Summary: Current RfA ineffective. Proposed automated software evaluation of Wikipedia contributors. only users with high score will be able to get lised in RfA. Please comment & criticise. The current RfA (Requests for adminship) process cannot serve Wikipedia anymore. Wikipedia is now a very popular big site and I am afraid the RfA process we are using can only support small communities. Currently 1 user who had less than 100 edits is nominated. Another user with about 200 edits requests adminship. In the past, a user who acted in the "politician's way" requested to become an admin numerous times: make me admin and I will do this and that... Of course the request was ridiculous and nobody was taking him seriously. Also, on January 12, 2004, a user was nominated for adminship. A developer promoted the user to administrator just 21 minutes after the nomination, even before the response of the nominated user (a nominated user has to respond in order to accept or reject the adminship). Although everyone, including me, supported the nomination (after he was made an admin!), and the admin is now good and valuable to the project, I think the quick developer's action was unnecessary. I say this, not in order to rise an issue with the developer (who is useful and valuable to the project) but only to show that the RfA process has "holes". The current RfA ineffectivity has been demonstrated many times. One of the main problems of the current RfA system is that everyone can nominate any person, many times not for Wikipedia's good but only for personal reasons etc. Uneducated nominations/requests are also common and waste our time. To put it in one sentence: It is very easy for someone to nominate a user for adminship, or even request it. I think RfA should be more difficult, so that whenever someone is listed on it, it will be more or less sure that he/she is already wanted or trusted by the community up to some degree. Requests could be go away. Personally, I prefer nominations. Or, the policy and the system could be formulated in such a way that it would be more difficult for someone to request adminship, than to be nominated for it. A semi-automated software system for user evaluation may be needed, IMO. Just like most auction sites (eBay etc): Other users will evaluate a user's edits. The system will work like this: In Page history, or in the version differences page, we could have three option boxes, one textbox and one button, all under the caption "Evaluate this user's edit". The option boxes will read: 1. Positive, 2. Neutral, 3. Negative. It will be required for the evaluator to write a summary in the textbox and justify his/her evaluation. When the user presses the button, the system will record the evaluation in the user's evaluation log. These logs will be public (accessible via the user's page), and updated/maintained by the software. Because abuse is possible, we can have evaluation moderators. When a new evaluation is submitted, it will not be written in the user's log until a moderator aproves it. The log will refer to the particular edit and article an evaluation was about, and it will keep some statistics, such as how many different users made a positive or negative evaluation. Evaluations which were not approved by the moderators will be kept in a separate log but not counted in the "official" user's score. The user's score will be calculated by software from data gathered from the evaluation log. I suggest the score's algorithm to pay more "attention" on recent evaluations. For example, evaluations one year old can be multiplied by 0.5, evaluations 6 months old by 0.75, while the evaluations from the past 2-3 weeks will be multiplied by 1.5. Also, evaluations from evaluators with a high score will count more in the final user's score (for example, multiplied by 1.33). The number of user's edits will be taken into account, too: The higher edits, the higher the score. So the score is not simply the number of positive evaluations, but it is based on more complex analysis and considerations. ***the algorithm which calculates the score should be published in wikipedia, written in simple pseudocode so that non-developers will be able to understand it*** I suggest that the moderators should be appointed directly by Jimbo. There will be a page called "Great contributors" maintained by software. In this page only users with a high score will be listed. In RfA, a user may be nominated for adminship *only* and *only* iff: a) he or she is listed in the "Great contributors" page, AND b) the user has made at least 500 edits. Otherwise, the nomination will be automatically rejected. I do not think users with less than 500 edits should be even considered in RfA. I ask for comments and criticism on these ideas. Also, please, suggest your own ideas and propose the changes you would like to see in RfA. I hope we can built a better and more efficient RfA system. --Optim __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it! http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/