On 10/30/05, Tom Cadden thomcadden@yahoo.ie wrote:
...I was off Wikipedia for a month and when I came back I noticed that a host of articles I had keeping an eye on because they were in my area of expertise had had some appalling edits done.
I rarely edit in my area of expertise for just this reason, too disturbing.
... the people who had brought the articles up to a very high standard had either left Wikipedia (some driven away from the frustration of trying to maintain quality, or because they had other commitments elsewhere), were working elsewhere on Wikipedia, or were simply fed up constantly proofing edits in those articles...
We should be doing everything we can to encourage people who create high quality work. These people often aren't the kind who come to Wikipedia for interaction and socializing. They often contrast to the large numbers in our community who *do* interact a lot.
Case in point, DrBob is a good editor. He's an expert on optics, writes well, makes great illustrations and has been a contributer for over FOUR years. He has about 2000 edits, actually more - some were lost in software changes long ago. He takes an occasional wikibreak of several months every year.
His admin nomination is being torpedoed because he "doesn't interact enough", despite the fact that he has been a volunteer on the wikipedia reference desks for over two years. Not only does he occasionally seek out interaction, but he is good at it.
This is the most idiotic no vote I've ever seen at RFA. Ability and desire to interact a lot will certainly help in some areas of wikipedia, administrator or not, but not the main administrative duties- vandalism revert, speedy deletes, copyvio cleanup and IP blocking. Remeber, this is not a person with no interaction, quite the opposite; this is an editor who seeks interaction from time in the communites public forms.
Admin's are NOT mediators, or mothers, or babysitters. The vast majority of their work doesn't require much interaction. If a guy has chosen not to interact on the the talk pages of politically charged middleast related articles in the last four years (where special interaction skills might help) then giving him admin power is not likely to change this.
Furthermore, we need a diverse goup of adminstrators and users alike. Requiring a ton of interaction for administratorship will cut out, in one fell swoop, all the quiet, hard working people who are here to write an encyclopedia, silently toiling behind the scenes. I think people like these are currently some of the very best admins. And I sometimes think that reserves silence and wisdome go hand in hand.