On Monday 07 April 2003 02:43 pm, Poor Edmund wrote:

How about creating a Button that sysops can use to promote other sysops? I'm getting tired of writing and checking SQL queries. Also, I don't want to become a gatekeeper :-(

This is how it was in phase II. I liked it since I could promote somebody soon after they posted a request for Adminhood on the mailing list. Right now there is a bottleneck at the developer level that IMO simply should not exist and is limiting the growth of the Admin ranks.

We could (maybe?) hash out some rules, like:

1. Must be nominated and seconded (i.e., takes N votes where N >= 2? or N

...

= 3?). 2. Can't nominate or second anyone till you've been a sysop

for N days (N > 30 days? N > 90 days? N > 12 months?)

I don't think we need hard and fast rules on this yet - our informal process of people asking for the upgrade on the language-specific mailing lists to ask for the upgrade seems to work. Most requests are accepted without worry but some are rejected (like TMC or a ultra green newbie that nobody knows).

We just need to get rid of the bottleneck at the developer level. IMO there is no need to leave people in suspense after asking to be an Admin - this gives the impression that Adminship is something special and tightly restricted to a very select few. I can only imagine that such a perception would tend to make people think twice before asking. The only non-newbie users who should think twice before asking are users who tend to get into more than their fair share of edit wars and POV disputes or who are otherwise not viewed as being trustworthy.

Oh and automatically sysoping users based on some computational criteria such as age of user account and/or number of edits made would be like handing out hand guns to everybody on their 18th birthday. Cry havoc!

At one time I was an advocate of auto-sysoping but my views on this have changed. I now think that human judgment should be filter at this level. Otherwise we might find ourselves with TMC, Clutch and Two16-like Admins. True these users are now banned and would also have been banned if they were Admins, but as Admins they would have done far more damage before getting banned.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

WikiKarma The usual at [[April 2]]