At 09:07 AM 6/1/2010, David Gerard wrote:

On 1 June 2010 05:56, Durova nadezhda.durova@gmail.com wrote:

...

[...] It is hardly surprising that, in this weak economy, wise editors have been > declining offers of nomination.

This is IMO asymptom of there being insufficient admins.

Yes.

And again, this is because of ridiculously ratcheted-up requirements by serial objectors at RFA that have no reasonable threat model attached.

I just opposed a call for adminship that I would not have opposed if it were easier to modify the behavior of abusive administrators. The editor might make a fine administrator and was merely naive about blocking policy and how free of abuse it is.

The way it's done at RationalWiki is that sysophood is inflicted on almost all regular editors without their asking. The criterion is "mostly harmless." That way, it really is "no big deal."

Yes. The power gap between editors and administrators on Wikipedia is too great. It was, perhaps, a decent first attempt at addressing the problem of how to manage the project, but it became frozen.

Of course, that's a wiki with 1/1000 of the activity of en:wp. (Some powers that sysops have on en:wp, such as editing interface text, are reserved to bureaucrats. I realise this just puts the problem off another level.

Levels are good.

But then again, the cycle of heavily active participation is 18 months anyway, so changing everything every couple of years keeps the system fresh.)

In my view, that cycle should be building a large body of editors-in-reserve, people who may only occasionally edit but who will contribute great value when they do. That would require some kind of superstructure that connects inactive editors and brings them in when they are needed. Part of the proxy concept is that proxies would serve as links to those they represent, would understand and know their special interests and expertise, and would, say, email them when it was needed. "Proxy" is a bit misleading. There has been no proposal that proxies would exercise actual voting power, for example, but only that it might be possible to estimate consensus more efficiently if we have some designations of personal trust.

The proxy is really a node in a communications network, in delegable proxy systems. It works, I've seen that. Value is gained from even a single proxy designation, for the proxy and client.