[WikiEN-l] Admins shouldn't shoot back

[Ray Saintonge]

Slim Virgin wrote:

>On 6/18/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
>  
>
>>on 6/18/07 4:10 PM, Ray Saintonge at saintonge at telus.net wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>>I was describing, not prescribing. For better or worse, your RFA is
>>>>the place where you essentially voluntarily put yourself under the
>>>>microscope. In a way, it's like a job interview, with all that
>>>>entails.
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>It's quite rare for a company to put all job interviews on a closed
>>>circuit TV network to its entire staff so that even the most menial
>>>employees can vote on whether that interviewee will get a management job.
>>>      
>>>
>It has happened, famously, with some workers' cooperatives, and they
>inevitably fail for obvious reasons. 
>
I believe you.  Any idea how many people were in those co-ops?

>Yet we persist in doing it here
>-- and worse, because we have no idea who our "menial employees" are,
>or whether we have one person filling several jobs -- using the excuse
>that adminship is "no big deal." Ditch that attitude, and we would
>quickly find a way to deal with some of our problems. So long as it's
>in place, there's no will to find creative solutions.
>
I humbly beg to differ.  The fact is that modern democracies allow the 
most menial to vote, and they expect that right.  I perfectly understand 
the argument that voting should be limited to those who have met some 
sort of qualification criteria, but maintaining that position opens a 
whole new range of very serious issues.  Having adminship as "no big 
deal" is not the problem in itself; our collected conflictedness about 
this point is a much bigger problem.  We frequently see people who claim 
that it's no big deal, but whose actions are inconsistent with what they 
claim.  The down side of having adminship as a big deal that 
consequentially getting rid of admins is also a big deal.  A system 
where appointing admins is easier will also make it easier to get rid of 
admins who get out of line.  We could also have short-term desysops just 
as we now have short term edit blocks.  Extended absences could be more 
easily dealt with by suspensions that could be easily reversed if the 
person comes back.  If the person was not a problem before his absence 
there would be no reason to believe that he would act differently when 
he came back,  The severe problem people that concern you will always be 
there, but we cannot afford to make the problem seem worse that what it 
is; that only encourages them.  To show their true colours they need to 
have opportunities to fall on their faces.

Your last point is especially erroneous.  Creative solutions depend on 
the ability and willingness to take risks  ([[Zack Warner]] was quick to 
raise that admonition earlier this evening to the current crop of 
potential Idols.)  Jimbo himself took risks to get Wikipedia going; the 
risk at the time was that his financial investments could have gone down 
the tubes.  A community of people who follow rules to the letter, and 
are too afraid to be bold are rarely able to get out of the box that 
they have created for themselves.  That's not a small group when you 
remember that most of our teachers were also stuck in a box, and 
probably never knew how to teach their students to get out of the box.

Ec