[WikiEN-l] A BADSITES RfA piling-on

[Slim Virgin]

On 5/30/07, Michael Noda <michael.noda at gmail.com> wrote:
> As someone who has done large numbers of minor edits in the past,
> completely unaided by scripting*, I'm disappointed that you feel this
> way.  These edits are often the formatting and style edits that make
> Wikipedia look and feel like an encyclopedia.  And yet you implied
> that anyone who does mass-editing is either using a script or is
> "mindlessly hitting a button".  Was that necessary?
>
Michael, I'm sorry if you felt offended by what I wrote. I just feel
it's an issue that's going to have to be addressed at some point. My
impression is that the focus on RfAs now seems to be on vandalism
fighting and AfD voting. (This is based only on the RfAs I've looked
at over the last few months, and not a proper study.) The result is
that people are being promoted who *seem* to be very experienced
editors because they have thousands of edits. But in fact they know
little or nothing about the policies; they may have contributed
nothing to project space other than AfD; and they may have very little
article talk interaction. This raises a number of issues, primarily
that we're promoting people who may not be experienced editors and who
don't know their way around the community, and secondly that there's a
high risk of promoting people who already have admin accounts, because
it's very easy to get one if you're willing to spend a few weeks
sticking to the formula. It'd be harder if we required candidates to
have interacted on talk, engaged in writing articles and so on. That's
all I was trying to get across, not that making formatting edits is a
useless thing to do.