[Foundation-l] Friendliness: a radical proposal -- some proposed details and a diagram

[David Goodman]

The actual work of helping new editors and monitoring quality does not
require an admin, and most of the people doing it are not admins. The
main thing I use admin tools for is to delete hopelessly unacceptable
articles, but almost everything I delete has been spotted by a
non-admin. However, most of what I do is not the use of admin tools,
but explaining to the authors of these who have come in good faith
what was wrong and how they can do better, & encouraging the
potentially good ones to stay. Anyone who has sufficient learned or
innate politeness & understanding can do that.

And anyone with politeness and understanding can pass rfa, if they
care to, if they are willing to tolerate some stupid remarks. The
ability to patiently tolerate stupidity is and ought to remain  one of
the requirements for being an admin.

On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 1:42 PM, Neil Harris <neil at tonal.clara.co.uk> wrote:
> Here are some more details to flesh out my proposal for new admin creation.
>
> Proposed rate of automatic new admin creation: 5% a month, until back to
> early-Wikipedia proportions of admin number relative to edit rate.
>
> Although this sounds a lot, it's only about 3 new admins a day.
>
> ---------------------
>
> State transitions:
>
> IP user
> |
> |  Creates an account, passes captcha test
> V
> User
> |
> |  Time passes
> V
> Autoconfirmed user
> |
> |   Time passes. User gets chosen at random from pool of all editors,
> followed by machine checking for good participation. The daily rate of
> random selection is tuned to generate the correct rate of new admins
> over the long term.
> V
> Proposed new admin
> |
> |   Gets message. Sends a request message to a list. Any "old admin"
> checks for human-like edits, then performs one-click action to issue
> admin bit. If they don't respond within (say) two weeks, the invitation
> is withdrawn, and they have to wait to be be drawn again at random.
> V
> New admin, with limited powers
> |
> |   One year passes without being de-adminned
> V
> Old admin, with full powers
>
> ----------------------
>
> Some possible machine-detectable criteria for "good participation",
> based on edits:
>
> * Account age: Has been a Wikipedia contributor for at least two years.
> * Recent activity: Has made at least one edit in at least X days in the
> last three months.
> * Recent blocks: has not been blocked at all in the last year
> * Responsiveness: Has edited a user page of an editor who has edited
> their user page, at least Y times in the last three months.
> * Edit comments: Has added a non-trivial edit comment to at least Z% of
> their edits
> * Namespaces: Has edited some balanced mix of articles, talk pages, user
> talk pages, and project talk pages, within the last three months
>
> Note that this is a satisficing activity -- the aim is not to find the
> best editors, or to be fair, but just to select active Wikipedia
> participants who know their way around, and are not misbehaving, and
> then select some of them by lot.
>
> The final test, for humanness, necessarily needs to be performed by a
> human being, to avoid the threat of bots gaming the system, but, if as
> suggested above, there are only about three or four candidates proposed
> each day.
>
> Note also that almost this process can be implemented in a bot,
> independently of the actual wikipedia software itself.
>
> -- Neil
>
>
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-- 
David Goodman

DGG at the enWP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG