[Foundation-l] Term of service?

[Erik Moeller]

On 5/22/06, Jan Kulveit <jk-wikifound at ks.cz> wrote:
> > To de-admin someone is then to explicitly label them as
> > untrusted, and that should only be done in nasty cases. It would also
> > mean that everyone who contributes and understands the policies should
> > eventually become trusted, without a need to sum up percentages for
> > namespace contributions or edit summaries.

> Does it actually work that way on any project of moderate to large size?

I don't know if you count en.wikinews.org as moderate to large, but it
certainly has a very high percentage of admins (41, 0.5% of reg'd
users vs. en.wikipedia's 0.06%), much more so among active users.
There are two conditions for becoming an admin:

   1. You've done at least a month's work on Wikinews.
   2. You are trusted by the community.

We flag inactive admins as such. We've had a couple of wheel wars, but
I think over time policy will evolve to prevent that. So far I haven't
seen a trend at all to assign admins editorial roles, rather there
seems to be a strong community culture against that.

WN is different from WP in many ways (most importantly, community
attention always focuses on a small set of articles at a given time).
Yet, I see no automatism towards bigger editorial roles for sysops or
stronger criteria for nomination within any given community. For
instance, in spite of both communities being huge, admin roles in
de.wp are significantly broader than in en.wp.

I think it depends more on what the philosophy of the most active
initial contributors in a community is. This tends to guide the
evolution of policy and practice. Newbies tend to assume the word of
oldbies as unquestionable fact. "It is so because it has always been
so."

The notion that policy itself is a mechanism that can be radically
edited, literally, is alien to many. After all, it doesn't work like
that in the real world. In the real world, people whine about things
they feel they cannot change. So, rather than proposing constructive
changes to policy, newbies often whine about evil admin power abuse,
etc.

As I said, I also think the term "adminship" notoriously tends to lead
to stronger assumptions of roles. I have seen countless media reports
where "admins" were, essentially, considered to be the staff of the
site that makes editorial decisions. This is understandable given the
choice of name, and many newbies have the same expectations. And
doesn't "admin cabal" sound much scarier than "trusted user cabal"?
The name suggests much more power than I think the role should hold.

This discussion, particlarly on foundation-l, is a good idea, BTW. We
need a lot more communication about policies across projects and
languages. Statistics and comparison grids would be even nicer.

Erik