On 10/21/06, Earle Martin <wikipedia(a)downlode.org> wrote:
I was not being asked for a reason to do anything. I
was being asked
for a reason for being able to do anything, which is quite different.
I made it clear in my nomination that I wished to be judged on the
strength of my earlier contributions. And in those earlier
contributions, I made quite sure to give reasons. (Mathbot's tool
says: "Edit summary usage for Earle_Martin: 100% for major edits and
96% for minor edits. Based on the last 150 major and 131 minor edits
in the article namespace.")
As an admin you don't get to chose which questions people expect you
to answer (which can range from "why did you delete my image??????" to
"which guideline says we should not have article specific
disclaimers?" to "have you stopped blocking people against policy?").
(incidentally "because I wanted to destroy something beautiful" "who
cares?" and "I've just blocked you. Draw your own conclusions" are not
good answers.)
Is that somehow harmful to the project?
yes because it means that we have 500 people who can cause rather a
lot of chaos who are not really part of the admin community.
And why would I want to be in
any particular percentile of activity? This is a reference project,
not a game where you have to rack up a score. (See: editcountitis.)
Admins are meant to be cleaners. Standards of what makes a good admin
will differ from what makes a good editor.
Perhaps, if you (a) have many, many hours to spend on
editing
Wikipedia (I don't, being both employed and having a family to look
after) or (b) you use AutoWikiBrowser. I don't, because strangely
enough to use AWB you have to qualify by having a large number of
edits.
No I just know exactly in which areas it is possible to rack up edits
at a rate of greater than one a minute (stub sorting, orphaning images
on CSD, cating uncat articles and wikifying are the first lot that
come to mind).
Care to explain?
Politics gets complicated. It gets really complicated when the players
are wikipedians and the rules are fluid and change from minute to
minute. You can dodge the politics but that takes a fair bit of
knowledge of what is going on.
Care to explain?
Comments are aimed at other editors. Neutral votes are aimed at bureaucrats.
Sorry, but making oblique references to events I did
not witness
involving a person I've never spoken to is a remarkably useless way to
answer a point.
It is however an excellent demonstration. Unless you know about the
events behind that comment people will appear to be acting
irrationally where in fact they are not doing so. The "I promise not
to go batshit" is meaningless unless you know what people consider to
be going ah "batshit".
--
geni