[WikiEN-l] Analysis of Request for Adminship

[Steve Bennett]

On 3/31/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> All admins learn on the job.  It's not skill at doing the technical
> duties of an admin that matters, it's competence in using
> administrative powers responsibly that is being selected for.    RfA
> has proven to be relatively poor at discriminating against people who
> should not be admins, because the criteria that most people are
> applying when they vote are not really very good proxies for "will not
> abuse administrative privilege" and in some cases are actually proxies
> for "will abuse administrative privilege".

Personally I'm a bit puzzled that there seems to be a bias in favour
of people who have edited high profile articles and thus have "handled
conflict" well. The trouble is then that those admins will obviously
want to continue editing the same types of articles, only they have
"admin" attached to their name now, and aren't treated or perceived
the same way.

Speaking for myself, I treat an "admin" differently when he has a
difference of opinion on content on a certain page. Perhaps we need a
non-empowered "respected user" flag for oldbies with common sense that
don't actually want to do any vandal fighting?

> contest, as it is today.  But the best solutions to accomplish that
> all involve creating special "administrator selection committees" or
> similar such bodies, which will be roundly decried as anti-democratic
> and cabalistic by people who are more interested in Wikipedia as an
> social experiment.  And while this latter group is smaller than the

Would it be possible to make such a body purely an advisory panel? Ie,
3 people review a user, and present their findings to the community,
who then votes? Is that feasible for the volume of RfAs?

> group of people who are interested in Wikipedia as an encyclopedia,
> this smaller group is disproportionately represented amongst those who
> participate in community processes, thereby skewing "consensus" toward
> the "social experiment" point of view.

The "social experiement" type users are the most likely to react
violently against a "cabal", right? Whereas the "get the encyclopaedia
written" ones are theoretically more like to support such fascism. 
Does that help at all as a starting point?

Steve