2009/2/11 Charlotte Webb <charlottethewebb(a)gmail.com>om>: That doesn't work for admins that have been around a while - most of the people that contributed to their RFA will have left the project.

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 6:46 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: And that tells us what? That they were trusted at one stage and might or might not be now. Someone should bring up a list of the really old admins (in terms of RfA) and how many people commented at their RFA and how many of those people are still around. Are there any "mailing list" admins still around (in the very old days, admins were given the bit based on a mailing list discussion)? Of course, many of these old admins are themselves inactive now. Carcharoth

2009/2/11 David Goodman <dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com>om>: You mean RfA, yes? I think it's perfectly reasonable to invoke the principle of "time immemorial" and not worry about it.

2009/2/11 David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>om>: Am I the only one that got a vision of Cybermen attacking admins from reading that?

2009/2/11 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>om>: I have occasionally referred to some of our more common-sense disabled editors as "Turing Test failures" ... - d.

2009/2/11 geni <geniice(a)gmail.com>om>: Well, I don't say it about specific ones. I also admit my own failings. - d.

2009/2/11 David Goodman <dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com>om>: [RFA, yeah :-)] I think the problem here is mission creep. RFA is just the most recent iteration of how we picked admins, after all, and it itself has evolved. If we say now that we want to reconfirm all pre-RFA admins, then I can easily see (in a year's time) someone saying, well, RFA used to be a lot laxer, we should in principle reconfirm all those early ones because they might not pass now, etc etc etc. I believe this is what happened with the various content-grading review processes. If you want to do this sort of thing, it might be simpler to say "reconfirm after X years" and apply it on a rolling basis to everyone still active. (This then turns into a proposal that we've had before, which is infrequent but periodic reconfirmation) Would it be useful at this point to have some idea of how other projects do it? I know some have a "normal" deadminning process, but I'm not sure how this works - do some have a request-based system, some have regular reconfirmation, what? -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

2009/2/12 Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com>om>: Is less than that, surely? 1% of the *active* admin body, maybe. Ok, I've done the sums: Special:Statistics says we have 1623 admins, 1% of that is 16. Wikipedia:Former_administrators shows 10 admins desysopped (involuntarily) total in the last year (to end of January), 7 by ArbCom, 2 of which were only for 6 months. I don't know what the average number of admins during that year was, but it looks like ArbCom permanently desysop less than 0.5% of the admin body annually.

2009/2/12 Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com>om>: Sure, there's no problem with just considering active admins, but you need to be clear about what you're discussing. Of course, but things change so rapidly that I'm not sure data from 2 years ago is relevant. For information only, there were 11 desysoppings in the year to the end of January 2008, 9 by Arbcom. I don't know how many admins there were at that time, but I'm pretty sure there were more than 900, so 1% is still an overestimate. If you do restrict it to just active admins, it's probably a decent estimate.

2009/2/12 Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com>om>: Indeed. As I suggested, a small amount of enforcement of good behaviour amongst the admins by the ArbCom will go a long way to getting all admins to behave in a more fitting manner. As Lar pointed out, the admin bit is so much of "no big deal" that people will do anything not to lose it. - d.

geni wrote: People have thought that in the past - that the ArbCom won't act against admins doing certain things - and they have been wrong. Your theory is more like wishful thinking from the admin side: there is a tariff, there are procedural things that are constants. In other words the old business of a system that can be gamed in some ways, because it is too rigid. David is essentially correct, and it is faitly obvious that sanctions have a deterrent effect on most people (though not all). Charles

On 14/02/2009, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote: Another issue that admins are quite prone to (along with many seasoned editors) is that they tend to get *really* overprotective of articles. They tend to get this, 'we have written this *wonderful* article, and we have established that nobody can edit it without persuading the Committee Who Likes To Say No to say yes at talk pages X and then we'll consult different committees at Y, Z and maybe A, B as well if you get that far, otherwise we'll revert everything you do because it isn't Our Consensus And You Haven't Discussed It(tm)* and then report you on ANI for being Disruptive (tm)'. I mean We Really Like This Article (tm), why are you editing it, don't you like this article? n.b. *Consensus (tm) means we simpy vote and you simply lose; what's that you say? There's a policy about consensus? What's a policy? We outnumber you. ;-) -- -Ian Woollard We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly imperfect world would be much better.

Matthew Brown wrote: My take is that we have two types of well-meaning editor- those who understand our policies and guidelines (including MOS), and those who don't. The former are adept at creating good content through practice, the latter may need educating, and this is normally done through templated messages, the first level of which assumes good faith; however, it is often easier when time is short to revert with an edit summary of "unsourced", "irrelevant" or something equally blunt. Again, in my experience, very few "unsophisticated" (and this is not meant to be an insult) editors complain, because they edit and move on. Those who do should be directed to guidelines, but it becomes tiresome when they just don't (or won't) "get it". The overhead of this detracts from creation of good content; not helpful to newbies, perhaps, but I think this is how it is seen.

Agree 100% with David (DGG) here. On the other hand, a careful combination of templates with personalised messages can also work. See this essay here for more on this type of approach: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ArielGold/Etiquette2 Carcharoth On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 7:47 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Matthew Brown wrote: Yeah, it's sort of tricky, because both are clearly problems, but I think these are somewhat different problems from uncivil admins or senior/seasoned/whatever-you-call-it Wikipedians. I see more of the "cabal of very active editors owning an article" problem in controversial areas. I know I don't bother editing in Israel/Palestine space most of the time because I figure every article is probably owned by some group of people from one side or the other, and I don't want to expend the time to deal with figuring out how I'm "allowed" to contribute through that screen. There are a few other nationalism-related areas I stay out of for similar reasons (Poland-related articles seem to be tricky more often than you'd think, for example). But the problematic editors aren't always senior, but sometimes are just people who've managed to set up shop for long enough to be a problem, especially in a niche. One of the earliest ArbCom cases involved Mr Natural Health, someone who had been "owning" a bunch of health-related articles, and was a problematically active but not particularly senior or process-aware Wikipedian. And actually seasoned Wikipedians are often useful in fixing these situations if they crop up in isolated niches--- one of the most effective ways to break a cabal's hold over a particular group of articles is to bring them to the attention of a wider community of editors that can swoop in and impose the usual NPOV and WP:V and whatnot in place of that cabal's idiosyncratic take on the matter. But I'm not sure a general attempt to keep people from owning articles is a good solution, either. In many cases, probably a greater number numerically, there's the opposite problem. As has been widely noted even off-wiki, our very good articles have a tendency to revert towards the mean, and there's no particularly good mechanism to keep that from being the default without a lot of constant maintenance effort. That's not really a Wikipedia-insiders vs. outsiders issue, either, as many of the articles that started out good and later degenerated were written by newbies (often academics in a particular area). In fact, those are the ones that tend to degenerate the most, as occasional contributors write a great article but then don't stay around to protect it from junk being added. From that perspective, I'd say most good articles don't have *enough* protectors. As per Murphy's law, the protectors are all off protecting bad articles instead. ;-) But I might have a biased sample, since the areas I edit in seem to accumulate cruft. Good computer-science articles on general subjects invariably degrade with drive-by additions of pet language examples to the point where an article that might've once given a readable overview of a concept is an unreadable mess of "well in Haskell, the syntax looks like this, and in Scala, it looks like this, and you can also do it in Smalltalk, but slightly differently, like this". History articles on subjects even remotely popular also have a tendency to revert towards a pastiche of pop-history junk (often with nationalist mythologizing), unless someone is actively trying to maintain them. But I think this is a much trickier and more subtle issue than admin-civility or seasoned-editors-vs-newbies. Some articles need fewer drive-by edits by newbies adding uncited content, repetition of urban legends, or degredation of what was previously a readable exposition; one way to get that is more watchlisting and beating back of unhelpful 'improvements'. Other articles need less attention from people with very strong opinions about the subject. -Mark

Carcharoth: In fact we do have quite a few mailing list admins around. These include: Pierre Abbat, Brion VIBBER, Robert Merkel, Manning Bartlett, Vicki Rosenzweig, Bryan Derksen, Taw, AxelBoldt, The Cunctator, Magnus Manske, Tim Starling, and several others I've neglected to mention. As far as I remember they do not seem to have done anything that would violate the community's trust. bibliomaniac15 --- On Wed, 2/11/09, Carcharoth &lt;carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com&gt; wrote: From: Carcharoth &lt;carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com&gt; Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping To: "English Wikipedia" &lt;wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; Date: Wednesday, February 11, 2009, 11:01 AM On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 6:46 PM, Thomas Dalton &lt;thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: &lt;pattonabc(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: day, but this <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:EVula/opining/RfA_overhaul>doesn't appear Personally I think abusing it. previously or And that tells us what? That they were trusted at one stage and might or might not be now. Someone should bring up a list of the really old admins (in terms of RfA) and how many people commented at their RFA and how many of those people are still around. Are there any "mailing list" admins still around (in the very old days, admins were given the bit based on a mailing list discussion)? Of course, many of these old admins are themselves inactive now. Carcharoth _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l