From: Timwi <timwi(a)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.