[WikiEN-l] Admin burnout

[Rich Holton]

geni wrote:
> On 2/9/07, Rich Holton <richholton at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Because I really don't know and am curious, can you give an example to
>> illustrate the amount of damage an admin can do?
> 
> Userboxes. Take admin powers out of that fight and things would have
> been a lot less ah dramatic.
> 
> Other than that there were the ones who facilitated the Bobby Boulders
> troll. Many things are best left buried. A significant number of those
> involved are still admins.
> 

Yeah, the userboxes thing I've heard about. How much actual damage to 
the project was done? Who, aside from those directly involved, were 
affected by this?

I have no idea what the "Bobby Boulders troll" is about. But again, how 
much actual damage was done to the project?

For both of these, and the other unspoken cases, would having many more 
admins have helped or hurt?

It seems to me that no method of selecting admins will be perfect... 
there will always be some who, with hindsight, we can say should not 
have been made admins. But it would almost seem to be a question of 
ratios. If our de-facto policy of selecting admins results in a very 
small number actually being selected, is our ratio of good to bad admins 
significantly better than having a less restrictive selection process 
that allows many more people be admins?

What we don't want is to have admins be so rare that it becomes big news 
when one screws up. That would be a bad thing. Far better to have so 
many admins that it's no big deal when one screws up. Just like it's no 
big deal when a page gets vandalized. The vandalism gets fixed, perhaps 
the vandal gets blocked, and we move on.

-Rich