G'day Steve,
On 4/1/06, charles matthews
<charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
Does the
riot act say "team A is right", or does it say "I don't care
who's right, play nicely please"?
The latter. No personal attacks, for example. It is a different matter when
an admin says this, compared to people going on about ad hominem in a
pot-kettle situation.
Right, so having gotten an article to featured article status is not
necessarily a useful training ground for being an admin? In the same
way that being a great soccer player is not necessarily an advantage
in being a great referee, or being a great pianist is not particularly
useful in being a piano tuner...
It is not necessary to have been a good player to become a good referee;
or, indeed, to have played at all. However, it helps ... oh, crikey,
does it help! The more experience you can get with the game (in my
experience this applies to every game I've played or officiated), the
easier it is to officiate that game. In a sporting context, being a
player yourself helps you understand what the players require from an
official, what things are trivial[0], what things are dangerous and tend
to upset players and need to be stamped on, and so on. It is possible
to learn these things, but it takes time, and while you're busy trying
to work out what's expected of you your reputation suffers.
On Wikipedia this manifests itself differently. Those of us of a
"process is descriptive, not prescriptive" bent like to see admins who
have a handle on the way Wikipedia works, who can be trusted to do what
seems best for the project (as opposed to just doing what policy says
or, worse, just doing what they feel like). The more experience in the
different areas of Wikipedia one has, the better an admin they'll make.
RC patrol and stub-sorting produces awe-inspiring edit counts, but
doesn't really provide any real insight to how Wikipedia works. Now, an
admin who becomes an admin solely on the strength of his vandal-fighting
abilities is fine, so long as he restricts himself to vandal-fighting
... and doesn't run off to speedy delete stuff that doesn't need
deleting, or close AfDs with "x% said delete/keep", or unblock patently
offensive usernames because "you need a better summary than 'username'",
or semi-protect pages because one vandal added 'poop' to the lede, or
apply indefinite range blocks, or ...
There are plenty of things a good editor might find useful about
adminship, and plenty of reasons why a good vandal-fighter might not be
a good admin. Remember the CVU newbie syndrome from a while back? "I
don't have a fucking clue about Wikipedia, but I'm good at whacking
newbies, so I should have admin tools!"
The more experience you get, the greater an understanding of the project
your receive, and (theoretically), the better an admin you are. This
applies to all aspects of the project, whether you're stub-sorting, RC
patrolling, newpages patrolling, on the welcome committee, mediating,
working on the cleanup backlog, fixing typos, crafting FAs, or even just
simply editing for fun once in a while. Administrator is a
Wikipedia-wide rĂ´le, and not just the preserve of one aspect of the project.
[0] Some levels of football expect to be allowed to get away with a
certain degree of holding, pushing, etc. Some levels of softball
expect some latitude with leaving the base early, pitching, etc.
Some levels of netball expect you to go easy on the stepping,
contact, etc. And so on ... knowing which level expects what, and
how much to allow and how much to come down hard, is vital to the
game. Be too strict, and you can kill the game. Be too laid-back,
and the players will take advantage of you.
--
Mark Gallagher
"What? I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse
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