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

Sun Jul 3 16:48:48 UTC 2005

>> It also isn't very helpful to continually hang an axe over the head
>> of good users, in regard to their adminship in this case.

> I don't think my proposal is advocating anything of the sort, unless you 
> would refer to the current threat of being blocked for inappropriate 
> behaviour as "hanging an axe over their head" too.

She considers any threat to her adminship extreme, even if it's
perfectly justified.  If adminship really isn't that big of a deal,
then a hanging axe shouldn't be a big deal either since they'd only be
losing something that doesn't matter much.  Her own logic works
against her.  Admins are a dime a dozen really and Wikipedia isn't
going to fall apart even if Wikipedia suddenly lost half its admins.

I agree with the approach of making the admin position even less of a
big deal, since that would make it less abuse prone due to the
psychological aspect of having 'special powers' being lessened and it
would allow for more accountability since being on equal grounding
means people are more likely to report and follow through with abuse.

>> The Open Directory Project continually hung an axe over people - and
>> they left as a result, in droves. Let us not make the same mistake.
> 
> I suppose we're doing the other extreme (high bar for entry to adminship 
> and even higher bar for getting "axed out" of adminship) - and we have 
> rather few good admins as a result (500 out of 25500, less than 2%, 
> isn't very much for something that's supposedly "no big deal"). That's 
> the mistake on the other side of the spectrum...

Yeah and the opposite action is horrible.  The bar for getting removed
most certainly should not be lower than what it took to get in and it
shouldn't be held to a lower standard than users.  It really doesn't
make the slightest bit of sense to do that and only serves to remove
accountability for admins.

I have to wonder, why does ambi think that admins are so valuable that
it will matter if we lose some (aside from the obvious hidden motive)?
No one will care and Wikipedia will continue functioning as normal
because Wikipedia thrives mostly because of what non-admins do.

Her analogy to ODP is completely false.  With ODP, you need special
privileges just to edit.  That was the issue, that the editors
themselves were held to high standards.  In this case, it's just the
admins.

Even with admin status removed, you're still fully capable of edits,
which is the primary purpose of Wikipedia.  Really, if you're judging
your importance in terms of being an admin instead of being a normal
editor, then you really shouldn't be on Wikipedia as you're obviously
viewing it in terms of power [tripping] rather than useful
contributions.  What's worse is that they'll try to rack up tons of
minor edits in attempt to make themselves seem valuable, when it's
really more of an image thing than anything else.

And yeah, being only 2% does make it a big deal.

Remove the importantance and emphasis on the power aspect of being an
admin and you can only help Wikipedia.

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Nathan J. Yoder
http://www.gummibears.nu/
http://www.gummibears.nu/files/njyoder_pgp.key
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