[WikiEN-l] Speaking of bad and wrongness

Sat Nov 11 15:45:36 UTC 2006

On 11/11/06, Earle Martin <wikipedia at downlode.org> wrote:
>
> For the last week I've had an MfD open for an egregious example of
> process gone wrong. It'd be good to get some comments on it from
> list-members.
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion/Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/Standards/A-D

I think the biggest problems faced by those pages are that they are too
unweildy and too many of the opinions are out of date and undated.

I don't see how this can be considered "process gone wrong" or "instruction
creep".  The underlying idea is good.  I remember when I first came across
adminship.  It seemed like a cool idea.  Then I read that people with "less
than 500-1000 edits" were unlikely to pass the vote.  Since I had just a few
hundred edits I wandered off and learned about policy and all sorts of other
things, and ended up passing my RFA easily.  In part it was because of the
standards publicised by jguk - he said (at the time) that he would oppose
anyone without an FA to their name, and support a candidate with one.
Putting a good article together did not, in and of itself, prepare me for
adminship, but the time it took gave me a chance to learn about policy and
learn about Wikipedia.

Anyone who has even had an "oppose" vote with little explanation wishes for
a list of standards.  Some people have said that criteria belong in a
person's user space.  If so, then there needs to be a central directory of
these userspace criteria - so something like this list would be needed
anyway.  People who do post criteria should be required to update them, or
at least certify them, every few months, but that's a different matter...