JAY JG wrote:
What tangible (not philosophical) benefits in terms of creating a better encyclopedia would these changes provide?
What tanglble (not philosophical) benefits in terms of creating a better encyclopedia would being able to edit freely provide? Well, duh, you have more freedom and therefore are better able to help.
Disagree. Admin is a position of increased responsibility and trust; trust must be earned.
This is exactly the "we have to assume everyone's guilty" argument I already refuted. Trust must be earned, I agree; but distrust must be earned too. We are currently requiring too much trust for people to become admins, and we are distrusting new users undeservedly.
As a first step, I would like to suggest to make it policy that "oppose" votes must be accompanied by reasoning indicating the nominee's past wrongdoing or potential for wrongdoing. It should not be permitted to vote "oppose" just because someone has "only a few hundred edits", as this is neither a crime nor a sign of bad faith. As a safeguard against crackpots nominating themselves straight after their first edit, however, I suggest that candidates must be nominated by an existing admin.
Not only is this easily gamed,
It's no more easily gamed than normal editing privileges are. You just get them! If you do bad things, you lose your editing privileges.
but only having a few hundred edits means that other people evaluating the editor have little to go on when trying to assess whether or not they will abuse being an admin.
Again, the "guilty until proven innocent" mentality. You have no reason to believe that anyone (who hasn't even nominated themselves) is going to abuse anything, especially not if they haven't abused their already-present editing privileges already.
As has been pointed out, there are already plenty of admins, 500 and growing, more than enough,
I'm afraid "we already have 500 admins, more than enough" is an even worse reason to vote "oppose" than "this user doesn't have enough edits". Why should we deny anyone adminship just because we already have 500 of them?
and there is a process of voting them in which ensures that they are generally quite sensible.
Again, so you're assuming that people are "unsensible" until you're convinced otherwise.
This is simply another attempt to fix a non-existent problem.
I do have my reasons for posting this proposal; I believe that there *is* a problem. Of course most current admins won't see the problem because they're already admins. If it's too hard for a new user to become admin, current admins wouldn't have to care, but it means there *is* a problem.
Imagine a bunch of page-move/pelican-shit vandals admins working together.
We've already had page-move vandals working together. We've dealt with them.
Changes to current processes which are currently working well make no sense,
If a user with >600 edits, >1.5 edits per day, nominated by an existing admin, and absolutely no history of trouble or ill-behaving for over a year, cannot become admin, the current process is clearly *not* working well.
particularly as these changes do not seem to be at all for the purpose of making a better encyclopedia.
See above.
Timwi