On 4/12/07, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 4/12/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@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)