[WikiEN-l] Bureaucrats decide!

[Matthew Brown]

On 4/10/07, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> No. RFA is a way we gauge whether a person fulfills the basic
> standards of trustworthiness necessary for us to trust them with
> admin powers. It's not a straw poll on whether someone should become
> an admin. People's arbitrary opinions on how many admins we have,
> what admins should do, and/or any of the other insanity at, say,
> [[Wikipedia: Admin coaching]] were never designed to be a part of RFA.

Exactly.  I remember it being stated somewhere that I read early on in
my Wikipedia career that the admin tools were what we would give every
editor in the ideal world - but they were simply, and unfortunately,
too destructive to give to everyone without first doing a simple
trustworthiness test.

Every editor who has been around for a little while to learn the ropes
and shown no tendency to do crazy things if given the admin bit should
be granted it.  A few words of caution and a few pages of basic rules
of thumb should exist to guide the new admin in the use of the
facilities, and ideally someone should keep an eye on new admins for a
short while to make sure they understand what they're doing.

Admins who show a tendency to do crazy things with the admin bit
should have it removed forthwith.  Making mistakes is definitely
allowed; it's whether you learn from them and respond to them
appropriately.

-Matt