George Herbert wrote:
On 2/9/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
How on earth would you go about persuading someone to take this on? The whole day's posts have spoken about nothing but the negative side of the job; are there any advantages - or are you simply hoping there are enough masochists out there to fill the positions?
Why is anyone contributing to Wikipedia at all?
That's a really good answer to this.
I mean, I look at things this way, for myself:
1) I'd make a really good, if not great, administrator on this site. 2) Even as a mediocre administrator, I have the spare time and ability to clean out uncontroversial backlogs. I'm "available" 12-16 hours a day in many cases. 3) I'll never pass RfA for a number of reasons, none of which would have to do with my trustworthiness except for one or two editors. 4) I'm still not sure I even want to be part of that "club," given some of the administrators in place. 5) Even with #4 being true, I'm dedicated enough to this project to have donated two years of my time to it, and I'm capable of more and would do it if I could. 6) I can't.
Do I WANT to be an administrator? No, not really, for all the reasons people describe - it's largely thankless, it leaves you wide open for even more criticism, and it's not "fun" in the way writing about an 18th century chess hoax is. Could I BE a greater asset to the project as an administrator? Without question.
So the system leaves people like me behind. Since I don't really WANT the bit, I'm not terribly concerned about it. But when I hear about burnout and backlogs from the same people who want to stand in the way of getting people who can use the tools equipped (and that generally does not apply to people here), I simply have to roll my eyes.
So yeah. Someone else said it - it's probably going to take a Foundation/Jimbo-level decree to get anything to change on this point. A great idea at [[Wikipedia:Trial adminship]] was ditched this week, and the 100 new admins every 3 months idea is even better, but will never gain traction from the non-mailing list community. It's a pathetic truth, but there it is. And until we start being more forgiving of users who've made mistakes and learned from them, the situation's not going to get much better.
-Jeff