[WikiEN-l] Editing with open proxies

[Anthony]

On 6/18/07, Slim Virgin <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/18/07, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> > On 6/18/07, Slim Virgin <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > What I am arguing here and elsewhere is that one of the very obvious
> > > niches is that people can get to be admins by hitting revert for a few
> > > months. I think we need to put a stop to that.
> > >
> > I think if you do put a stop to that, Wikipedia won't have enough
> > admins to handle the tasks at hand.
>
> We already have too many admins. Every time this has been looked into,
> we find that's it a relatively small number of admins who are active.
> If we want to keep on promoting others, especially in such large
> numbers, we should start desyopping the inactive ones.
>
The admin backlogs seem to me to be long enough to indicate that there
aren't enough active admins.  And the recent discussion over speedy
deletions indicates to me that admins could use more time to perform
their current actions already.  Maybe there are too many inactive
admins, but that's a problem which can't really be solved by not
promoting accounts who do nothing other than reverting.

> But that doesn't touch on the main issue: that we're promoting
> accounts who've done little or nothing but spend months reverting.
>
I really don't see how that's a main issue.  It could be argued to
lead to certain problems, but so far I haven't been convinced of that
argument.

> An analogy to the situation we're in is an airline acknowledging that
> 100 percent security is impossible, and therefore they might as well
> get rid of all security measures. It's an irrational position.
>
I don't think that's a particularly appropriate analogy, because
Wikipedia has not gotten rid of all security measures.  Rather,
Wikipedia has recognized that it will always be possible for bad
people to become admins, therefore Wikipedia has created a system
where the damage which can be inflicted by admins is quite minimal.

Even with regard to the ability to view deleted pages it's unlikely
that having a few or even many rogue admins will cause any real harm
which wouldn't be possible already anyway.  Anyone who wants can
download the entire history dumps, and anyone evil enough to post
private information on Wikipedia could just as easily post that
private information on some rogue site directly.