[WikiEN-l] No big deal?

[Steve Bennett]

On 6/15/06, Brian Salter-Duke <b_duke at octa4.net.au> wrote:
> Entirely agree. I took a look at that RfA and thought "Why the hell do
> people apply to be admins. Nobody needs to put up with that much crap". i
> The process needs improving.

Well, I'll repeat the suggestion I've made several times: get the
community to define, quite closely, exactly what qualifications admins
must have (minimum number of edits, namespace distributions etc), then
reduce RfA to a fact-finding mission to determine whether they meet
those criteria, with relatively little subjectivity in voting.
Currently RfA voters have *way* too much freedom in coming up with
silly reasons to vote for or against candidates.

Bad reasons I've seen for voting against:
* Didn't have email set (no one had told him to)
* Didn't answer questions within 24 hours
* Didn't fill out RfA form properly
* Was too demanding on someone else's RfA (!)
* Had added a racist Jewish joke to an article about racist, Jewish jokes.
* Had a web link in signature (no one had told him not to)
* Had a silly user page
* Less than 3000 edits
* Has strong opinions on userboxes

Bad reasons I've seen for voting for:
* Had taken lots of photos for the project (I like this guy a lot, fwiw)
* Seems nice
* Hasn't done anything stupid
* Made several great FAs.

I've also suggested that one or two people should take it upon
themselves to really study the candidate over several days, going
through their entire history and producing a short report, which other
people can base their votes on. Rather than the current system where
each person independently supposedly checks the history, and probably
votes based on the first 3 edits they see.

Steve