[WikiEN-l] Major dysfunction in RfA Culture

[Earle Martin]

On 15/04/07, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2)Results in a large group of admins who don't really know their way
> around policy/process.

{{fact}}

I've seen a lot of this project's policy and process. That doesn't
necessarily mean I'd get involved with all of it should I become an
admin.

> the effect of this is that when they do get involved they tend to cause
> trouble with the hyper-actives and thus reduce their work rate.

{{fact}} again.

Everyone has to learn the ropes. That's not a disruptive process; it's
a natural part of a growing community. If the system as it exists
can't cope with a higher influx of administrators, then new procedures
for training need to be implemented. Anyway, the more users that
become admins, the greater the chance that you will find more
"hyper-actives" who will offset this dubious effect of new admins.

> 3)there is no benefit in designing processes to be comprehensible to
> those who don't use them regularly. If you have 20 people doing 90% of
> the work in one area (say a sub aspect of deletion) there is little
> point in worrying about the needs of that 10% when setting up the
> process. This is why process may appear incomprehensible to outsiders.
> No benefit in doing otherwise.

What has this to do with quiet admins being harmful to the project?

> 4)splits in the admin community between those who do large amounts of
> work and those who don't. Split would be lessened if the majority of
> admins were fairly active (~>100 admin actions a month)  obviously
> there is always going to be something of a split between the hyper
> actives and other admins but that split would be smaller if most
> admins were fairly active

Are you trying to imply that factions would develop in the admin
community based on how much work people do? Sorry, but I think that's
ridiculous.

> 5)security  risk (admin accounts getting hacked) without the gain.

This is conjecture and scaremongering.

> 6)reduces the practical size of our reserves. Fairly active admins
> have less problem stepping up their admin action rate than the in
> actives. They already know the ropes so it is simply a matter of doing
> more stuff.

What is this need to "step up [one's] admin action rate"? Why can't
our admins continue what they're doing? If we end up with some admins
who are all-out gung-ho types and a bunch of slow admins... we still
end up with more admins. All of whom are doing /something/. This is
not a problem.

> 7)gives a misleading picture of our admin resources. In theory we had
> 849 active admins as of March 3, 2007. The real figure is closer to
> 400.

This is a non-issue. Nobody's forced to use the total number of admins
to refer to anything. Stats on activity exist, and can be quoted, as
you yourself have done here.

-- 
Earle Martin
            http://downlode.org/
http://purl.org/net/earlemartin/