[Foundation-l] Friendliness: a radical proposal

[Theo10011]

On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 11:43 PM, Neil Harris <neil at tonal.clara.co.uk>wrote:

> Thesis:
>
> The main reason why Wikipedia seems unfriendly to beginners is the
> reduction in the assumption of good faith. A lot of this could be
> resolved simply by creating large numbers of new admins. This should be
> done automatically. So why not just do it?
>
> Argument and proposal:
>
> Many admins and edit patrollers find themselves forced into an
> aggressive stance in order to keep up with the firehose of issues that
> need to be dealt with, a surprising amount of which is fueled by
> deliberate malice and stupidity and actually does require an aggressive
> and proactive response.
>
> This is not the admins' fault. The major reason for this is the broken
> RfA process, which has slowed the creation of new admins to a trickle,
> and has led to an admin shortage, which in turn has led to the current
> whack-a-mole attitude to new editors, and a reduction in the ability to
> assume good faith.
>
> I'd like to move back to an older era, where adminship was "no big
> deal", and was allocated to any reasonably polite and competent editor,
> instead of requiring them to in effect run for political office.
>
> If, say, over the next three years, we could double the number of
> admins, we could halve the individual admin's workload, and give them
> more a lot more time for assuming good faith. And, with the lesser
> workload and more good faith, there will be a lot less aggression
> required, and that will trickle outwards throughout the entire community.
>
> I can't see any reason why this shouldn't be done by an semi-automated
> process, completely removing the existing broken RfA process.
>
> Now it might be argued that this is a bad idea, because adminship
> confers too much power in one go.  If so, the admin bit could be broken
> out into a base "new admin" role, and a set of specific extra "old
> admin" powers which can be granted automatically to all admins in good
> standing, after a period of perhaps a year. For an example of the kind
> of power restrictions I have in mind, perhaps base new admins might be
> able to deliver blocks of up to a month only, with the capability of
> longer blocks arriving when they have had the admin bit for long enough.
>
> All existing admins would be grandfathered in as "old admins" in this
> scheme, with no change in their powers. Every new admin should be
> granted the full "old admin" powers automatically after one year, unless
> they've done something so bad as to be worthy of stripping their admin
> bit completely.
>
> None of this should be presented as a rank or status system -- there
> should only be "new admins", and "old admins" with the only distinction
> being the length they have been wielding their powers -- admin "ageism"
> should be a specifically taboo activity.
>
> Now, we could quite easily use a computer program to make a
> pre-qualified list of editors who have edited a wide variety of pages,
> interacted with other users, avoided recent blocks, etc. etc., and then
> from time to time send a randomly chosen subset of them a message that
> they can now ask any "old admin" to turn on their admin bit, with this
> request expected not to be unreasonably withheld, provided their edits
> are recognizably human in nature. (The reason why "new admins" should
> not be able to create other admins is to prevent the creation of armies
> of sockpuppet sleeper admin accounts riding on top of this process -- a
> year of competent adminning should suffice as a Turing test.)
>
> So: unless there is a good reason not to, why not do this?
>
> -- Neil
>
>
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I think those are two separate issues. I don't think having a large number
of admins would have an effect on apparent friendliness to beginners, if I
had to guess I would say having more admins would probably increase the
degree of alienation. Admins do a lot of janitorial tasks, having more would
prob. increase the administrative activity. This is in addition to having
new admins who wouldn't have been properly vetted by the community, which
would bring in new and unknown admins into the equation. There is an another
school of thought, who believe that some admins might be the problem.
Beginners might not be able to separate or understand that an admins actions
is isolated and doesn't represent the larger community, they're probably
unaware of possible recourse available to them after an administrative
action.

The second problem is the current RfA process, which I agree has been
getting really restrictive for genuine candidates. I saw people oppose
deserving candidates for the most trivial of reasons, from a single userbox
to not being descriptive enough in edit summaries. I agree that we need to
reconsider the current RfA process, the number of new admins has been
falling steadily. I would support going back to the old days when adminship
wasn't a big deal, but it has to be restricted to deserving candidates. The
current standards don't need to be applied so stringently in my opinion.

As for the tool to inform eligible candidates, I believe there might be
something similar already available to find qualifying candidates, using a
bot to inform eligible candidates is not the issue. Its the current RfA
process thats intimidating to editors. Dividing the Admin bit in two has
probably already been considered to some extent, the rollbacker rights on
en.wp might be an example. I think we need more admins and to a certain
degree, they need to go through some community vetting but not at the
current level of scrutiny.


Theo