JAY JG wrote:
What tangible (not philosophical) benefits in terms of creating a
better encyclopedia would these changes provide?
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.
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. 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.
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,
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.
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.
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?
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.
This is simply another attempt to fix a non-existent
problem.
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.
Imagine a bunch of page-move/pelican-shit vandals
admins working
together.
We've already had page-move vandals working together. We've dealt with them.
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.
particularly as these changes do not seem to be at all
for the
purpose of making a better encyclopedia.
See above.
Timwi