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

Wed Jan 4 15:33:20 UTC 2006

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.

Without commenting on whether your adminning was reasonable at the time,
I'll just note that things are quite different now.  English Wikipedia has
over 800,000 articles, thousands of regular editors, and well over 700
admins.

It's not at all hard to be come an admin, and Wikipedia is currently
creating a new admin a day.  If I wanted to, I could create a sockpuppet
account, use it for 20 minutes a day, and within 6 months have it to admin
status.  I already know of one banned edtior who was very close to
succeeding at this (he was caught via other means), and I know of another
problem editor who is currently preparing a sockpuppet (actually his third)
for an adminship he will certainly receive (unless he is exposed first). The
formula is quite simple, and the only reason I don't post it here is because
if I do, other people will start using it.

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.

As I said, we have over 700 admins now, and in any event you don't need
admin powers to revert vandalism.  As well, the "semi-protection" template
seems to be quite effective in calming down articles which are regularly
vandalized, or which are undergoing a spate of vandalism.  The issues I see
as far more pressing aren't about vandalism, but are about registered users
violating community interaction norms (e.g. personal attacks, uncivil
behaviour, wikistalking) and content policies (in particular POV pushing).

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.

It turns out that, in practice, it is difficult to de-admin an
administrator.

Jay.