[WikiEN-l] RickK leaving: adminship has become much more than "no big deal" and that's poisonous

Tue Jun 21 06:14:38 UTC 2005

michaelturley at myway.com:

> Part of the more general problem I see here that causes this 
 > is that granting administratorship at Wikipedia is meant to be
 > "no big deal", yet anything that even hints at removing such,
 > even for an hour or two, is the seen as end of the world as we
 > know it.

If adminship is meant to be no big deal, there are a number of things 
that should be changed, I think.

* Rename adminship to "trusted users" and greatly relax the criteria for 
becoming a TU (certainly in terms of minimum number of edits, which is 
getting excessive)
* Make all TU actions reversible, and possibly require quorums for some
* Make privileges individually revokable (banning, deleting, protecting 
etc.) in case of policy violations
* Decrease technical dependency on admins for tasks like deletion and 
protection - see http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?DevolvePower
* Have fast procedures in place for revocation of privileges, but only 
in cases of proven repeated and persistent violations of policy.

Getting adminship is like an initiation rite, and that makes it special 
to anyone who goes through it. Some even go through it repeatedly. It's 
a judgment call on the contributor's "worth" as much as on whether they 
are trusted. "Not enough edits!" "Writes insufficient summaries!" 
"Doesn't use preview enough!" It's also a big deal because 
"administrator of Wikipedia" is a nice title. I think the name 
"bureaucrats" is very clever in comparison.

Someone who goes through the RFA process is often likely to feel that 
they *deserve* to be treated specially. They are now part of the core 
group, after all. If you slap them repeatedly, that's not going to make 
things better -- it will only generate friction between the slapper and 
the slappee. :-)

Let's not limit ourselves to thinking with a fixed set of parameters, 
especially those related to punishment. Hurting some people in order to 
help others may sometimes be necessary, but if you feel the need to do 
this frequently, step back and analyze the system itself. I believe that 
the way to make adminship "not a big deal" is to flatten the power 
structure of Wikipedia tecnically and socially and to atomize privileges.

Erik