Thesis:
The main reason why Wikipedia seems unfriendly to beginners is the
reduction in the assumption of good faith. A lot of this could be
resolved simply by creating large numbers of new admins. This should be
done automatically. So why not just do it?
Argument and proposal:
Many admins and edit patrollers find themselves forced into an
aggressive stance in order to keep up with the firehose of issues that
need to be dealt with, a surprising amount of which is fueled by
deliberate malice and stupidity and actually does require an aggressive
and proactive response.
This is not the admins' fault. The major reason for this is the broken
RfA process, which has slowed the creation of new admins to a trickle,
and has led to an admin shortage, which in turn has led to the current
whack-a-mole attitude to new editors, and a reduction in the ability to
assume good faith.
I'd like to move back to an older era, where adminship was "no big
deal", and was allocated to any reasonably polite and competent editor,
instead of requiring them to in effect run for political office.
If, say, over the next three years, we could double the number of
admins, we could halve the individual admin's workload, and give them
more a lot more time for assuming good faith. And, with the lesser
workload and more good faith, there will be a lot less aggression
required, and that will trickle outwards throughout the entire community.
I can't see any reason why this shouldn't be done by an semi-automated
process, completely removing the existing broken RfA process.
Now it might be argued that this is a bad idea, because adminship
confers too much power in one go. If so, the admin bit could be broken
out into a base "new admin" role, and a set of specific extra "old
admin" powers which can be granted automatically to all admins in good
standing, after a period of perhaps a year. For an example of the kind
of power restrictions I have in mind, perhaps base new admins might be
able to deliver blocks of up to a month only, with the capability of
longer blocks arriving when they have had the admin bit for long enough.
All existing admins would be grandfathered in as "old admins" in this
scheme, with no change in their powers. Every new admin should be
granted the full "old admin" powers automatically after one year, unless
they've done something so bad as to be worthy of stripping their admin
bit completely.
None of this should be presented as a rank or status system -- there
should only be "new admins", and "old admins" with the only
distinction
being the length they have been wielding their powers -- admin "ageism"
should be a specifically taboo activity.
Now, we could quite easily use a computer program to make a
pre-qualified list of editors who have edited a wide variety of pages,
interacted with other users, avoided recent blocks, etc. etc., and then
from time to time send a randomly chosen subset of them a message that
they can now ask any "old admin" to turn on their admin bit, with this
request expected not to be unreasonably withheld, provided their edits
are recognizably human in nature. (The reason why "new admins" should
not be able to create other admins is to prevent the creation of armies
of sockpuppet sleeper admin accounts riding on top of this process -- a
year of competent adminning should suffice as a Turing test.)
So: unless there is a good reason not to, why not do this?
-- Neil