On 7/3/05, SJ <2.718281828(a)gmail.com> wrote:
There is no fundamental reason not to apply soft
security to
adminship. A few technical changes which should be made to allow
this:
That it's unnecessary, for starters. What we have now works fine.
Changing that creates a whole lot of security problems that we just
don't need - particularly with no compelling reason to change in the
first place.
And a few social changes : If you reduce hard
security, you do have to
increase soft security.
* It would become normal for admins who crossed a line to be
admonished and forced to stop using admin powers for a short while,
just as good users are sometimes blocked for a short while.
* There would be a page for people to discuss users who shouldn't be admins.
* If an admin were admonished, the person who nominated that admin
should be also; people should take responsibility for their
sponsorships
What purpose does this serve? It builds adminship up into some sort of
huge thing that it isn't. If you generally behave yourself and make a
few good edits, you become an admin. It really isn't very hard. It
also isn't very helpful to continually hang an axe over the head of
good users, in regard to their adminship in this case. People make
mistakes. The Open Directory Project continually hung an axe over
people - and they left as a result, in droves. Let us not make the
same mistake. If someone isn't doing something *seriously* wrong,
their only *need* to have anything to do with meta stuff at all is to
request adminship.
One final thing I would like to stress : we take in
all manner of
people who *can't write* and, by allowing them to try for weeks and
months, in the presence of good models, we teach them. People who
have never been good writers become skilled at writing crisp, neutral,
encyclopedic prose... even if they still can't write a decent letter
to their parents.
Somehow I suspect this would be a lot more trouble than it's worth. If
someone is that antisocial that they're not trusted enough to become
an admin, then perhaps they should look to themselves. Wikipedia is
not group therapy.
Ond of the advantages of making adminship more open
would be that more
people would learn to be skillful, neutral administrators.
Where is the problem that would warrant this?
-- ambi