[WikiEN-l] Major dysfunction in RfA Culture

[John Lee]

On 4/15/07, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.


Increasing the number of admins -> increasing the numbers of both active and
inactive admins. The latter might be bad, but I think it's really neutral;
the costs associated with it are minimal. The former, however, would yield
great benefits.

> 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.


So basically if there's this guy who is competent and qualified to be an
admin, but he hasn't written an FA/reverted 100 vandals/made 5000 edits, he
should automatically be rejected? That's the reasoning I'm seeing on RfA at
the moment. This relativism that all viewpoints are valid is simply wrong.

> 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?


A thousand article edits is substantial. Short sniping remarks don't
contribute much to the discussion.

> 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.


A minuscule one, outweighed by the benefits of active admins.

> 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.


They answer to the community, do they not?

>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.
> --


So we should just stop trying, eh?

geni


Johnleemk