, no one has ever nominated me, I just came up with those figures while I was discussing RFA requirements with some friends on IRC. I was looking through them and I'm like "Wow, I could totally run for admin!" =D Eh, I'm not going to brag about being a great candidate for admin on the mailing list, seems a bit tacky. On 6/28/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Hehe =D I'm considering it. mboverload On 6/28/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On 6/15/06, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain(a)gmail.com> wrote: I actually dislike the questions, as it reduces RfA to a beauty pageant. Most of the questions are pretty retarded anyway, like "a vandal shows up, but claims to be Jimbo, and starts heavily editing FAs. Three hippos in pink tutus come past and tell you that he's ok, but then a purple geranium points out that this user has been blocked in the past. What do you do?" In most cases, RfA candidates aren't equipped to deal with such questions, and they shouldn't have to: the mechanics of being an admin are learnt on the job, by asking other admins. In other cases, the candidate is probably going to end up giving a "safe" answer, which sounds good, but which no one is ever going to hold them accountable to. In other words, the questions only test whether the candidate knows what RfA voters want to hear. Unfortunately, that's not a particularly useful quality. Steve

On Thu, 15 Jun 2006 13:27:33 +0200, "Steve Bennett" <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote: Best one I've seen: do you see the role of administrator as that of policeman or janitor. Made me think, anyway. Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

On 6/15/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net> wrote: Before I got adminship? Policeman. Now? Holy crap, I smell like turpentine. -Ras -- John Lyden - rasputinaxp(a)gmail.com "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time..." -Kerouac

G'day Guy, Too vulnerable to the "faking through a job interview" style of answering. Anyone who does a modicum of research before accepting their RfA (that is to say, looking at other RfAs) will know how strong the "janitor" metaphor is. Unless the "policeman" metaphor becomes more acceptable to the community --- and I hope it won't --- then, knowing the mindset of many who hang out at RfA, this is a very simple pass/fail question. Admittedly, the "oh, policeman, obviously" is something that might trap a clueless CVU newbie or two, so we can weed them out before they do any damage after passing on their vandal-biting contribution alone. I'd like to see more creative answers. Like: "admins are neither policemen nor janitors; we're volunteer firemen from the SES. We clean up messes, protect fellow community members from fires, and if necessary have the power to confiscate matches from particularly nasty firebugs." -- Mark Gallagher "What? I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!" - Danger Mouse

On Thu, 15 Jun 2006 11:17:32 +0200, "Steve Bennett" <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote: This has definite merit. More like a RFAr - initial fact finding, then voting. I'd vote for that if polls weren't evil ;-) Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

On 6/15/06, Theresa Knott <theresaknott(a)gmail.com> wrote: The side effect of a large number of very high qualitiy candidates. they can get away with setting very high standards because there will be a lot of people who meet them. -- geni

As someone who has just recently gone through the RfA process successfully, I thought I would pipe in with a few thoughts. First, I tend to be a lot like Geni when participating in an RfA - if I know the user, I might vote. There's only been a couple of times I've voted for a user that I didn't know, and at least once I regretted the decision. I was really surprised that my RfA passed, and fairly convincingly. But, I think I approached the RfA knowing what my limitations were and knowing what my strengths are going to be as an admin. I'm not a vandal fighter. If I see vandalism on my watchlist, I'll go after it. But, I'm not out there monitoring recent changes or anything like that looking for vandalism. I wanted the RfA tool mostly to deal with image related issues, and I think all of my admin functions to date have related to images. The biggest problem that I see with the RfA process is that you have a group of folks (and it's a fairly large group) who vote on nearly every RfA. Unless they are spending all of their wiki time researching admins, which I think is silly, they have to come up with some fairly objective standards to measure folks against. It could be that they don't have an email enabled, they haven't contributed substansially to an FA, they have too few counts, or that they don't have the right blend of counts (too few main talk or user talk, etc). While many would view some of these as being really silly, they do allow a line in the sand to be drawn to give a yes or no vote. On RfA questions, I think many are really silly. Most of mine were very appropriate and geared towards how I would handle certain image-related questions. It's one of the reasons I was supportive, although I didn't express that view yet, of the person going around and "advertising" an RfA of someone that they had worked with. I'm one that doesn't necessarily check RfA on a regular basis, but if one of the editors that I work with on Olympic pages or something else was up for RfA, I would go vote. Sue Annesreed1234(a)yahoo.com

On Thu, 15 Jun 2006 17:50:36 +0200, "Steve Bennett" <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote: Seems set to become a rouge admin even before he's started! Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

On 6/15/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net> wrote: We need to enforce sane rationales for votes on RfA ... somehow. Particularly for oppose votes, since they carry much more weight. Failing that, perhaps we should start a Wiki society that, for every oppose vote judged to be idiotic, automatically mass votes in favour of the candidate. And I'm only half-joking ;-) -- Matt [[User:Matt Crypto]]

Theresa Knott wrote: Bureaucrat candidates who have ever indicated that they would act as something other than votecounters have been strongly opposed; some barely scraped through (e.g. Essjay) and even this was after they gave in and agreed to avoid exercising discretion unless the percentage of support votes was between 75% and 80% (>80% is automatic support; <75% is automatic fail, or a relist at best). In short, "RfA regulars" or the "community" are uncomfortable with such discretionary powers; to them, bureaucrats are just for deciding the sticky 75% to 80% decisions, and discounting socks. Then again, this does seem to work for the most part. Barring a major controversy, I think Herostratus will pass comfortably. John

On 6/15/06, Steve Bennett &lt;stevagewp(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Or better yet, RfA is a !vote. If vote-counting is illegal, let us !vote-count. Each comment in AfDs and RfAs shall henceforth be known as !votes, and we shall !vote count to our heart's content. !voting is !evil.

G'day Matt, RfA is like AfD: its major problems are social --- that is to say, a culture that "oppose, too few portal edits" is acceptable has appeared. The solution isn't to hang around on the list complaining that "oppose, bites newbies left right and centre" is an inappropriate view, but to get onto RfA and: a) Set a good example! b) Point out stupid comments. If every time someone said "oppose, has only been here three years with 20 000 edits and beloved by nearly everyone, rather than four years, 30 000 edits and everyone", someone *else* posted a reply pointing out just how silly such a view is, it might die out. And the good thing about it is it's self-correcting: if you say "$x is silly", and $x is in fact a Very Good Point, then you will look silly and the practice of $x will continue. Either way, getting involved as a general rule is a Good Thing. -- Mark Gallagher "What? I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!" - Danger Mouse

Steve Bennett wrote: I'd prefer something more like ~200-300 edits, been there a month or two, and seems to be a sane and reasonable person. Adminship isn't a big deal, really. It gives you a rollback button, the ability to delete pages, and the ability to block users, all of which can be undone if you misuse them. Now even image deletions can be undone, so there really is minimal danger in just giving every reasonable comer admin privileges. -Mark