[WikiEN-l] Admin burnout

[phoebe ayers]

On 2/9/07, Taco Deposit <tacodeposit at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 2/9/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 2/9/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
> > > How does the Community define a "quality admin"?
> >
> > Duh. 100% edit summaries. 3000 edits, well distributed across article
> > space, project space and article talk space. Never having pissed
> > anyone off. Ever.
> >
>
> And you can't have made the 3000 edits over too long or too short a period
> of time.


Because Heaven knows we wouldn't want people who had been hanging around the
project for a long time to be admins.

KP's point, below, about only people who have lots and lots of time to edit
becoming admins is a good one -- it means, for the most part, that people
with very busy outside lives will never get the chance. We're losing a whole
swath of potential admins this way.

The thing about adminship (to sort of address Marc's questions) is we don't
really have any other "official" way to recognize editors. Sure, there are
barnstars and the like; but these are pretty meaningless outside of a narrow
context. There are cabals, but since TINC, well, you're out of luck :) Being
able to say "I'm an administrator on the English Wikipedia!" is a kind of
code for "I've devoted a lot of time to the project, and people recognize
and value my contributions -- I'm an important person!"

It doesn't really matter what the actual work is. The current administrators
on this list are talking about the pain and suffering of having to use the
mop & bucket (which is, as far as I can tell, entirely true) but ignoring
the fact that by having the sysop bit they have recognition within the
project that it's not possible to get in any other way. There's no "trusted
editor bit" that can be set. There's no "you've been editing for three
years, now you're level x". You can make a tremendous number of valuable
edits on the projects (or perhaps a smaller number of really good edits over
a long time), but there's no way to up your privileges or even recognize you
officially without making you an admin. And what if I want that recognition,
but don't really have any interest in deleting speedys or mucking through
endless policy? Perhaps then you get trouble, or at least an inefficient
system where people play to "admin criteria" rather than "let's make this a
good encyclopedia criteria".

I give a lot of talks on wikipedia to the outside world, and I get asked all
the time if I'm an admin -- not because the people asking really have any
conception of what that means, but because they assume that if I know a lot
about the site I must be in the "in crowd" and the only thing they know
about on Wikipedia that constitutes an "in-crowd" is adminship. We must
change this, and find some other recognition mechanism for devoted,
conscientious and level-headed editors that does not depend on their
knowledge of what the heck "A7" means or whether they've made x number of
edits to the wikipedia namespace.

-- phoebe (brassratgirl)