[Foundation-l] Term of service?

[arnomane at gmx.de]

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