On 5/30/07, Michael Noda michael.noda@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.