[WikiEN-l] Newbie and not-so-newbie biting

[Carcharoth]

On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 11:35 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/9/18 George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com>:
>
>> I almost wish we had an admin action review board, whose job it was to
>> say just quickly look at some fraction (10%?  1%?) of all admin
>> actions and see if they're documented, justified, reasonable etc and
>> give the admins feedback, request more writeup, ask for
>> reconsideration etc.
>
> +1
>
> This is a most thoroughly excellent idea. Reviewed by a stable group
> of reasonably known and sane people, not just whichever people have
> shown up at ANI that day. I suspect that'd mean the arbcom, who are
> quite busy enough ... but hmm.

It is possible to use "Special:Random" to bring up a random editor,
but that is next to useless because of the number of inactive editors.
Something to randomly generate active admins for review would be good,
but probably not very popular. Better would be a random generator of
admin *actions* for review. Trouble is, some type of admin actions are
so voluminous and routine, that the 'bad' actions would still get lost
in the volume.

*Any* system relies on people being told how to appeal against admin
actions, and it depends on them also having the confidence that they
will get a fair hearing, and that depends on those reviewing the
actions to genuinely review them, and not just rubber-stamp them.

Again, the trouble is that the vast majority of appeals are rightly
declined. So the volume overwhelms the few bad blocks and denying of
unblock requests, and things get missed.

Some of those end up at ArbCom, sent to the arbitration mailing list
and ending up at the door of BASC (the Ban Appeals Subcommittee), but
that is only a small fraction of an undoubtedly larger number of
questionable blocks and actions that never get properly reviewed (and
that in turn is dwarfed by the very large number of correct actions).

Carcharoth