[WikiEN-l] Thoughts on the process of requesting adminship

Fri Jul 1 00:38:00 UTC 2005

>From: Timwi <timwi at gmx.net>
>
>
>I was going to post this as a reply to another posting, but my thoughts 
>have become somewhat general, and so I'm posting this as a new entry.
>
>I have come to realise that our current process of requesting adminship is 
>at a sharp contrast to the wiki model in general. I have come to believe 
>that we are not following our own principles that we so highly value.

What tangible (not philosophical) benefits in terms of creating a better 
encyclopedia would these changes provide?

>Why do we let anyone edit? Because we believe that assuming good faith is a 
>good thing. We let people edit because they can't do any lasting damage 
>anyway; if they turn out to be editing in bad faith, we can still revert 
>their edits and block them later. No permanent damage done. We also let 
>people edit because we believe that they are innocent until they show 
>themselves guilty.
>
>Incidentally, with admin powers, we handle it quite differently. Not only 
>does becoming an admin require majority support, but it is even the case 
>that many people vote "oppose" on the grounds of lack of dedication, lack 
>of a minimum number of edits, or lack of involvement in community issues. 
>They can apparently get away with an argument that essentially amounts to 
>saying "we can't really be sure they're innocent, so we'll have to assume 
>they're guilty for now". As a result, there are people who are not admins 
>even though they would never be doing anything wrong if they were. Those 
>people should be admins.

Disagree.  Admin is a position of increased responsibility and trust; trust 
must be earned.

>If we disregard for a moment that admins can delete images permanently, 
>which surely can be rectified in a future software update, admins cannot do 
>any lasting damage, just like editors. As such, their situation is a quite 
>close analogy to the case of the editors.

Why not have everyone made bureaucrats while you're at it? They can't do 
much harm either, nothing that can't be undone.

>If we applied the current request-for-adminship philosophy to editing, we 
>would have to vote on everybody's right to edit before allowing them to 
>edit!

The analogy is poor; admins have only a small number of additional powers; a 
few more or fewer would have little impact on the workings of Wikipedia.  
Having to vote on edits, on the other hands, would radically change an 
impeded Wikipedia's function.

>As a first step, I would like to suggest to make it policy that "oppose" 
>votes must be accompanied by reasoning indicating the nominee's past 
>wrongdoing or potential for wrongdoing. It should not be permitted to vote 
>"oppose" just because someone has "only a few hundred edits", as this is 
>neither a crime nor a sign of bad faith. As a safeguard against crackpots 
>nominating themselves straight after their first edit, however, I suggest 
>that candidates must be nominated by an existing admin.

Not only is this easily gamed, 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.

>In the long-term, my suggestion is to abolish the requirement for majority 
>vote. Anyone who is already an admin is trusted; I think someone nominated 
>by an existing admin should therefore be given a certain "initial trust" 
>too. Thus, admins should be able to just appoint other admins. As for 
>removing adminship, ideally I would like to see the process closely 
>resemble that for blocking users. The things we have collected at 
>[[Wikipedia:Blocking policy]] have evolved over time; a similar 
>"deadminning policy", containing various behaviours that warrant 
>deadminning without a vote, is surely conceivable. In particular, I can 
>imagine the 3RR apply to page-protection, deletion/undeletion, or 
>blocking/unblocking other users. Having more admins, and therefore more 
>sensible admins ;-), makes this much easier to keep under control by the 
>community.

As has been pointed out, there are already plenty of admins, 500 and 
growing, more than enough, and there is a process of voting them in which 
ensures that they are generally quite sensible.  This is simply another 
attempt to fix a non-existent problem.

>What if tens of people gang up, all become admins and then do lots of bad 
>stuff? Well, it is already possible for people to gang up -- and indeed, 
>gangs of web forum users have done so in the past.

The ones who did so in the past were rather stupid, which was inevitable, 
given their beliefs.  In the future this would be a much more serious 
problem, and could severely disable Wikipedia.  Imagine a bunch of 
page-move/pelican-shit vandals admins working together.

Though some people seem to keep forgetting this, the primary purpose of 
Wikipedia is to create an encyclopedia, not experiment with 
anarcho-democracy, or create an on-line trust community or online group 
therapy for internet trolls.  Changes to current processes which are 
currently working well make no sense, particularly as these changes do not 
seem to be at all for the purpose of making a better encyclopedia.

Jay.