[WikiEN-l] Major dysfunction in RfA Culture

[geni]

On 4/15/07, John Lee <johnleemk at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

Given the number of de-facto inactive admins we already have I don't
see much benefit in that approach.

> 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.

Not silly reasons from their POV.


> 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"."
>

You want admins who don't know the value of content?

> 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.

Non active admins siting around is a risk.

> We could get the 'crats to disregard opinions that do not pay heed to this
> basic principle of adminship being no big deal.

How? The crats don't answer to you.

>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.


People have been saying this for years now. So far they are yet to
come up with a system that either:

a)can be made identical to the current one through the use of trivial
legal fictions
b)takes power away from the community.
c)results in a significantly increased overhead
d) some combination of the above.
-- 
geni