[WikiEN-l] Major dysfunction in RfA Culture

[Andrew Lih]

Geni, it's surprising that none of the seven arguments register even a
small amount of resonance with me. You seem to equate dormant users
giving "rise" to passive problems, yet this does not make any sense in
this volunteer, peer-production community.

The only one that had validity:

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

This has been a strong argument for HTTPS login screen for Wikipedia,
which should be a high priority.

-Andrew


On 4/16/07, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4/15/07, Earle Martin <wikipedia at downlode.org> wrote:
> > On 15/04/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On 15/04/07, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > Given the number of de-facto inactive admins we already have I don't
> > > > see much benefit in that approach.
> > >
> > > 1. It would reduce the harmfulness to the community of the present RFA.
> > > 2. "De-facto inactive admins" do not harm the project.
> >
> > I have never understood why Geni considers "paper admins" (a phrase he
> > has used a number of times since I've been reading this list) to be
> > harmful. Geni, would you care to explain?
> >
> >
>
> 1)lowers the social pressure on admins to be active.
>
> 100 admin actions a month can be  less than an hour a month depending
> on what you are doing. If we could get that our of people our backlogs
> would be shorter. At the moment we have maybe 300 admins who are
> active at that rate.
>
> The upshot of this lack of expectations is that people can get the
> social benefits of adminship without doing the work. It would be nice
> to change that.
>
> 2)Results in a large group of admins who don't really know their way
> around policy/process. 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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
>
> 5)security  risk (admin accounts getting hacked) without the gain.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> --
> geni
>
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