JAY JG wrote:
What tanglble (not philosophical) benefits in terms of creating a better
encyclopedia would being able to edit freely provide? Well, duh, you
have more freedom and therefore are better able to help.
So, nothing specific comes to mind then?
I think I've been specific enough, but fine, I'll be more specific.
Fighting vandalism using the rollback button, using "delete" to be able
to move page to where a lonely redirect is sitting, protecting pages
where other people are having an edit war, blocking users with obvious
violations of 3RR, ... That enough yet?
Disagree. Admin is a position of increased
responsibility and trust;
trust must be earned.
This is exactly the "we have to assume everyone's guilty" argument I
already refuted.
It's easy to refute strawman arguments; that's the reason people make
them in the first place.
From what you wrote later in the e-mail, I assume you think this is a
strawman argument because you are supposedly not actually assuming
anyone's guilty. But then my other argument kicks in that you have no
reason to lock someone out of something that would be useful to them for
helping Wikipedia if you don't even believe they're guilty of anything.
Trust must be
earned, I agree; but distrust must be
earned too. We are currently requiring too much trust for people to
become admins, and we are distrusting new users undeservedly.
Your opinion is interesting; I see no evidence that it reflects
reality.
I have given evidence of this further down in my posting.
New users are, in fact, able to completely modify just
about
any part of Wikipedia they want. This is a huge amount of trust that
already creates huge vandalism problems. What you are asking for is for
them to be given special powers to do things like easily reverting pages
and blocking users.
No, I am not asking for that. My proposal does not include anyone
gaining administrative privileges without trust from any existing admin
(quite in contrast to the editing privileges, which you get without
anyone's trust).
Not only is this easily gamed,
It's no more easily gamed than normal editing privileges are. You just
get them! If you do bad things, you lose your editing privileges.
Huh? This is nothing like normal editing privileges. Even you admit as
much, since you specify that people must be nominated by an existing
admin. If you think these powers should be no different than other
editing abilities, why not simply argue that they beome part of the
"basic package"?
I guess it's my turn to call this a strawman argument. You said "this is
easily gamed", I responded to that argument. Now you're responding with
an argument that is attacking a perceived inconsistency in my approach.
The reason we can't make them part of the "basic package" is that there
always needs to be a level "above" which isn't part of the "basic
package". That doesn't mean that we need to treat the "top level" as
such an elitist position as we do. (Yes, I know, there's also the level
of "developer", but it doesn't count because it has powers to do
irreversible things.)
but only having a few hundred edits means that other
people
evaluating the editor have little to go on when trying to assess
whether or not they will abuse being an admin.
Again, the "guilty until proven innocent" mentality. You have no
reason to believe that anyone (who hasn't even nominated themselves)
is going to abuse anything, especially not if they haven't abused
their already-present editing privileges already.
No, not "guilty until proven innocent". Rather "reserve judgement,
because the jury is still out". That's simply prudent commonsense.
It's the same "prudent common sense" that makes people who don't know
about wikis sceptical that such a system would work. There is no need to
"reserve judgement" if you can just test the person, by giving them the
privileges and seeing if they abuse them or not. Then you can pass
judgement based on actual facts rather than guessing. Reserving
judgement about granting the privileges makes sense only if the
privileges allow you to do something irreversible.
As has been pointed out, there are already plenty of
admins, 500 and
growing, more than enough,
I'm afraid "we already have 500 admins, more than enough" is an even
worse reason to vote "oppose" than "this user doesn't have enough
edits". Why should we deny anyone adminship just because we already
have 500 of them?
No-one has voted oppose on those grounds; but you are proposing that way
more people be made admins, without any sort of consensus process for
making them so, because we somehow need even more people with these
powers than already have them.
You are repeating the same argument that you made above: "We shouldn't
make more people admins because we already have enough." But not only
have I refuted this argument already (it doesn't hurt to have more if
they don't abuse it), it is also a strawman argument because it is not
refuting any argument I made (I never said we "need" more of them).
and there is a process of voting them in which ensures
that they are
generally quite sensible.
Again, so you're assuming that people are "unsensible" until you're
convinced otherwise.
No, I simply don't know if they're sensible.
Right, but you're also denying them the chance to show you that they are.
I do know that the majority of new editors are
"not sensible" in that
they are not familiar with Wikipedia policies and norms, and
therefore regularly violate them. Some editors learn the ropes
quickly; others never do, even after tens of thousands of edits,
either because they are unable to learn them, or unwilling to do so.
Right, so just because some of these people exist, others should be
denied adminship because there is a vague chance they might be one of
them. Is that what you're saying?
There is nothing wrong with violating a policy in good faith as long as
you learn your mistake and don't do it again.
I do have my
reasons for posting this proposal; I believe that there
*is* a problem. Of course most current admins won't see the problem
because they're already admins. If it's too hard for a new user to
become admin, current admins wouldn't have to care, but it means there
*is* a problem.
Huh? The problem is it's too hard for new users to become admin,
therefore it *is* a problem? That's entirely circular.
You're making it sound circular, but it isn't. As soon as someone who
deserves admin powers (because they know the policies, they won't abuse
any powers, they always act in good faith, etc.) cannot get them
(because people vote "oppose -- not enough edits"), there is a problem.
Changes to current processes which are currently
working well make no
sense,
If a user with >600 edits, >1.5 edits per day, nominated by an
existing admin, and absolutely no history of trouble or ill-behaving
for over a year, cannot become admin, the current process is clearly
*not* working well.
Why not?
Because this user should be an admin.
It seems to me (please correct me if I'm wrong) that most of your
argumentation is to oppose the idea of abolishing the adminship votes
altogether. But what do you think about my first proposal, to just make
it so that you cannot vote "oppose" based on number of edits or any
other criterion that isn't indicative of bad faith or other problematic
behaviour?
Timwi