[WikiEN-l] Bureaucrats decide!

[Andrew Lih]

On 4/12/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On 4/12/07, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> > There are large aspects of Wikipedia ttat are dominated by people's
> > whose opinions should be discounted completely as the destructive
> > idiocy that they are.
>
> No, that kind of culture of hostility is what we must guard against.
> The opinions against WP:OFFICE were misdirected. But the concerns
> about the process are valid & merit open debate. They should be
> directed to foundation-l, the WP:OFFICE talk page, and so forth.
> WP:OFFICE is a very first hackish attempt to solve a complex problem.
> The flaws of the process have been unfairly projected at Danny, who
> was not the architect of the policy.
>
> The same principle applies in many debates; for example, many AfD
> comments are really concerns about specific Wikipedia policies such as
> notability, which very much are in need of revision and reform. Direct
> and instruct people to talk about these problems in the right places,
> and you may get useful results. Telling them to shut up because they
> perpetuate "destructive idiocy" breeds hostility and contempt.
>
> There are destructive idiots. When recognized, they should be banned
> from Wikipedia. All other users should be treated with respect and
> understanding. I'm worried about the idiots. But I'm more worried
> about the erosion of a culture of respect that has been essential to
> Wikipedia's success as a community.

Erik enunciates quite well the phenomenon you see in RfA. It's the
same that you see in U.S. politics -- a bunch of single issue litmus
tests that wind up being the focus of the candidate. Some care most
about WP:OFFICE, some about free content, some about notability, some
about speedy deletion, some about biting newbies, some about blocking
policy, etc.

The union of all these individual peeves creates an incredibly high
bar for the nominee and winds up creating a search for "the perfect
admin," when that's not what RfA is for. What winds up happening, is
the poor sod up for adminship winds up having his/her RfA being the
battleground for outstanding ideological spats within the community.
That acerbic slugfest is not fair to the individual who happened to
stroll into the situation. Long term, it's damaging to the morale of
the project and folks who should be valuable to Wikipedia.

As Phil said before:

> Unfortunately, the community, over time, began to stop doing the job
> of answering "is this person trustworthy enough to become an admin"
> and began doing the job of answering "is this person the ideal admin?"

This should be etched at the top of [[Wikipedia:Requests for
adminship/Front matter]]

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)