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.
So, nothing specific comes to mind then?
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.
It's easy to refute strawman arguments; that's the reason people make them
in the first place.
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.
Your opinion is interesting; I see no evidence that it reflects reality.
New users are, in fact, able to completely modify just about any part of
Wikipedia they want. This is a huge amount of trust that already creates
huge vandalism problems. What you are asking for is for them to be given
special powers to do things like easily reverting pages and blocking users.
Of course, this would simply give them abilities to act against other users
that they distrust, but wouldn't help them (for example) WRITE BETTER
ENCYCLOPEDIA ARTICLES!
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.
Huh? This is nothing like normal editing privileges. Even you admit as
much, since you specify that people must be nominated by an existing admin.
If you think these powers should be no different than other editing
abilities, why not simply argue that they beome part of the "basic package"?
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.
No, not "guilty until proven innocent". Rather "reserve judgement, because
the jury is still out". That's simply prudent commonsense.
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?
No-one has voted oppose on those grounds; but you are proposing that way
more people be made admins, without any sort of consensus process for making
them so, because we somehow need even more people with these powers than
already have 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.
No, I simply don't know if they're sensible. I do know that the majority of
new editors are "not sensible" in that they are not familiar with Wikipedia
policies and norms, and therefore regularly violate them. Some editors
learn the ropes quickly; others never do, even after tens of thousands of
edits, either because they are unable to learn them, or unwilling to do so.
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.
Huh? The problem is it's too hard for new users to become admin, therefore
it *is* a problem? That's entirely circular. What on earth makes you think
it is "too hard"? Exactly how did you measure that, on the [[Mohs scale]]?
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.
Not ones with admin powers.
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.
Why not? Please note that assertions and proofs are entirely different
things.
Jay.