Slim Virgin wrote:
On 6/18/07, Marc Riddell
<michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net> wrote:
on 6/18/07 4:10 PM, Ray Saintonge at
saintonge(a)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