[WikiEN-l] declining numbers of EN wiki admins - The theory that making it easier to get rid of admins is a solution to the decline in their active numbers

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

Again, this gets long. If allergic to Abd Thought, or to lengthy 
comments, please don't read. Nobody is required to read this, it's 
voluntary, and you won't hear a complaint from me if you don't read it.

Actually, the mail triggered moderation, the list is set to 20 KB 
max, which is low in my experience, and it was rejected as too long. 
Therefore, instead of only needing to skip one mail, you'll need to 
skip two. This is part one.

At 03:14 PM 5/31/2010, Charles Matthews wrote:
>Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
> > At 01:35 PM 5/31/2010, Charles Matthews wrote:
> >
> >> Actually, most people who don't apply as an admin just don't apply.
> >
> > With ten million registered editors and a handful of RfAs, that's
> > obvious.
> >
> >>  They
> >> don't generate "evidence" one way or another. It is a perfectly sensible
> >> attitude for a well-adjusted Wikipedian getting on with article work not
> >> to want to be involved in admin work.
> >
> > Sure. However, there is a minority who are *not* "well-adjusted" who
> > would seek adminship for personal power.

>Yes, and the first required quality for being given such power is not to
>want it. Etc. But you were the one talking about getting painted into a
>corner.

Sure. "You were the one" implies some argument being applied to one 
side and not the other. What was that?

Barging ahead anwyay, I'd say that anyone sane would not want to be a 
Wikipedia editor unless (1) they have some axe to grind, or (2) they 
are neutral and simply want to help an obviously desirable cause. 
However, when people become highly involved, they naturally develop 
attachments, which is how it comes to be that even a quite neutral 
editor can become an abusive administrator, and this will be quite 
invisbile, for many, when they don't have the tools. The more boring 
grunt work you do, the more natural it is to think you own the 
project. After all, if not for you....

I remember reviewing the contributions of an administrator, known to 
all of us here, because of some suspicion that an sock puppeteer was 
really, from the beginning, a bad-hand account of someone, and this 
admin was a possible suspect. What I saw, reviewing edit timing, was 
thousands upon thousands of edits, for hours upon hours, a few edits 
a minute, doing repetitive tasks. The admin was running a tool that 
assisted him by feeding him proposed edits, so what he was doing, for 
many hours, was a few button pushes a minute to accept the edits. I 
was both in awe (at the dedicated work) and in wonder at how this 
could be done without losing one's sanity....

In fact, it might have been better if that work had been replaced by 
fully automated bot work, with processes and procedures for reviewing 
it and fixing problems. If he could do that for hours on end without 
error, probably a bot could as well, with only a little error, 
perhaps. But, of course, for quite good reasons, most fully automated 
bot editing has been prohibited. That's changing, to be sure, there 
is now, for example, a spambot that reverts IP additions of spam web 
sites, an intermediate position to blacklisting that allows possibly 
useful but often abused sites to be used by registered editors, and 
edits by the IPs become "suggested edits" easy to review if anyone is 
willing. And the IP could actually ask any registered user to do it, 
or register and get autoconfirmed....

Overall, editorial efficiency has been seriously neglected, because 
editorial labor was not valued. Admin labor has been valued somewhat, 
and some of the disparity between the real rights of administrators 
and those of ordinary editors comes out of assumptions about this.

So, Charles agrees that wanting power is a disqualification, and I 
agree. (You might look at RfA/Abd 2, where I addressed this, I didn't 
want to be an admin, I was merely responding to a suggestion that I 
help clean up the place, and I was quite clear that anything that I 
wanted to do, personally, wouldn't be helped by being an admin, I'd 
just be tempted to use the tools while involved. I'm pretty sure that 
I'd not have aroused serious controversy over the use of admin tools, 
but, of course, those who later were offended by me as an editor seem 
to have assumed that I'd simply have blocked anyone who disagreed 
with me. That would have been really silly!)

But if it's a disqualification at the beginning, then, we must see, 
it should remain a disqualification. If an administrator is 
personally attached to being an administrator, it's a problem. Which 
then exposes the contradiction of the picture being presented: 
supposedly people would not apply to be administrators, or perhaps 
would quit, if they saw that allegedly abusive administrators would 
lose their tools. The fact is that when controversy arises over tool 
use, the best administrators back up and back off, and hardly ever 
get taken to ArbComm, because they don't allow themselves to be the 
focus of the controversy. Rather, say, they blocked an editor, and 
the editor is complaining about bias. If the admin backs off and 
doesn't touch that editor again, but limits activity to presentation 
(at the beginning!) of the evidence behind the block, letting and 
encouraging independent review of that, the dispute becomes a dispute 
between the editor and the community, or it is resolved. A good 
administrator might even go out of his way to later do a favor for that editor.

But if the administrator starts to think of the community as divided 
into warring factions, with himself on one side and the editor on the 
other, and the admin *must* act or "they" will win, neutrality has 
been lost. As soon as you think you are personally the bulwark 
against "them," you have some kind of belief that consensus is the 
other way, or is at least not going to back you up by taking your place.

There is a kind of war going on, but we are each called upon only to 
take a position actively, maybe *once.* I'll revert a change to an 
article, with explanation, almost never more than once. As an admin I 
might block someone once, almost never more than that. If I were to 
see some problem beyond that, I'd almost certainly go to a 
noticeboard like any other editor. In an emergency, sure, but then I 
*really* need to go to that noticeboard, note that I've previously 
blocked and might be biased, and asking for review. One of the worst 
abuses I've seen of the abuse of an administrator was a desysopping 
where an admin made an unwise block, that he should have left for the 
judgment of someone else. But he had immediately gone to a 
noticeboard to ask for review! Effectively, he was punished for an 
error. That's abusive, and only if he did this again and again should 
desysopping have been on the table. All that was needed was to tell 
him that he shouldn't have blocked, and ask him to agree not to do 
it, or something like it, again. But, politics! Sometimes there is 
mob screaming for blood, wanting someone to *suffer* for this mistake.

As to the dispute involved, between the blocking admin and the editor 
blocked, I was on the other side. As hinted, I believe the block was 
an error. So? The issue should always be, is this going to be 
repeated? Even if one finds that the admin did it before, that's not 
enough to establish that the admin would repeat it after being 
troutslapped for it. And even troutslapping should be done with 
assumption of good faith and gentleness. "Just don't do it again!" 
That is, if we want to operate a volunteer project and retain wide 
participation.

(continued in Part 2, following.)