[WikiEN-l] Fwd: Major dysfunction in RfA Culture

[John Lee]

On 4/19/07, Ron Ritzman <ritzman at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 4/18/07, John Lee <johnleemk at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > (You might dispute the assertion that this philosophy will only let a
> tiny
> > amount of bad apples in, but I can't think of many, sorry, any bad
> apples
> > who didn't get in under our present Kafkaesque gauntlet at RfA that
> would
> > have gotten in under an RfA operating under the "no big deal" thinking
> I'm
> > advocating.)
>
> Any thoughts on how the current "gauntlet culture" developed? One wild
> guess might be that some of the current voters might have some time in
> the past been "burned" by an admin who didn't have one or more of the
> attributes they are looking for. One example would be someone who
> spent a lot of time and effort writing an article just to have it
> speedied by some admin with most of his edits in policy areas quoting
> WP:THIS or WP:THAT. An admin with experience with a project would be
> less likely to go decimate somebody else's project. (think webcomics)
>
> In short, an admin with lots of experience writing "articles" would be
> less likely to nuke somebody else's hard work. Just a guess.


Of course correct - but ironically much of the problem lies with people who
want users to participate more in morasses like AfD or to brush up on area X
of policy, rather than making article edits. And on at least one occasion,
I've seen one guy say something along the lines of "I trust you to have the
tools, but oppose because you don't have enough article edits". The whole
question revolves around *trust*.

Simply put, people should not be opposing because they "see no need for the
tools" - a comment which often comes up when decent article editors are
nominated. The more admins we have the better. To be honest, if I ran for
RfA today, I would probably be denounced as having no need for th tools,
since I rarely use them. But I still use them, at least a few times a month
(mainly because I work in quiet areas of the 'pedia, and can't be arsed to
get involved in crazily controversial areas of WP) - and this is the sort of
quiet work that probably would be more effective.

People like geni reject this suggestion because they look at the admin stats
presently and point out that, say, 20% of the admins are doing 80% of the
work. But it doesn't have to be that way. I hypothesise that they are
confusing cause and effect. I think it's more likely that our unnecessary
restrictions making only the most crazy/hard-working/real-lifeless people
get through RfA are preventing a "long tail" from building up that can do
most of the work.

Heck, for editing in general, it is the long tail which does most of the
edits. I see no reason the same can't apply for admins, except for our
artificial restrictions which focus more on arbitrary qualifications than
the question of trust.

Johnleemk