[Wikipedia-l] Re: Optimize <s>mentoring</s> monitoring system

Sat Jul 3 01:43:39 UTC 2004

Fennec Foxen wrote:

>On Fri, 2 Jul 2004 14:17:12 +0200, Erik Zachte <e.p.zachte at chello.nl> wrote:
>  
>
>>Only trusted mentors should have access to this function to avoid trolls
>>approving their own edits.
>>    
>>
>"Trusted mentor"?
>If you're proposing a new permissions bit, how will we go about
>selecting people to fill the role? What would you say to the
>(numerous) objections about there being a new role, the confusing
>and/or evil heirerarchy, and stuff like that?
>
>Or would you rather attach this to the Administrator role? What would
>the risks of that be, with... <ahemahem> certain administrators whose
>neutrality have been questioned of late?
>
Well, naturally that will lead to people patrolling the un-trusted 
mentors to make sure that the areas they're responsible for covering are 
being handled "properly". Dr. Seuss wrote an entertaining bit about the 
fictional residents of Hawtch-Hawtch, who assign someone to watch a bee 
work. When the bee's work doesn't improve, they have someone watch the 
bee-watcher, and then someone watches the bee-watcher-watcher, and so 
forth. Given the predilection so many of us have for looking over other 
people's shoulders to check their work, it seems that we're headed down 
that path.

So, a word to the wise for the developers - don't delude yourselves that 
coding this kind of feature will ever satisfy people. They'll just want 
you to duplicate the work again later, one step higher in the food chain.

Mentoring is _very_ different from monitoring.

--Michael Snow
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/attachments/20040702/a838eeec/attachment.htm 