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

Tue Jun 21 20:56:24 UTC 2005

On 6/21/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:

> This is why I look forward to graduated user rights levels. The
> abilities to block, delete, protect, and revert should all be assigned
> individually, not as a lump sum just for "doing a few hours RC patrol,
> having a bajillion edits and working on a featured article". Sure, those
> things make a person a good Wikipedian, but does that justify adminship?

Actually, yes.. and no.
Adminship should be granted to everyone who has the ability to
correctly use the admin functions correctly almost all of the time.
This means never using them as a favor, to add bias, or to slant power
in a dispute. This is a pretty low bar and it's the only bar we need
over those functions to keep wikipedia working well.  I'm not sure
that granular access will help all that much as most people who can be
trusted to use any one of them could probably use them all without
issue (cept perhaps the revert button).

For practical reasons we can't just give adminship to all editors and
only take it away from the abusers: because abusers would keep
inventing new identities to keep getting adminship.

But that doesn't leave us with holding a near popularity contest as
the only option:  We could require that once a user demonstrates a
substantial time and effort investment in the main namespace they are
automatically admined absent any preexisting strong evidence that they
are already a problem editor.  (So even if a troll wants to keep
getting adminship to abuse it, he must do a kiloedit or two to the
actual articles, ... sounds like a fair trade even it means
occasionally we get a troll admin that causes a little damage before
we deadmin them).  We could control the influx of new people causing a
lot of work for those monitoring their behavior by only adding a fixed
number every month, selected at random from the top 10% by edit count
of eligible nonadmin users) .  I know many think that edit count is a
poor judge, but if you only count the main namespace I think the sort
of people who will make good users of the admin fuctions will tend to
rack up the edits (by doing rc partol and such).

Once a user abused their administrative powers, it should be
revoked... with the usual allowances for minor screwups and human
nature.  It has been pointed out elsewhere, that adminship shouldn't
be a wonderful award. As a result we probably should deal with
adminship behavioural burps by temp-deadmining, but rather by a temp
block.

I think there is also the room for setting aside special titles and
roles to recognize our appreciation of  substantial contributors of
all forms... But it is silly of us to conflate this honor with the
award of some technical functions.