[Foundation-l] Friendliness: a radical proposal

[Neil Harris]

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