On 4/15/07, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 4/15/07, John Lee <johnleemk(a)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