[Foundation-l] Friendliness: a radical proposal

[Raul Gutierrez]

Greetings all. I have been monitoring exchanges regularly, but never felt
the urge to respond to any topic, here is my first.

As a beginner, I found Wikipedia, in addition to unfriendly, very abstract
and complex. 

Wikipedia Spanish has a problem with editors, and I can see in the text
below some of the things I have experienced, where is why:

I am a big archaeology fan and decided to undertake a personal project,
enhancing the quality of archaeology articles, mainly because I noticed that
many articles did not exist in Spanish or in English. 

What was worst was that many articles exist in English and not in Spanish,
naively I set out to fix some of it, by investigating, researching and
adding bilingual articles, in some cases simply translating from English and
a few from German, Italian, etc. So I guess I found the reason why there are
far too few Spanish articles. 

At a point in time, I encountered empowered and authoritarian Spanish text
editors that vandalized my contributions, deleted articles, made Wikipedia
rules on the go, etc., and offered no explanations. The last resort measure
I had was to stop creating Spanish articles. In English, however it has been
a pleasure, I have found people very proactive, friendly, helpful, etc. For
details about my contributions and comments, see my user page, under
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gumr51. I have a lot of time to research
on my personal project, however very little time or interest in arguing or
engaging in sterile debates with Text Editors, that I have no clue who they
are, what is their knowledge, or actual interest are, since the environment
is very impersonal, few even provide their real name. 

Since this is voluntary work, I would have liked or expected for the text
editors to advise or comment on problems they encountered, I spent a few
weeks last year asking for help and advice, I did get support in English,
but not in Spanish.

I believe that in addition to "quality" text editors and their "power
levels", somebody may require to qualify the editors expertise in the
content of articles, beyond the Wikipedia rules.

I will continue adding English archaeological articles.

Regards from a frustrated Mexican bilingual "Wikipedian",

Raul Gutierrez 


-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Neil Harris
Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2011 12:13 PM
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: [Foundation-l] Friendliness: a radical proposal

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


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