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

[Ray Saintonge]

Ron Ritzman wrote:

>On 4/18/07, John Lee 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.
>
I don't think it's a matter of experience writing articles.  It's more 
about an excessive zeal to protect their own firmly held points of view 
about what is right. 

Even more, it's about a screwed up decision making system that does not 
scale well into such a large community.  A number of people begin with 
what they honesly feel is a valuable proposal, and set about writing 
rules about it.  They are able to convince a small number of others that 
these rules are valuable, and a partisan crowd builds around that rule, 
willing to protect it.  Most of the rest of us have other things to do 
than to be constantly on the alert about the new rules, and tend to 
ignore them until somebody tries to enforce the rule.  In theory, some 
of these rules could sit there for years before most of us know about 
them.  Some rules go so far as to discourage anyone from informing the 
community that the rules are being changed.  This is most likely to 
affect those who would disagree with the rule.  Votes taken without the 
community being properly informed about them do not reflect the will of 
the community.

At other times the rule changes come in a series of small increments 
which individually might take place without objection, but which 
collectively can have a profound effect.

Unless and until rule making can be seriously reformed we can expect the 
kind of harmful rigidity that pervades RfA and deletion processes to 
continue.  Beyond our fundamental root principles absolutely no rule 
should be set in stone.  When a rule has been adopted (under whatever 
rule adoption procedure is followed) no-one be able to sit back and feel 
the relief of being able to say, "That's one more problem out of the way."

Many of us grow up in the real world with a set of rules already there, 
rules about which we had no influence.  Similarly, newbies come to us 
and are confronted with a set of rules about which they had no 
influence.  We need a mechanism that allows anyone at any time to have a 
meaningful say in the future of a rule.  Even a newbie should have an 
influence on a rule that was adopted long ago.

Ec