On 5/22/06, Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:

Nothing wrong with it. For one thing, inactive administrators would be purged

I never understood the need for that. It should be sufficient to flag them as inactive. It's true that the irreversibility of image deletions does represent a bit of a security hole, of course, but that applies to active admins as well.

as well as those who simply don't work out. On English, they can only be removed if they are nasty enough that they end up in arbitration, and that is very nasty indeed.

As long as adminship only represents a certain level of trust and is primarily used to push buttons for those who can't, that shouldn't be a problem. I've long felt that admins should be called "trusted users". To de-admin someone is then to explicitly label them as untrusted, and that should only be done in nasty cases. It would also mean that everyone who contributes and understands the policies should eventually become trusted, without a need to sum up percentages for namespace contributions or edit summaries.

Erik

On 5/22/06, Jan Kulveit jk-wikifound@ks.cz wrote:

...

To de-admin someone is then to explicitly label them as untrusted, and that should only be done in nasty cases. It would also mean that everyone who contributes and understands the policies should eventually become trusted, without a need to sum up percentages for namespace contributions or edit summaries.

Does it actually work that way on any project of moderate to large size?

I don't know if you count en.wikinews.org as moderate to large, but it certainly has a very high percentage of admins (41, 0.5% of reg'd users vs. en.wikipedia's 0.06%), much more so among active users. There are two conditions for becoming an admin:

1. You've done at least a month's work on Wikinews. 2. You are trusted by the community.

We flag inactive admins as such. We've had a couple of wheel wars, but I think over time policy will evolve to prevent that. So far I haven't seen a trend at all to assign admins editorial roles, rather there seems to be a strong community culture against that.

WN is different from WP in many ways (most importantly, community attention always focuses on a small set of articles at a given time). Yet, I see no automatism towards bigger editorial roles for sysops or stronger criteria for nomination within any given community. For instance, in spite of both communities being huge, admin roles in de.wp are significantly broader than in en.wp.

I think it depends more on what the philosophy of the most active initial contributors in a community is. This tends to guide the evolution of policy and practice. Newbies tend to assume the word of oldbies as unquestionable fact. "It is so because it has always been so."

The notion that policy itself is a mechanism that can be radically edited, literally, is alien to many. After all, it doesn't work like that in the real world. In the real world, people whine about things they feel they cannot change. So, rather than proposing constructive changes to policy, newbies often whine about evil admin power abuse, etc.

As I said, I also think the term "adminship" notoriously tends to lead to stronger assumptions of roles. I have seen countless media reports where "admins" were, essentially, considered to be the staff of the site that makes editorial decisions. This is understandable given the choice of name, and many newbies have the same expectations. And doesn't "admin cabal" sound much scarier than "trusted user cabal"? The name suggests much more power than I think the role should hold.

This discussion, particlarly on foundation-l, is a good idea, BTW. We need a lot more communication about policies across projects and languages. Statistics and comparison grids would be even nicer.

Erik

On Mon, May 22, 2006 at 08:39:36PM -0400, Delirium wrote:

I know I got adminned on en.wikipedia.org without much discussion, while I was still pretty new. I edited for 4-5 weeks, requested adminship, and was given it.

Was that in 2003? In that case, that's what I'm speaking about. I doubt you would request adminship with the same ammount of contributions & time spent on Wikipedia if you were to ask now. Read some of recently failed RfA... demands are rising, judging by what people request while voting, you should -have editcount in order of thousands -contribute ~3months -satisfy various demans on structure of contributions -good portion of contribution should be "signifficant" contributions in main namespace -portion should be housecleaning work -you should have some experience in Project ns -but do not spent too much time on Project! -you should have led 1 article to featured status -fill edit summaries! -be nice in edit summaries -no POV! -preferably, almost no serious conflicts -yet some experience with conflicts and so on...

Jan Kulveit

Am Dienstag, 23. Mai 2006 08:18 schrieb Andre Engels:

Please not. I don't want to be an admin. I don't want to get into fights about admin policy again.

At least in Wikimedia Commons you're still bureaucrat although you haven't used these "powers" a lot in the last time. ;-)

When someone makes a mistake, I prefer being able to call admin abuse above getting into a blocking/deblocking war. It would be nice to have the rollback buttons again, but becoming an admin would be too high a price for that.

I think this motivation problem shows clearly that any policy with regular adminship votes should be discouraged. Why? Here my reasons: * Regular voting tends people to transform Wikipedia into a democracy simulation (creating a full nation with constitution, parliament, parties, judges and whatnot) with votes on every edit. Wikis are no democracies (although they have some demecratic elements), wikis are more like involvement in a charity organisation: "Just change world on your own now." It's not that democracy in reallife is bad -quite the contrary our ancestors have fought for it- but online is not real life. * Voting is easy in contrast to a useful ns-0 edit. Trolls are happy voters. Also a thoughtfull comments and creativity get often neglected if you call for a vote. * Many voting tends to create a lot of arbitrary policies (wikis and exact policies are two things that don't really fit that much together. Policies should be thatfor reduced to the absolute minimum) that makes our life hard and reduce our own motivation why we are here at all and happy policy-trolls will try to enforce every policy to the letter against better knowledge. * You don't get real power in a wiki by becoming an admin. You get power by trust. And this power is the one that matters (especially when you see that you have just made something that you consider useful and a large group of people likes it and defends your action). For example I got a half call for de-admin in de.wp because a troll thought I am an admin and have abused my admin rights. Well this was really funny. I wasn't an admin at that time. * In the end the good admins that do the hard work will get discouraged and only some policy fanatics will remain.

With regard to the inititial thing on zh.wp. This is very much the same: Admins are no angels. Admins are voluntarily users and demanding from other users some "terms of service" is exactly the wrong thing and will frustrate the good people. And I really hope that every admin everytime risks his adminship status in case he sees that something goes wrong or in case he notices that something must be done. Of course as long as you're reasonable and not arrogant...

So my small wish is: Please let us vote less and do more. If there is a strong disagreement of a larger group we can still vote in order to come to a decission. If an admin misbehaves make a deadmin-vote in case it is necessary but not regularly. Create policies by doing things and forseeing and respecting the positions of others. The strongest policies are the informal ones that get considered after a certain time the "natural thing" (TM).

Arnomane

Am Dienstag, 23. Mai 2006 10:26 schrieb Andre Engels:

I don't see the connection between your reasons and my message.

The connection is that admins are seen as some kind of superman and in the end admins expect from each other the same too and then you have nice revert- and block-unblock-wars because the admins think the action of each other is against policy $foobar. The consequence is that admins themselves take their actions too serious and too political and loose joy.

And regular voting and "terms of service" policies and thus no ethusiastic collaboration are the deeper reason behind that frustration. Not some recent controversy.

Arnomane

On 5/23/06, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:

Please not. I don't want to be an admin. I don't want to get into fights about admin policy again. When someone makes a mistake, I prefer being able to call admin abuse above getting into a blocking/deblocking war. It would be nice to have the rollback buttons again, but becoming an admin would be too high a price for that.

My view of admins as "trusted users" implies that adminship does not automatically come with a responsibility to use it. If you don't want to block because of the conflicts it may cause, you can still act like a regular user -- while deleting spam when you see it.

The problem begins when people start arguing "User X hasn't done any admin action on this project for months, he shouldn't be an admin". That is a view of adminship as a "job" which I do not share. Adminship should only indicate that you are a good faith contributor who can be trusted to use certain software features responsibly. This seems to work on en.wikinews, and on en.wp to a certain extent (RfA criteria creep has gotten quite bad on en.wp).

I do not know if this is the case on nl: and if not, how difficult it would be to reform it. Given how quickly people scream about "top down" approaches to policy, my inclination is to believe that the best way to fix broken admin policies in various language editions is probably to come up with a completely new technical model of trust that provides obvious advantages to the current one (e.g. higher rate of vandalism clean-up), leading communities to adopt it.

Erik

2006/5/22, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com:

As long as adminship only represents a certain level of trust and is primarily used to push buttons for those who can't, that shouldn't be a problem.

But is it primarily used that way? I don't see it being used as such. If I, as a non-admin, want someone to be blocked, there's a procedure so difficult and long that I might as well not do it, which will probably fail anyway. If an admin wants someone to be blocked, they do it, and a day later some other admin comes by and decides that the block was too long and unblocks.

Can an admin do anything then? No, certainly not. That's what I discovered. I unblocked addresses. That was so bad that I basically got into a war with another admin on nl:, which ended in both of us resigning. I don't want those fights any more. I don't want to be an admin the way things are now. Even though it would be damn nice to have that rollback button, but then again, another advantage of not being an admin is that I don't feel as much pressure to help fight vandalism.