[WikiEN-l] You're magically made an admin. What do you do?

[Gallagher Mark George]

G'day Jeff,

> David Goodman wrote:
> > What concerns me is that we might find some FA candidates in there.
> > Can we think of an algorithm? DGG
> 
> Well, for one, there's plenty of vandalistic nonsense and copyright
> violations in the stacks of deleted stuff.  The things we lose 
> (and thus
> harm the project in ways that can't ever be truly measured) are 
> the types
> that are speedied for spam or notability or because a random 
> administratordeems them too short.

To be fair, it's not exactly poor judgment from admins --- well, it is, but not entirely.  In my experience dealing with speedies, the vast majority of improper speedies are articles that some CVUer incorrectly tagged and the admin just speedied without looking, trusting the CVUer's judgment.  Where an admin commits an improper speedy off his own bat, it's usually something along the lines of he judged that he didn't need to follow process in this case.  Incompetence vs IAR, in other words.

Towards the end of my adminship, I was removing improperly-placed tags at least as often as I was speedying articles.  Admins tend to know what they're doing, but get very lazy and instead rely on the judgment of users who *don't* know what they're doing but think they do because these chappies on the anti-vandalism IRC channel gave them the good oil.

I remember one article about an American high school that was tagged for deletion on notability grounds.  Another article, about a band, was tagged for deletion because the tagger's favourite band adopted the same name ten years before this band and he wanted all mention of the later fellows excised.  In both cases the article was deleted, without the deleting admin even reading the tag.  In the first case, the relevant admin said, "Whoops, I wasn't paying enough attention.  Sorry, will do better in future."  In the second case, the relevant admin said "Bollocks", but got in trouble later anyway for the gigantic amounts of improper speedies he was effecting.

It's too much to ask that speedy taggers Get A Clue, especially when you have organisations (I won't name it again, in view of geni's sensibilities) who actively work to suppress Cluefulness in many of our harder-working editors.  But I don't think it's too much to ask that admins, at the very least, Learn What You're Supposed To Be Fucking Doing before they do it, and Pay Attention You Dickhead before deleting stuff that should never have been removed.

<snip data/>

> So if you can filter out the vandalism and copyvios, you might 
> actuallyhave a stronger group than what's assumed.

Absolutely.


Cheers,

-- 
[[User:MarkGallagher]