[WikiEN-l] Analysis of Request for Adminship

[Steve Bennett]

On 3/31/06, Ilmari Karonen <nospam at vyznev.net> wrote:
> Well, no, the part about going on a vandalism spree was hyperbole.  It's
> more about protecting ourselves against users who might use their admin
> povers for more subtle undesirable things, such as POV pushing, or for
> ends incompatible with the project (like the folks who think the best
> thing about Wikipedia are the userboxes), or who might simply use them
> carelessly or thoughtlessly, say, by rangeblocking all of Europe.

And we are going to detect such users by ensuring we only select
admins who use edit summaries 95% of the time and have made at least
1500 distinct edits in the minimum 6 months they have had an account
at en?

False metrics are worse than no metrics :(

I think I'd rather that each RfA required a neutral person to review
the person's entire edit history, noting the number of edit wars,
whether edit summaries were accurate, their apparent stance on
controversial topics like userboxes etc, then publishing those facts
for everyone to decide on. Rather than (incorrectly) assuming that
each person voting does such a review for themselves.

> That said, even vandalism _is_ a concern, if an unlikely one.  Besides
> the obvious opportunities, like replacing MediaWiki messages with
> genitalia, a malicious admin could really have a field day with the
> ability to edit the sitewide javascript files.  Unfortunately that does
> make adminship a big deal in some ways.

Has that ever happened?

Steve