[WikiEN-l] Major dysfunction in RfA Culture

[John Lee]

While casually browsing through old RfAs recently, I found a comment I'd
made about adminship being no big deal. I basically expressed my philosophy
as that if you won't do harm (or, more precisely, the harm you do is so
minuscule that it is vastly outweighed by your positive contributions) with
the mop and bucket, you deserve it.

I also realised, from looking at other comments made on that RfA, and from
reading the opinions of people in present-day RfAs, that this philosophy
isn't one adopted by many. People look for reasons to oppose, even if they
don't have much to do with harm. For example, why should writing an FA or
not doing enough vandalfighting be impediments to adminship? This is not
evidence that the candidate will do harm with the tools, or that by
approving the candidate, we will be harming Wikipedia.

It is true, of course, that these issues have nothing to do with some other
problems with RfA and its culture. But this thing I'm raising seems very
basic to me - adminship is no big deal in the sense that if you want it, you
can have it, unless there is proof that significant harm will be done if you
have the tools. Would it be worth noting this in big red <h1>-sized letters
on RfA, so that at the very least, we won't reject people for silly reasons.

Just to pick one random example, many (half?) of the opposes at
[[Wikipedia:Requests
for adminship/Navou 2]] (still ongoing) are literally along the lines of
this neutral vote: "I would love to support you, as you are an established
and experienced editor. However, as Tellyaddict has pointed out. You do not
have enough edits in the section "mainspace"."

Bloody hell. The whole point we have standards for time and edit count is to
have some measure of experience. If the guy knows his stuff sufficiently,
why should having "only" a thousand mainspace edits, or "only" five months
of experience be an impediment?

I don't know who Navou is - and there are valid concerns raised about
him/her. My comments here are not comments on him/her, but general comments
about the sorry state of RfA. The whole point of RfA is this: TO WEED OUT
PEOPLE WHO DO HARM WITH THE MOP AND BUCKET. If there is no evidence that the
candidate will do harm (assuming, of course, that the user has made enough
contributions for there to be enough data to evaluate him/her), the
candidate should pass.

We could get the 'crats to disregard opinions that do not pay heed to this
basic principle of adminship being no big deal. I wouldn't rule that out.
But this seems to be symptomatic of a basic problem with the culture of RfA,
and the culture of many people caught up in our processes.

Coercion is pointless if it only addresses the symptoms, and not the cause.
We disbanded Esperanza because it was reforming out of coercion, rather than
an actual change in the culture it represented. We need to address this
fundamental problem with RfA's culture - or rethink our entire process of
appointing admins.

Johnleemk