[WikiEN-l] Re: Thoughts on the process of requesting adminship

[Timwi]

Rebecca wrote:
> 
>>There is no fundamental reason not to apply soft security to
>>adminship.
> 
> That it's unnecessary, for starters. What we have now works fine.
> Changing that creates a whole lot of security problems that we just
> don't need - particularly with no compelling reason to change in the
> first place.

You are asserting that "what we have now works fine" even though I have 
already mentioned numerous times why I think it does *not* work fine. I 
have provided what I think is a compelling reason to change in the first 
place.

> What purpose does this serve? It builds adminship up into some sort of
> huge thing that it isn't.

I think you misunderstood the proposal then. Imagine you're a writer for 
a proprietary encyclopedia, let's say Encarta. This is a prestigious 
position, because they use strict criteria to select their editors. To 
be an editor on Wikipedia is less of a "thing" because anyone can come 
in and edit. Consequently, lowering the bar for entry to adminship will 
make adminship into less of a "thing".

(Incidentally I also think the concept of "adminship" should be renamed 
to something less prestigious-sounding, perhaps "priv" (after 
LiveJournal) or "high-ID" (after eMule), or perhaps an entirely made-up 
initially-meaningless name, but that's food for another discussion some 
other time.)

> If you generally behave yourself and make a few good edits, you
> become an admin.

No, you don't -- that's what I've been saying all the time. You need a 
ridiculous amount of edits to become an admin (apparently more than 642 
and more than 1.7 per day), no matter how well you generally behave 
yourself throughout a whole year.

> It also isn't very helpful to continually hang an axe over the head
> of good users, in regard to their adminship in this case.

I don't think my proposal is advocating anything of the sort, unless you 
would refer to the current threat of being blocked for inappropriate 
behaviour as "hanging an axe over their head" too.

> The Open Directory Project continually hung an axe over people - and
> they left as a result, in droves. Let us not make the same mistake.

I suppose we're doing the other extreme (high bar for entry to adminship 
and even higher bar for getting "axed out" of adminship) - and we have 
rather few good admins as a result (500 out of 25500, less than 2%, 
isn't very much for something that's supposedly "no big deal"). That's 
the mistake on the other side of the spectrum...

> If someone isn't doing something *seriously* wrong, their only *need*
> to have anything to do with meta stuff at all is to request
> adminship.

So according to that, having "only" 600 edits is "doing something 
seriously wrong"...

> Somehow I suspect this would be a lot more trouble than it's worth. If
> someone is that antisocial that they're not trusted enough to become
> an admin, then perhaps they should look to themselves. Wikipedia is
> not group therapy.

Here, for once, I agree with you. People should not be admins unless 
they're willing to learn what it takes to be a good admin. But if 
someone already *has* the qualification to be a good admin, simply by 
being a normal average rational sensible reasonable common-sense human 
being with no history of any wrongdoing, they should be an admin.

>>One of the advantages of making adminship more open would be that more
>>people would learn to be skillful, neutral administrators.
> 
> Where is the problem that would warrant this?

Agree here too. But this is not an argument against my proposal. :)

Greetings,
Timwi