[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

[David Goodman]

Administrators differ in competence, and perhaps even in
trustworthiness,  but I think experience has shown that not even the
most experienced and trusted of all will always correctly interpret
the view of the community, and that nobody whomsoever can really trust
himself or be trusted by others to be free from bias. I see no reason
to think that the long-term administrators are any more likely to show
neutrality or a proper self-perception as the newer ones. If anything,
they are more likely to have an over-extensive bview of the centrality
of their own ideas.   Consequently, I think   there is no other basis
by which any administrator can make a decision except by consensus,
implied or express . For those who are   willing to read beyond the
first paragraph:

in general I do not think it is the business of the closer to decide
between conflicting policies. Their job is to discard arguments not
based on any policy, or, sometimes, by SPAs, and then judge consensus.
The questions asked at RfAdmin are enough to identify admins who know
enough to tell what is policy and what is not, as long as things don't
get too complicated. It is not enough to identify admins who
understand all policies well enough to judge which of conflicting ones
to apply, or how to interpret them in difficult situations. A good
thing, too, or we'd have chaos, because none of us agrees for all of
that. The only people here competent to judge conflicting content
policies or how to interpret them are the interested members of the
community as a whole, acting in good faith. It is by the community's
express consensus that  BLP and Copyright  trump other policies if the
situation is unambiguous. But how the BLP and copyright policies are
to be interpreted and applied in any particular instance is a question
for the community, not individual administrators.

The assumption in closing is that after discarding non-arguments, the
consensus view will be the correct one, and that any neutral admin
would agree. Thus there is in theory no difference between closing per
the majority and closing per the strongest argument. But when there is
a real dispute on what argument is relevant, the closer is not to
decide between them , but close according to what most people in the
discussion say. If the closer has a strong view on the matter, he
should join the argument instead of closing, and try to affect
consensus that way.   I (and almost all other admins) have closed keep
when we personally would have preferred delete, and vice-versa.   .

When   admins delete by Speedy, it is on the assumption that what they
are doing is so unambiguous that the community has given implied
consensus in advance. If someone challenges this is good faith, the
proper response is to simply send the article for AfD, and find out
the express consensus.

If I wanted a place where my view of proper content would prevail, I'd
start a blog or become an editor of some conventional publication.


On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 5:51 PM, David Lindsey <dvdlndsy at gmail.com> wrote:
> The key is not making it easier to remove adminship.  This proposal gets us
> closer to the real problem, but fails to fully perceive it as does the
> common call to separate the functions of adminship.
>
> The real solution to the current (and relatively long-standing) problems
> with RfA and adminship in general is the marriage of the "technical" side of
> adminship with a "political" side, which is rarely acknowledged.  Successful
> reform will involve separating these two aspects, rather than the more
> common idea to separate some technical pieces from others.  The proposal
> below is a bit lenghty, but it's the product of years of thought, and I
> encourage you to read it.  If you don't have the time, well then, the take
> away point is that we should create a distinction between those
> administrators trusted to intervene in highly-controversial areas and those
> not so trusted.
>
> The technical bits of adminship are, indeed, no big deal.  With a large
> community of administrators and an alert body of stewards, the possible
> danger of obvious abuse of the administrator privileges is nearly zero.  As
> an illustration, in the heat of the recent dust-up on commons, an
> administrator there "went rogue" and vandalized the main page.  His edits
> were reverted in less than a minute:
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&action=historysubmit&diff=38894158&oldid=38894141.
> Even in an absolute worst-case scenario of administrator abuse (for example,
> vandalizing the main page and then deleting a large number of pages with
> just less than 5,000 revisions in an attempt to lock the servers, especially
> abusive shenanigans in the MediaWiki namespace, or inserting malicious code
> into monobooks), the damage done would be reversed in under 10 minutes.
> Given this, it is highly improbable that any vandal/banned user would
> attempt to gain administrator status solely for the purpose of carrying out
> some such abuse.  The danger comes from a compromised account or a higly
> disaffected administrator, and neither of these possibilities can be headed
> off by any level of standards at RfA, however high.
>
> Why, then, has adminship become a big deal?  Because in addition to the
> purely technical functions of adminship, administrators also have a
> political function.  Administrators are often compared to janitors, but the
> metaphor is highly flawed.  Janitors empty the wastebins, but they don't
> decide what should go in them.  Many of the functions of adminship do not
> carry a significant political component: blocking obvious vandals, most
> instances of speedy deletion, fixing cut and paste moves, deleting old
> userpages, straightforward AfD closures, etc. are simple instances where a
> trusted user is needed to perform a technical function.
>
> On the other hand, there are cases were administrator functions become
> highly charged and political - in closing controversial AfDs, blocking in
> many 3RR situations, and above all, in cases where some sort of intervention
> is necessary against well-established users who have engaged in some sort of
> unacceptable conduct.  In these cases, the role of the administrator is
> fraught and ambiguous.  He is faced with highly political choices about how
> to judge consensus, what course of action to take, etc.  It is customary for
> relatively new and inexperienced administrators to stay out of these
> situations and leave the decision up to an administrator who has more
> experience and, for that matter, for political weight within the Wikipedia
> system.
>
> The problem, though, is that there is no formal guidance of any kind as to
> who should actually make such decisions.  From a policy perspective, an
> administrator sysopped last week has the same standing as someone with years
> of service.  More importantly, a long-standing administrator with a
> reputation for more questionable judgment has exactly the same standing as a
> long-standing administrator with a reputation for impeccable judgement.
> There is no drawn by the community, except in the various most informal way,
> to separate administrators who should intervene in highly controversial
> situations from those who should not.
>
> It is intervention in the highly controversial cases that causes problems
> and allegations of abuse.  Our concern is, or at least should be, primarily
> in who is making highly controversial administrator judgements and on what
> basis, not who is carrying out F5 speedy deletions or blocking obvious
> vandals.  Concern over these highly controversial judgements, because there
> is no line separating those administrators who engage in them from those who
> do not, is what has driven steadily escalating standards at RfA.  We are
> less concerned that a newly-appointed admin will prematurely block a vandal
> without any warnings tomorrow, than that he will, in 12 months, block a
> well-established user for the wrong reasons after a heated debate at ANI.
> In other words, the problem is that RfA is being asked to make a judgment
> that should not be made at RfA.
>
> What we need, then, is not a way to desysop more easily, but rather a way to
> delineate highly-charged and controversial administrator actions, and the
> administrators qualified to perform them, from uncontroversial administrator
> actions, and the administrators qualified to perform them.  I will not
> presume to provide a full criteria for what separates controversial from
> uncontroversial administrator actions, but I would suggest something along
> the lines of the following.  Controversial: Arbitration enforcement actions,
> blocks of established users for any reason other than suspicion of account
> compromise, close of AfDs where the consensus is not clear (this of course
> becomes itself a murky distinction, but could be well enough set apart),
> reversal of the actions of another administrator except when those actions
> are plainly abusive.  Non-controversial: All others.
>
> As for deciding which administrators are qualified to make decisions in the
> most controversial areas, I would suggest that we already have a group of
> people, the bureaucrats, in whose judgement the community has expressed
> particularly high confidence.  I would propose that the bureaucrats become
> the group who are expected to undertake the controversial administrator
> actions; this would almost certainly entail some expansion of the current
> bureaucrat pool, but personally I like the idea of tying the controversial
> administrator actions to the ability to promote administrators - it
> underlines their seriousness, and at present, the bureaucrats do not have
> many functions.  If, however ,the community is unwilling to combine the two
> groups, another group, say "sub-bureaucrats" could be created, but I must
> emphasize the importance of a bright-line distinction between those
> administrators trusted to perform highly controversial tasks and those not
> trusted to do so.  Obviously, the ordinary administrators would still have
> the technical ability to intervene in the highly controversial areas, but
> doing so would obviously entail serious consequences or desysopping.
>
> This brings up a final point: the issue of administrators with insufficient
> knowledge to appropriately follow policy on, for example, speedy deletion.
> I firmly believe that if we separate the political and non-political aspects
> of adminship, this becomes less of an issue.  While an administrator taking
> the wrong course in a controversial area is akin to a janitor, who is
> empowered to decide what to throw out, deciding to throw away your important
> papers because he doubts their importance, the mistakes of lack of policy
> knowledge and inexperience are more like a janitor who, because he doesnt'
> know any better, throws away the recycling and attempts to recycle the
> rubbish.  The second category of mistake is more easily rectified.  The old
> idea, of some sort of mentoring for new administrators, does nothing about
> the political aspects of adminship (making controversial decisions) which is
> why it has failed in the past, but it is a perfect solution to the problem
> of inexperience/ignorance.  New administrators who do not have a full grasp
> of the speedy deletion policy, or the blocking policy for vandals, or the
> criteria for granting autoreviewer status would be encouraged, perhaps
> through a formal process, to get up to speed on those areas by a more
> experienced mentor.  If we carry through this proposal, there is every
> reason to believe that the crowd at RfA would be much more willing to
> promote more candidates and the process would become much less grueling.
> Our shortage of people to perform technical tasks could be easily reduced,
> if not eliminated.
>
> This proposal is not process creep or the introduction of unneeded
> bureaucracy.  It is also not an answer in search of a problem.  There is
> clear acknowledgement that we have a problem, and this solution is a
> minimalist one.  As I have proposed it, it simply takes advantage of an
> existing process (RfB) and group of users (bureaucrats) and would require
> only minimal amendments to policy, setting aside those areas of
> administrator conduct that are highly controversial and requiring that only
> bureaucrats act in those areas.
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-- 
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG