[WikiEN-l] Worthy admins? (was "The userbox fad")

Wed Jan 4 12:22:30 UTC 2006

Hi,
  Time for hiercharchies of admins? Give "rollback" powers to anyone
with half a clue. Save temporary block powers for people with a whole
clue.  Save permanent block/ban powers for people with demonstrated
good judgement, preferably on the previous levels.

Not to make it a prestige thing, of course...

Steve

On 1/4/06, Jake Nelson <duskwave at gmail.com> wrote:
> All this discussion of admin standards is pretty funny, when so many of
> the longtime admins who end up pontificating on policy got their post
> within virtually no support votes at all... hell, look at mine, not that
> I consider myself that much of an oldtimer: 3 votes. That's it. I'd been
> on Wikipedia all of two months, with only ~600 edits. Even then (which
> was late 2003), there was some discussion of how it might be too HARD
> for people to become admins, as we then (and much, much, much more now)
> needed more people able to fight vandals effectively.
>
> It's often underappreciated just how important that little rollback link
> is for efficiently removing vandalism from a large number of pages. And
> we need more people to have it. Many times, I'll set Recent Changes to
> hide logged-in users, 500 edits to a page, and 'diff' everything on that
> page... and while all those edits will have scrolled off the view of
> anyone else trying that by the time I'm done, there'll still be a bunch
> of uncaught blatant profanity edits that slipped through. It's like a
> firehose sometimes. (I'm inclined to make some strained simile involving
> strainers or buckets and not enough, etc... but I won't.) It's simple:
> WE NEED MORE ADMINS.
>
> I do agree with the 'admin status is no big deal' line of thought. If we
> invest too much in it, it gets hard to get people on the team rolling
> back vandalism and taking care of speedy-delete material (though a
> standard policy of simply blanking pages instead of worrying about
> deletion would help on that score). Furthermore, it fosters the very
> annoying trend to drag every admin into ever more arcane WikiPolitics
> and layers of bureaucracy... the powers are there to be a janitor, not a
> legislator. They're unrelated. (I don't enjoy spending my time on
> talkpages... if I want to have a discussion with someone, I use email or
> MUX, not a wiki page... and VFD is a bilious slimefest I'd be happy to
> see gone entirely.)
>
> Maybe giving people block/ban powers is a big deal, however. Since the
> proposals for bureaucrats, Arbitrators, and the like eventually did go
> through, maybe block powers can be split off of adminship and given to
> some other userclass, and we can thoroughly establish once and for all
> that an admin's job is maintenance. Maybe even rename the label:
> 'Maintainer', 'Janitor', etc. I don't really care what you call it, but
> apparently 'Administrator' gets people thinking too much about it
> meaning you're the boss... and I have to admit it gets heavily
> misinterpreted outside WP: If I tell someone that I'm an administrator
> on Wikipedia, they think I'm saying I'm on the Foundation board, or a
> siteadmin, or a developer. As WP's public pfoile continues to rise,
> that'll be more of an issue as "Wikipedia Administrator" J. Random
> Wikipedian gets quoted in a news article as an authoritative source of
> official opinion.
>
> Further, when we find there's a bad admin, this doesn't mean "we need to
> make it harder for people whose main contribution is vandal-fighting to
> be an admin", it means, fire their ass, deadmin them, and then get
> someone else. If all they do is get in fights with other uses or throw
> their weight around on talkpages, they don't need the anti-vandal tools.
>
> -- Jake Nelson
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