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

[Marc Riddell]

on 2/26/11 3:52 PM, David Goodman at dggenwp at gmail.com wrote:

> 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.

Yes!
> 
> 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.

As it is with clinicians :-). I've been called things I had to look up!:-)
Yes, David, this is what I meant when I have said that a culture cannot be
mandated or legislated. It must happen one person at a time, each time we
communicate with another person. And the ability to interact with another
person in a civil manner should be a requirement for everyone working on the
Project. It then becomes the hallmark, the distinguishing feature of a
Wikipedian.

Marc Riddell

> 
> 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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> 
>