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Other forks (the pointy kind)

There are some other decisions that should be made before we head to VPP so that things don't get too wild and crazy. 3, 4 or 6 months? Sounds like a hard question but my guess is that it's actually easy; we just look at failed RFAs and correlate the following items: 1. advice of "wait 3 months" vs. "wait 6 months" 2. Showing up at RFA again after 3 or 6 months 3. long-term trustworthiness of the candidate, at least sufficient to overcome Mike Godwin's objections. Any volunteers?

Another question is what subset of the tools is ideal. A minimal subset ... seeing deleted pages and moving without redirects ... would only allow the candidates to better perform tasks to help them eventually pass RFA ... so, lower risk, but not as much admin work gets done and they don't get as much practice. Julian and others have said the blocking is the problematic userright, that any other userrights are fair game. Balloonman is suggesting we give them the whole box of tools, as long as a coach or coaches are watching them like hawks. Is it possible to discard any of these options before we head to WP:VPP? - Dank (push to talk) 16:40, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

If we give someone the whole box of tools and then keep an eye on them, I would think that 3 months would be long enough to figure out whether or not they have a good grip on them; any mistakes should show up in that amount of time. If the purpose fo this "admin-lite" is to create a preview mode, allowing us to judge whether or not the candidate is competent with the tools (I assume the question of trust would be handled previously), then giving them an incomplete set of tools will result in an incomplete assessment of their competency. Shereth 16:45, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Another fork, credit to Balloonman for the excellent idea of bundling this with some form of coaching/oversight: one coach per Assistant, or does everyone who wants to volunteer as a coach and all the Assistants participate on the same page? - Dank (push to talk) 20:26, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

It would be a single page per coachee/coach, but others (like now) could drop in and add their comments/thoughts.---Balloonman NO! I'm Spartacus! 20:41, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
(ec) I suppose the coach-assistant relationship would need to be defined a little more firmly, no? I get the impression it is the sort of thing where a coach is accepting a certain amount of responsibility for their Assistant's actions; for example, it should be incumbent upon them to correct minor mistakes, and to request a removal of the tools in more serious cases of Assistants gone wild. That being the case, it seems to me that a "one coach per Assistant" rule is prudent. Multiple coaches can muddy the issue of responsibility, and in some cases may provide inconsistent feedback and oversight. Too may cooks in the kitchen, and all. I could forsee some instances of multiple coaches who have an ability to closely coordinating their efforts, but in the long haul I imagine a 1:1 ratio being the most sensible. Shereth 20:45, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
My initial proposal was that somebody could accept up to 2 coachees at a time, but if they showed themselves capable, that number could go up (or down) with 'crat discretion. But a coachee would have one formal coach, who is in essence lending them the tools, but could have multiple couches for guidance. (EG I know that under the old system new coaches often asked for help with coaching.) But yes, the principle difference in my proposal over the old "temporary admins" which has always been shot down is that the coachee is not an admin, but is working as an extension of a coach. The coach takes some responsibility in the coachees actions and should the coachee go off the deep end, would need to request an emergency desysop. Similarly, if a coachee goes off the deepend, other admins could request that desysop as well. As they are not admins yet, this would be a simple process.---Balloonman NO! I'm Spartacus! 20:50, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
That makes sense, let me put it another way. Presumably, the community will pull the plug on this if the coaches plus concerned admins don't perform as expected by the voters. My question is: do we send a message to the coaches that we believe they're signing up to make the whole project work, or just signing up to look at one or two coachees? Only 1 or 2 coachees is more prudent; on the other hand, it's possible the community won't back the proposal without knowing that there's a group of people who are trying to make the whole thing work, because otherwise, mistakes may happen that slip through the cracks. I don't have a good feel for what we need to get the votes. (Btw, it makes sense to call them coachees informally, but User:Vandal is going to be less than impressed when they get blocked by "Coachee" Smith, it will probably just fuel the backlash ... User:Soap suggested "Assistant", does that work for you?) - Dank (push to talk) 20:56, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

I'm actually not sure I agree with the admin-lite concept as a solution to the problem. I think what we need is an unbundling of tools in an apolitical fashion, much like rollback was intended to be. Obviously the low hanging fruit has been picked, there aren't any clear analogues to rollback in the admin toolkit (insofar as rollback was basically simulated with semi-automated tools when the right was unbundled). But I think rollback has been an enormous success and we would do better to follow that success and push for devolution of rights rather than establishing a tiered approach to adminship. A few problems w/ assistantship/admin-lite:

  1. We place another implicit step between editors and admins.
  2. We place an extraordinary amount of faith in coaches and trust in candidates. If someone 'fails' a RfA in such a way that they become a candidate for admin-lite we have to believe that the coach will effectively cover the concerns listed in the RfA and that the candidate won't just go through the motions of the coaching process.
  3. We implicitly lower the bar for RfA where that isn't necessarily the problem (while I agree that replacement rate is a problem it doesn't follow that RfA standards or percieved RfA standards impact that replacement rate much).
  4. Lowering RfA standards (I'm assuming the model of 60%-->admin lite for 3-6 months-->Admin) may result in getting admins we don't want. There are folks who (in my opinion, obviously) should never have the bit but might scratch 60% in an RfA. If that isn't convincing then remember that with a bright-line promotion criteria of 75% each opposing vote is worth three support votes at the margin. At a bright-line promotion criteria of 60% each opposing vote at the margin is worth half as much, only 1.5 supporting votes. It becomes increasingly difficult to prevent promotion.

I'm not opposed to this wholeheartedly. I certainly prefer a WP:PERM style devolution of some tools over admin-lite and I strongly prefer some real check over autopromotion. But those are my thoughts. Protonk (talk) 21:09, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

I would favor something like "apprenticeship" instead, which would happen before RFA instead of after a failed RFA. The idea would be that a candidate who finds a coach and gets approval from (say) five current admins is given temporary adminship. The coach is given the power to request de-sysop, which would be done immediately with no questions asked. The candidate would have to do a proper RFA within (say) three months, or the adminship would expire. Looie496 (talk) 16:47, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
It's just not possible; decisions are made by WP:CONSENSUS on Wikipedia. That's a Foundation principle, it's been policy since Day One, and it particularly and especially applies to handing out admin tools, including the right to see deleted material. The Wikimedia lawyer has gone so far as to say that he'd ask the Board to take action if the community ever decided to let non-administrators see deleted pages, so we need to make the argument that if someone passes RFA in an "Assistantship" role, the same standards of trustworthiness and dedication are required. So there has to be something like an RFA, and we might as well do it at RFA, to let someone experiment with the tools. - Dank (push to talk) 17:26, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

A modest proposal

Can someone please concisely summarize the positions in the spiraling mess in the above sections, for those of us who havn't been engaged since minute 1? Please take several minutes to think about it, and write it with the quality and neutrality we expect of articles.--Tznkai (talk) 16:38, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

This would be a good time for us to construct the TLDR summary. There are some questions still outstanding, but maybe we can fill them in as we go. Here are some notes, I hope people will change or fill in details:
  • There's enough concern about the long-term trends involving admin work that many people are willing to try out some new things and see whether they work.
  • One trial would involve spinning-off of certain userrights; many userrights have been suggested above. (Obviously we don't have a way to do this for real until we get consensus, and we're not going to get consensus until we have a successful trial. I'll volunteer my admin services to help us get past this paradox; if someone is selected by the community as a likely candidate for some userright, then I'll work with them, let them tell me what articles they want to use that userright on, and I'll push the admin button if I agree and I won't if I don't. At the end of the trial, we come back and see if the community still thinks it would be a good idea to give them that userright. If a bunch of admins volunteer to do this, we should get sufficient data.)
  • Another trial, I'd suggest we try it for one month before making a more permanent decision, is to allow for a new possibility at RFA. [tweaked - Dank (push to talk) 18:01, 17 September 2009 (UTC):] If the supporters for full adminship, plus the opposers who say they're okay with "Assistantship", together constitute a consensus in the view of the closing crat, then the candidate could be promoted by the crat to "Assistantship" with full admin userrights for 3 months. Some coach would need to volunteer to answer the Assistant's questions and revert any mistakes the Assistant makes for 3 months, and approving the Assistantship would de facto approve that coach in that role. The Assistant would either come back to RFA 3 months later and pass, or lose the admin bit if they don't. (Obviously, for purposes of the trial, we need to get some kind of agreement from a steward or Arbcom that they'd be willing in principle to take the admin bit away after 3 months. Whether things actually work out that way, who knows, but as long as we can get agreement in principle, that's probably good enough to conduct the one-month trial in good faith that things will turn out as planned.) There's some talk that if the trial works out, the community will request the desysop bit for crats, for the limited purpose of desysoping Assistants after 3 months if they fail RFA or don't do RFA. Who knows what the voters will do, but the hope is that Assistantship will require the same standards of trustworthiness and dedication that we'd expect from any admin, but not the same standards of familiarity with the tools; that's what 3 months of coaching is for. - Dank (push to talk) 17:21, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
Thanks. Could someone summarize the long term trends?--Tznkai (talk) 17:27, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
Protonk did that above; it's this graph, this graph and this graph. - Dank (push to talk) 17:29, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
With fairness to Hammersoft, please realize that summary of past trends don't automatically extend to future trends. You have to wade through some claims and counterclaims and see which story speaks to you if you want some idea of future paths. I could write a summary but it might be biased toward my view that enough of current trends may continue to place us in extremis in the near-distant future. Protonk (talk) 17:32, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
I don't think it insults Hammer or anyone else to say "There's enough concern about the long-term trends involving admin work that many people are willing to try out some new things and see whether they work." No need to claim crystal balls, the claim is that many people are concerned and feel the need to try new things and see if they help. - Dank (push to talk) 17:38, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
I'm just saying for purposes of a concise summary hedging is ok. If/when we write up a longer summary I am ok with asserting the consensus view above and offering some detailed qualifications. Protonk (talk) 17:54, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
I think it would be helpful to get a breakdown of where admin activity is lacking, unless the contention is tat there is a general loss of admin "presence" with its attendant inefficiencies. --Tznkai (talk) 17:59, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
Biggest backlogs are in deleting maintenance style pages like spam userpages and nonsense minor talk namespace pages as well as blocking drive by vandals. MBisanz talk 18:01, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
Well my first contention (summarized above in the 'editing break editing break' section) is that the current trends manifest primarily in fewer admins each performing a larger share of admin tasks. Anecdotal support for this can be found by perusing the less 'emotional' XfDs (basically all X not A), SBL operations, EF operations (which isn't strictly an admin task of course) and so forth. The threat from that isn't increased backlogs but the possibility that desysopping someone like WMC a year from now could move WP from an operating equilibrium to collapse. Protonk (talk) 18:06, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
So your argument, in summary would be that there is an increased concentration of overall workload onto fewer admins, and if for whatever reason one of those admins quit or was desysopped or otherwise stopped, the workload would not be spread quickly and efficiently enough?--Tznkai (talk) 18:09, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
That's one of my arguments, yeah. Protonk (talk) 18:17, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
That's part of the problem. Loss of institutional knowledge is another. In a previous life, one of my job functions involved working with the executives who oversaw the sales team, which meant a lot of focus on transition plans. We operated on the 'hit by a bus' theory; If Mr Sellsalot gets hit by a bus tonight, how do we pick up his clients where he left off? If Ms Companyboss gets hit by a bus, how do we keep the company functional until a new CEO is picked? Of no less concern is how to deal with workload balancing if/when a tragedy occurs, and particularly around heavy holiday times. At such times, more work is devolved to fewer people anyway, so each person then becomes that much more crucial to ongoing success. Which is basically the position we're in now. The solution is therefore twofold: more admins--however we do that, preferably this trainee (I prefer that over 'assistant') scheme--and a radical realignment of how RfA works. Really, RfA needs to boil down to one simple question: can this person be trusted to follow consensus as expressed via policy and guidelines? That's it. Nothing more. However, the reality of trying to turn RfA into anything less than a trial by fire (and knives and pointy sticks and small biting insects), to say nothing of even making it rational, is simply impossible the way Wikipedia works; this site is one of the longest-running examples of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory (anonymity = fuckwad). The short version: people like to assume the worst, RfA is largely the only place where it's not only allowed but positively encouraged. So that's not going to change anytime soon.
What can change is how we get people to RfA. And the trainee/assistant scheme is the best way of doing that, Provisionally grant the tools for three months. At the end of those three months, demonstrate at RfA that you used them wisely, with the requirement of opposers that they must show abuse of the tools in order to oppose. And done. Hand-in-hand with this we need a desysopping system (my proposal is still twitching here; I haven't had much time to really dig my brain into things lately) so that when someone--this has happened with RfA, it's happened everywhere on this site--games their way through this process and then becomes abusive after an RfA, the tools can be removed quickly and with a minimum of fuss.
As a side note, given the Archtransit and Pastor Theo debacles, obviously CUs should be run on coach/trainee pairs. Sorry if that ruffles feathers, but that's how it is. → ROUX ₪ 18:30, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
Here Roux offers a powerful corollary to my general statement, one which I should have added in the summary. I agree almost completely. Protonk (talk) 18:38, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
IMO not a good idea to force CUs on admins because 0.1% of admins happened to have problems that would have been detected by using it...If anything it would scare people off.--Patton123 (talk) 18:58, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
I understand that people are wary to give up certain "civil liberties" (such as anonymity) for "security" (from truly rogue admins), but what is so 'scary' about being checkuser'ed? –xenotalk 22:16, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Does anyone have any tweaks to my rough draft of the summary on Assistantship? Has anyone heard what the WMF lawyer, User:MGodwin, thinks? He's probably our next stop, since he could be a stopper. - Dank (push to talk) 18:35, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Pointer to the project page, dan? Protonk (talk) 18:38, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
(edit conflict)Balloonman has apparently contacted Godwin. Not sure what the response, if any, has been. Bear in mind he's only needed if the viewDeleted right is included in this traineesistantjuniorgophership. If, instead, we had the devs create a userright called sysoptrainee or something, we could easily keep viewdeleted out of it (thus removing WMF's objection) while still allowing all other admin tools. → ROUX ₪ 18:39, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
If the community clearly says "yes" and MGodwin clearly says "no" then I suppose we'd have to ask the devs to give us a version of Assistantship without the ability to do deletion work or see deleted pages. But no telling if the devs would do that. - Dank (push to talk) 18:45, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
If there is community support for a new usergroup, they will make it. cf. 'confirmed' which was created fairly swiftly after the discussion closed. –xenotalk 22:09, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
Thanks, that's good to know ... but we'd still have a problem: no one has expressed any interest in a version of Assistantship that doesn't involve deletion work. - Dank (push to talk) 22:35, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Deleting pages of temporary wikipedians is a job an adminbot can take care of very quickly, and non-controversially. Poof. Problem gone. MBisanz suggests there's a backlog of blocking drive by vandals, but there's no evidence to suggest there's a backlog there. --Hammersoft (talk) 19:01, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
    Indeed, CAT:TEMP deletions aren't even really that imperative anyway. No space saved, etc. We used to have a CAT TEMP deletion bot, didn't we? –xenotalk 22:11, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Probationary adminship

I'm not sure if I buy the idea of assistant ship - it seems like a lot of work thats unreliable, so I thought I'd offer something similar but a bit simpler in conception. There are some problems with this approach, but I thought it might be worth considering.--Tznkai (talk) 19:02, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

All new admins (or admins under a certain threshold) starting (date) are considered probationary administrators. Probationary administrators have all the permissions duties and standards that full administrators have. After (x) months, they must pass a reconfirmation RfA, or a steward is asked to desysop without prejudice.

Interestingly, Wikipedia:Perennial_proposals#Reconfirm administrators doesn't address this. What you're suggesting here is the same as the proposal that's being discussed, except that you're changing the name from Assistant to Admin, there's no mention of coaches, and the current proposal allows the RFA community to decide whether someone needs a reconfirmation or not, which seems like a reasonable time-saver to me. - Dank (push to talk) 19:25, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
I'm fine with this where threshold >60% and x is between 3 and 8 months. I would prefer it be done concurrently with devolution of some rights (which I prefer over this and other 'provisional' style proposals). Protonk (talk) 19:46, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
(e/c)The absence of coaches is actually a major difference, and streamlines the ordeal rather significantly. Its also considerably more intuitive, and does not need additional bits to flip, and doesn't imply tiers of authority. Rather, it is considerably more like the difference between tenured non tenured professors rather than teachers and student teachers. (Which reminds me, a variation here is to allow repeated probationary periods) The assistant model creates a supervisor/supervisee relationship, which the extensive failure of multiple mentorships proves is not systemically reliable. (To be fair, many mentorships do succeed) Probationary adminship have a number of benefits, and also disadvantages, which I'll try to outline below:
Advantages: Allows an opportunity for "bad apple" admins to be weeded out. If x is a sufficient number, most admins will show their warts. Additionally, some newly admins will find they really don't like having their bits, approach burn out, and will have an easy out by simply not requesting reconfirmation. These opportunities to control the admin population will also ease concerns of the community members who are always on the look out for not promoting a bad admin. This should increase the number of admin candidates, and bring along with them more good admins, which I will simply assert is good.
Disadvantages: The probationary admin is likely to be excessively risk adverse, unwilling to step into areas where admins may well be needed, or unpopular opinions will arise. This could make newly minted tenured admins suddenly run wild with their freedom. Likewise, the known flaws in the RfA process are likely to be exacerbated if any candidate is voted on twice.
I think this process is superior to the assistant model because it doesn't make one volunteer admin disproportionately influential or responsible for monitoring a new admin, and doesn't tier admins in their abilities.--Tznkai (talk) 20:10, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
Further thought: I'm only lukewarmly in favor of my own proposal. I am merely trying to refine the changes that are being suggested into something more practical, in case the change is made.--Tznkai (talk) 20:12, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
I don't see those disadvantages that are listed above really being disadvantages. The trickiest areas are, almost by definition, rare. I think of things like deletion review and cases of long term abuse/bad behavior. Deletion review's workload is almost half of what it was a couple of years ago (although why this is, I have no clue). The backlogs are on things that provisional admins would have no problem tackling. As for newly minted "real admins" suddenly running wild, psychological data simply doesn't back that up. Behavior stays consistent over time. An admin who begins cautious is likely to remain cautious. Sure, there may always be "sleeper agents" but there is very little that can be done to prevent someone with truly bad intentions from screwing us later if they are behaving well at first (I'm thinking Runcorn). IronGargoyle (talk) 21:27, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
The disadvantages that you mentioned are why provisional admins have never been encouraged, which is why there would be a coach. The coaches job would be two fold 1) to encourage the coachee to get involved in new areas and 2) to help run interference when they do mess up. If a coachee messes up they would have the safety net of having a coach to talk them through what they did and why they did it wrong. A mistake thus doesn't become the kiss of death that it would have in a simple "provisional admin" scenario... in fact, mistakes would be a chance to show growth and development.---Balloonman NO! I'm Spartacus! 22:17, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

This notion has been proposed ad naseum and killed every time. The coachee/coach method is a variation on this but with a few distinct differences that I hope would get this past the objections. Namely, that the person would NOT be an admin and would be supervised from the start.---Balloonman NO! I'm Spartacus! 21:30, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

I think it brings way to many attendant difficulties in the coachee/coach. Hierarchies are not only bad inherently, but they're impossibly difficult to make work on a wiki of this size. Honestly, those worried about the drop off in admins may just need to go out and recruit.--Tznkai (talk) 21:37, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
Heirarchies are inherently bad? Sounds like you must be an anarchist? Now, I know that on WP, we try not to have heirarchies, but in the real world they are what maintain order. As for making them work? I don't see much of a problem. A coach would be allowed a maximum of 2 coachees and would be partially responsible for monitoring said coachee's actions. If the coach fails in this, he won't be allowed new coachees amd removing the buttons from a trainee would be rather simple. We won't have to go through an RfC/ArbCOM/ANI, we simply make the request showing why it is necessary. (Again preferably with the coach involved, but in the case of a rogue coachee, that wouldn't be necessary.) But the coaching model also gets rid of the two step RFA confirmation process that has been criticized in previous provisional admin models.---Balloonman NO! I'm Spartacus! 22:13, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
Thats an oversatement on my part. How about "hierarchies have inherent flaws" I'm not sure if I can explain the problem with maintaing hierarchy on wikipedia adequately, but it revolves around the instability of the time, space of volunteers , and restricting/relying on the volunteer on a project like wikipedia.--Tznkai (talk) 22:22, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
We rely on volunteers all over the place around here. The coach who accepts the responsibility is simply accepting another task. While s/he is assuming additional responsibility to be directly invovled, s/he won't be alone. If a coachee goes off the deep-end it will get the attention of others (just as an admin who makes a questionable call get the attention of others.) The coach is merely stating, I trust this user enough that I'm accepting some of the responsibility for his/her actions. Most people won't do that for strangers or people they don't trust. Similarly, if a coachee really starts to blow it, the coach will pull the plug because the actions are linked back to them! But other admins can (and will) step in if necessary. The coach is also sitting there saying that s/he will help monitor the actions to make sure they are done right.---Balloonman NO! I'm Spartacus! 22:52, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

A thought

All this seems unnecessarily complicated to me. Apparently the admin system does work to some extent since rogue admins get caught sooner or later and desysopped. Assuming that there is a shortage of admins, wouldn't it be a lot simpler if all the people proposing proposals on this page just stepped back a bit and agreed to cut that extra bit of slack for RfA candidates? So the candidate doesn't yet understand 'fair-use rationale' - explain it and assume they will. Messed up a few CSD tags, list em, explain why, and move on. If we all did that, more admins would automatically flow into the system. The proposals above make little sense because the true rogue admin will just lie low until reconfirmation (do a few routine things and avoid anything that looks hairy) while the dedicated apprentice admin will try to do something and his/her reconfirmation RfA will go down in flames ("you csd-a7 THAT page! How could you!" - that sort of thing). Not to mention that editors willing to undergo two RfAs will skew the admin population toward the masochistic set! --RegentsPark (sticks and stones) 19:34, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Good luck getting people to vote more sensibly. Making the selection process less democratic might have a chance, though. Friday (talk) 19:37, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
Okay, can you support the proposal to break off one or more userrights and make them available by a (presumably easier) community decision at WP:PERM? Or does that have the same drawbacks for you? - Dank (push to talk) 19:42, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
That makes sense to me. For example, I can think of hundreds of editors who could safely be given the right to delete pages but won't run for adminship. Ideally, for the system to work well, we really want lots of non-hard working admins. One way of achieving that is unbundling the tools and distributing rights. --RegentsPark (sticks and stones) 20:06, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
I agree that a probationary period is not going to be terribly useful. As usual, I think the best solution is to make adminship non-permanent (I dislike reconfirmation proposals because they still generally start from the assumption that admin positions are permanent, unless removed). When a term is up, an admin can choose to stand for a new RfA or not. It sets us up for less drama when admins want to give up the tools or when they fail a subsequent RfA. Sχeptomaniacχαιρετε 20:00, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
Second Friday's comment, although I suspect for different reasons. :) The RfA process isn't all that bad; but when you have 100+ editors, each with their own distinct view, participating in a fairly high-profile discussion, it's hard to get anything that resembles consistency. –Juliancolton | Talk 20:14, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
Just an editorial comment: at this point in the discussion, there's enough variation in what people would like that we can't, as a practical matter, get any farther with Assistantship ... it's not that there's a clear yes/no, it's the combinatorial explosion thing, it would fragment into too many different discussions to be able to come to resolution. If opinions come together over time, I'll say something, but at this point I'm thinking that the proposal for a trial of unbundling specific userrights is way less controversial, and won't have us fighting the Foundation attorney. - Dank (push to talk) 20:20, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Enough with the questions already?

Does anyone have any evidence showing that the ridiculous mountain of "optional" questions which are now asked in RfA (beyond the basic 3) actually provides us with a better quality of admin than before these questions were the norm? I know we can't prohibit the asking of questions (nor should we), but I'm sure it is very discouraging for many editors to see the number of questions that they will have to answer in a way that dodges traps and placates every special interest. It is one thing to identify a particular concern in an edit history and pose a question in relation to that concern, it is quite another thing to just template-spam them. RfA is stressful enough. If it doesn't improve the quality, we should take a serious re-examination of all these questions as the individuals asking them. IronGargoyle (talk) 21:55, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Do you have data showing that it doesn't improve the quality? If you want to change things, don't you have the burden of proof?--Wehwalt (talk) 21:58, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
It was more an open question. I see people presenting a mountain of data above. I thought there might be something in that mountain of numbers that could be data-mined to answer my question. IronGargoyle (talk) 22:02, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
e.g.: Do admins confirmed before X date have a higher (or lower) rate of blocks/desysops/RFC/arb sanctions per month of service? IronGargoyle (talk) 22:05, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
I should also say that I'm not proposing a rules change per-say. I don't think it's a good idea to prohibit questions, I just think that people should, perhaps, self-censor themselves if it isn't helping things. IronGargoyle (talk) 22:07, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
The problem is, simply, people asking questions for the sake of asking them - and in particular the pseudo-science "what is your favourite pie" type rubbish. In addition this current vouge for "what policy/process/bit of Wikipedia is in your view broken" etc. seems to me to be exceptionally without value. If one finds, on review of a candidate, an edit or series of edits that they would like clarification on then that is exactly when a question should be asked - RFA is "allegedly a discussion; Indeed it would be discourteous to oppose if their is benefit of doubt on an edit without seeking clarification. However it should be perfectly acceptable to ignore frivolous questions, or ones where the response would seem self-evident if the person asking the question looked further.
tl;dr questions at RFA are a good thing. The people who ask them, however, need to think more about what value they, and the community, will derive from an answer before asking. Pedro :  Chat 

I strongly oppose any questions that, when answered, would not provide the community with any understanding of the candidate's ability to use the admin tools that they could not get from looking at the candidate's contributions. Timmeh (review me) 22:11, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

That was exaclty what I said Timmeh - you just managed to prune it to a sensible length! Pedro :  Chat  22:16, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
Being pressed for time and encountering five edit conflicts will often result in a neglect to read just-added comments and the necessity to shorten what would otherwise be long responses. I'm glad we're thinking alike on this issue, though. :) Timmeh (review me) 22:36, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

They actually are optional. If the question asked was completely frivilous, or did not have anything significant to do with the candidate's adminship candidacy, I would be well within my discretion as a bureaucrat to ignore opposes based on "not answering my question". --Deskana, (talk) 22:15, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Indeed - and rightly so. Pedro :  Chat  22:16, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
Yes. Though I have only rarely seen candidates who explicitly refuse to answer a question on the grounds that the question is vacuous. Protonk (talk) 22:22, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
We should encourage them to.--Tznkai (talk) 22:35, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
I would certainly be more inclined to vote for someone who deftly and politely refused to answer a bad question than someone who gave a pat answer. I think I have in the past (the only example I can think of is MZMbride's reconfirmation RfA or however you say his name, the guy who isn't MBainz...). Protonk (talk) 00:21, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Agreed. Echoing what the above folks have said, questions should only be asked if they pertain directly and specifically to the candidate. –Juliancolton | Talk 22:24, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

What Protonk says is true, but it's normally pretty transparent when they oppose citing really vague reasons and their question hasn't been answered. --Deskana (talk) 23:10, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

I just added too many questions at RfA to PEREN. This is one that comes up ever month or two...---Balloonman NO! I'm Spartacus! 22:31, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Some questions are relevant to the candidate, some are really using RFA as a soapbox and some are genuine tests of an admins much needed ability to respond politely to the totally bizarre. I've run twice in the last year with about a dozen questions each time, and I appreciate with even fewer candidates we are now beginning to get even more questions per RFA. But I would much rather have had someone who asks an awkward question and waits for an answer than someone who opposes without giving diffs to show they've thoroughly vetted me and found something worth opposing over. So of all the problems at RFA I think excess questions are the least of our worries. But if anyone out there is thinking of running, my advice is:
  1. Go through the previous months worth of RFAs, identify the questions that you will probably be asked and make sure you already have an answer in your sandbox before you run.
  2. Always reread the relevant policy before posting up an answer, especially if you think you know it and have spotted the trick in the question.
  3. There is no such thing as an optional question.
  4. Answer the questions in order and if you need 24 hours to answer just say so (most questions will rush in at the beginning).
  5. When you are ready to transclude your RFA stop and go to bed. Reread it when you log on for a longish session, fix the time and transclude it - things are about to get busy, (I was up till 3am last time).
ϢereSpielChequers 22:37, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
shudder I remember when it was "no big deal". -GTBacchus(talk) 22:41, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Ask ironholds about questions IMO. :p Protonk (talk) 00:30, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

A philosophical discussion

Out of all the privileges exclusive to administratorship, which one would you be willing to spin off into an individual privilege granted at Requests for Permissions? I think it would make sense to couple rollbacker with semi-protection. @harej 19:37, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

I'd quite like to have the ability to grant autoreviewer status, and I'm sure most of the admins who hang around IRC would agree with me there. I keep having to bug them to grant promising content creators the right, and it's save a lot of time for everyone. Ironholds (talk) 19:38, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
Meh...I'll probably be alone in this, but I'd really like the idea of users being to able to see (not undelete) previously deleted articles. This way, we wouldn't have to repeatedly ask administators to temporarily undelete them or copy the entire text. This would also really help at UAA :) Cheers, I'mperator 20:15, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
I'd grant the privilege to be taken seriously. Admins have unfair weight in discussions that have nothing to do with the use of admin tools. A close second would be a working understanding of IAR, but then I wake up and realize that most admins probably haven't got that. ;) -GTBacchus(talk) 20:20, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
Of all the privileges, this is the one least likely to ever be spun out, as the Foundation's lawyer has said if it was done, the Board would step in and overrule the community. MBisanz talk 20:27, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
I had to do a double-take on that one, Matt. I thought for a moment you were referring to the "unfair weight" never being spun out, but then the indentation/alignment snapped me back into reality. Useight (talk) 22:59, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
I would like to see the move-subpages or noratelimit aspects spun out at some point, also probably editinterface and when it is turned on, movefile. MBisanz talk 20:27, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
I believe the noratelimit IS spun out as I believe that's the main thing that Account Creators get ( I think they get the flag which if they wanted to could be used for other rate limits) Jamesofur (talk) 02:58, 19 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Movefile, semiprot (useful for vandal patrollers, as long as they are limited to doing e.g. a 12h or 24h semiprot only--can that be limited programmatically?), edit-through-fullprot (perhaps with a caveat: misuse it once and you never get it back). Definitely not viewdeleted, per Mbisanz above and Godwin's comments on the matter. → ROUX ₪ 20:38, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
Fascinating Roux. So I am better "qualified" to look at deleted pages than you? What makes me so special exactly? Pedro :  Chat  20:48, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
Lots of people use quotation marks to indicate a word being quoted. Since Roux said nothing about "qualified", it's interesting that you express it that way. -GTBacchus(talk) 20:51, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
Lots of people use quote marks to indicate that the word is not being quoted - but to demonstrate an approximation - as per my date stamped comment below. Pedro :  Chat  20:55, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
Oh, I see... is that like what I've come to know as "scare-quotes"? I've also heard them called "scorn-quotes", or something unpleasant like that. "Approximation" (a quote this time)... that's an interesting term to use. I'll have to meditate on this. -GTBacchus(talk) 20:58, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Agreeing with Matt, and ImperatorExercitus - the ability to view deleted pages would be an ideal unbundle. However, "apparently" RFA somehow qualifies people to view extreme libel, attacks etc. wheras just editing here does not. It is ever so slightly surreal that the foundation would, and Matt is right - they would-, make sure that non-admins could not view deleted pages - yet every admin can - despite most admins being anonymous usernames and little more when it come to the eyes of the law. Odd. Pedro :  Chat  20:45, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
    • Odd, yes, but I'm not sure anyone has ever explicitly claimed that admins are more qualified, or that anyone even had that thought in mind. It seems more to me as if the cookie crumbled that way, and here we are. That it doesn't make much sense is simply an indication that we're still humans, living on Earth. -GTBacchus(talk) 20:54, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
      • As I noted on your talk, a remark in quotes does not have to mean litteral quotation. I'm using them to make apprximation or to add a proxy voice. Please - this thread is marked "philosophical" (to use quotes per that convention) and thus to take second or third voice is perfectly normal. I'm sure if this were a spoken conversation the ill-will would not be here. Pedro :  Chat  21:01, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
        • There's no ill-will. Were this a spoken conversation, that would be clear. Also, the remark to which you've replied just here had nothing to do with quotation marks. I'm neither upset nor offended in the least. I'm raising another glass to you now. Ahem... everyone: To Pedro's health. This being a philosophical conversation, drink! :D

          Regarding the history of admin privileges, I am pretty sure that nobody ever explicitly decided "admins are qualified to see deleted pages, and others aren't". I think it's more an artifact of a lot of decisions that were made whenever. Again, cheers. :) -GTBacchus(talk) 21:04, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

          • I have to inteject here... I do believe that on previous discussions on this peren debate we raised the question of viewing deleted pages. And apparently, somebody, I want to say Useeight(?) Mbiz talked to one of the Wikifoundation lawyers or quoted a wiki foundation lawyer, wherein the position of the Wikifoundation was that they wanted to keep viewing of deleted pages in the hands of Admins only. Apparently there was an expression of concern related to privacy, copy vios, etc. and that from a foundational level, it was easier to justify the keeping of these records if they could show fewer people had access to them and that those people were "admins." In short, in a past discussions, the unbundling of the ability to review deleted content was killed from powers on high. While you and I may see it as the easiest to spin out, it is actually one of the least likely to be done.---Balloonman NO! I'm Spartacus! 21:23, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
    • However, "apparently" RFA somehow qualifies people to view extreme libel, attacks etc. wheras just editing here does not. This is perfectly understandable. The foundation isn't saying that it makes one magically qualified, but it is an effort to show some sort of control/limitation on what people can/cannot do. In my profession, I've learned you often put controls in place as CYA's sometimes knowing that it isn't the perfect option. This is the type of control that the foundation can use to say, "We don't let just anybody see them... look at our RfA process and how many people fail. This is a volunteer project, but we have controls in place to prevent abuse." It says nothing about the people who have the tool, it just says, "we (the foundation) did something."---Balloonman NO! I'm Spartacus! 21:32, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Ability to read deleted edits would be useful. It's the one reason I never got many other admins to retire voluntarily. O:-) --Kim Bruning (talk) 21:09, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

If you're going to bundle more things with rollbacker, you might as well do away with administrator entirely. I fail to understand what problem this is solving, and I fail to understand how this isn't addressed by Wikipedia:PEREN#Hierarchical_structures. --Hammersoft (talk) 21:16, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

"Philosophical discussions" are often not geared towards solving any particular real-world problems. Nevertheless, they may give rise (unexpectedly?) to good ideas. No harm in a little chat, eh? We spend so much time here being serious as nails... why not blow some bubbles? -GTBacchus(talk) 21:22, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
Because this talk page is not for philosophical discussions, it's for ways to improve the RfA page only. You could try village pump, but even there "lowing bubbles" is not a good thing. Why not do some gnoming instead? 87.115.88.250 (talk) 22:41, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
Yeah, the wiki works in mysterious ways. Asking people to stop discussing something seldom results in much progress. I'll keep my own counsel on the value of bubbles; thanks. I mean, who is prepared to say that no good idea on this site ever arose from a seemingly pointless discussion? Not I. -GTBacchus(talk) 22:47, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
Well, I can see it, so I guess they have... Unless they only let checkusers see it? (which makes no sense) J.delanoygabsadds 22:16, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
I'm an admin, and I can see it, but I'm no checkuser. --Patar knight - chat/contributions 22:23, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
As far as I know, it's always been available to admins. I remember looking at it in my first week of being an admin, which was almost a year and a half ago. (X! · talk)  · @995  ·  22:53, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
You can see the first 1000 or so entries. Try looking at pages starting with anything further down the alphabet than "C". – iridescent 23:32, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
If more people put them on their watch lists, we could get it down the alphabet further.. Particularly if we have enthusiasts who liked big watch lists. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 23:43, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

@Hammersoft: The admin role as such is pretty much obsoleted as is anyway. It might be handier to give the diverse tools to diverse specialists, as needed. :-) --Kim Bruning (talk) 22:28, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

You're the first really to make a "philosophical" point and it's a good one, though the problem may be how to put it into practice. Surely not RfBlocker, RfAfDcloser, RfPagedeleter... Dean B (talk) 23:08, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
@Kim: Good suggestion, however, the problem remains-How to prevent the pyromaniacs from getting the keys to the drawer with the matches...and how to quickly take those keys away should they gain access to them anyway.--R.D.H. (Ghost In The Machine) (talk) 00:50, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
  • I can ask, fairly easily, for an admin to do anything I need done, except tell me what's in deleted edits. There are times when that would be quite useful to a non-admin, especially when working on sockpuppetry, or at the help desk when someone asks "why was my article deleted?", or when trying to decide if someone was AIV-worthy or not. Unlike most of the other tools, it is harmless to give it to someone trustworthy, but not necessarily very active or highly experienced in "admin-related areas". If any one tool was unbundled, speaking only for myself, I'd want it to be viewing deleted edits. Ironically (Alanis Morisette "irony", not irony "irony"), however, that's the one tool that someone nefarious could most easily damage other people with, so it's the one tool I'd never want to be handed out without a decent level of user review. As Pedro (I think) mentions above, it's not like passing an RFA is a great indicator of trustworthiness, but it's better than nothing. If it ever was unbundled, you'd have to have an RFA-type screening process for it, rather than a PERM-type one, or handing it out with rollbacker. --Floquenbeam (talk) 00:45, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Editprotected, imo. there was a proposal to spin it out but it died quickly when it was splintered across various mutually exclusive (and non-mutually exclusive) options. I would back another proposal to spin that right out again, provided it didn't require an RfA style confirmation. Protonk (talk) 01:40, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
  • I've never understood why moving a page over a redirect that only has minor history is an admin-only task, other than that it technically involves deletion. That could very well be enabled for non-admins as well in my opinion. (With minor history I mean pointing the redirect to another target and adding categories to it.) Jafeluv (talk) 05:25, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
  • I think the issue is that the system has a hard time distinguishing between minor and major histories. It doesn't keep a count of the number of revisions until after the deletion process is started, which is why even with the BigDelete restriction, admins can sometimes trick the system into letting them delete pages with more than 5,000 revisions. This would in theory become a larger liability if more non-admins could trick the system in a similar manner. MBisanz talk 05:32, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Requesting contents of deleted pages

Looks like some good did come out of this discussion. Non-admins, please enjoy Wikipedia:Requesting contents of deleted pages. @harej 01:23, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Is this the first useful outcome, ever, from a WT:RFA discussion? --Floquenbeam (talk) 01:39, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
I wouldn't be surprised. @harej 01:40, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
Please see WP:REFUND. Protonk (talk) 01:41, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
This would only be for the contents, not for wholesale undeletion. @harej 01:42, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
Take a loot at the requests handled there. REFUND does anything with respect to deleted content that doesn't need a DRV. It's basically a noticeboard for Category:Wikipedia administrators who will provide copies of deleted articles. Protonk (talk) 01:44, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
Let's redirect it, then. @harej 01:45, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
Why would someone redirect an active noticeboard, where people interact in a centralized venue, to a Category? That makes very little sense to me. I would add that WP:REFUND is the most cleverly named shortcut I've seen in some time. -GTBacchus(talk) 08:54, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
...because people have spent or invested time into making an article, and want a refund or their article back. It is very clever. :) – B.hotep •talk• 08:59, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

That's kind of nice. Sometimes for investigations, it helps to discretely review controversial deleted edits too. ;-) --Kim Bruning (talk) 10:52, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

A level of trust

Are there differing levels of trust? I would suspect the answer is "yes" based on the fact that we have rollbacker and other such lower-standards positions with tools. To this I must ask the question, "what levels are these"? I ask on a philosophical level, not simply that of looking for the answer of "oh, these rights and these rights make one level".

To answer that question myself in the specific sense I noted, I have to say that the level of trust I would have would be to trust people who have demonstrated ability in a certain work-role on the wiki. This was mentioned earlier by Kim Bruning, but I'd like to ask the question rather than pose the observation. Who, and in what circumstances, would you trust a certain right to a user?

Perhaps a second(ary) question (or expansion, after reading the paragraph) I would pose is, why does the mentality exist (as exhibited by harej replying to floquebeam) that "we shouldn't produce more processes to judge the different levels of trust"? Simply bureaucracy? I hope not; we should be employing as many people as we can in as many different areas as they possibly can aid in. Further, it's a poor argument. For example, User:Example is someone who understands the protection policy fairly well, and has been known to request protection frequently. Would it be appropriate for him to be handed the tools for deletion or blocking? Again, this comes to an issue of trust; is it possible that I may trust him enough to allow Example to protect articles but not to delete articles? Why, of course it's possible that this is true! and in fact, we see these same concerns (sometimes as supports and sometimes as opposes) pop up on many-an-RFA.

I was just a-pondering. --Izno (talk) 06:06, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Yes. But there is no defined standards for each level. There are many ways to become viewed as untrustworthy, and many ways to become trustworthy. Of those who are trusted, that's really the only level. However, if someone who is trusted finds that they would like to do more maintenance around here, we consider them for administrator, which is essentially someone who is trusted, with a demonstrated track record. What qualifies someone for administrator depends entirely on the RfA voters who are active at that moment in time. After adminship, it is really just a matter of how many people you miss off with the mop that prevents you from climbing any higher in the "ranks". Hiberniantears (talk) 09:33, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
Ironically, actually taking ones responsibility as an admin seriously is a good way to make many people angry. This is because some admin actions lead to there being winners and losers, and not all losers are sporting about it. If you're active enough, or you are an admin for long enough, it starts to add up. --Kim Bruning (talk) 11:03, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
Yeah, it can get a bit hairy after a bit - you do your best, but the losers in a decision will treat you as an enemy or an automaton, and drag you through the mud for it. I once had a chap whose page I'd deleted drag me straight to RfArb for doing so. Non-admins so often forget that admins are just people trying to help out as well. Fritzpoll (talk) 11:06, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Responding to comments scattered through this section ... Flagged Protection will be here shortly, and requires a new trusted position called "reviewers", and I don't think the decision has been made how to select reviewers, someone correct me if I'm wrong. As was mentioned above, the ability to see deleted material would be helpful for a variety of non-admins, but I don't personally think we'd want to handle that at WP:PERM, and even if I did think that, I have a feeling the lawyers would overrule us on this one ... OTRS problems are often handled by deleting material, and if untrustworthy people could see the material, that would mean that the usual legal solution to these problems would be no solution at all. So then the question is: has RFA improved over the last couple of years? If both successful and unsuccessful RFAs have generally led to fewer hurtful comments and hurt feelings, better communication and more useful work getting done for the project, and if enough people are willing to volunteer some extra time for a new process, then for me, an RFA-like process for "reviewership" and the ability to see deleted pages (and maybe we could unbundle other admin privileges) wouldn't be unthinkable ... I'm not saying "yes yes", I'm saying "I don't know, I'd be willing to try". I continue to believe that the biggest current failing of RFA is how we treat unsuccessful candidates ... we don't give them a clear enough idea of what they need to do and how long they need to do it in order to pass a future RFA, and we don't give them much feedback after the RFA, not as a community and often not at all. If we could fix that, I'd feel pretty good about RFA and about a possible new RFA-like process. - Dank (push to talk) 18:19, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

If you read the 2 comments right above your own, and then think on the consequences for a moment, you will find that an RFA-like process culls not only the incompetent, but also the most competent. This alone shows that it might not be the greatest idea.
More importantly, RFA has taken 8 years to obtain our current number of admins. Now, depending on what form of flagged revisions we use, we will need to hand out a fairly large number of reviewer flags (more reviewers than we have admins, I think), and we will need them in a very short time frame. Do you think an RFA-style process will work, at this time? :)
That brings us to one of the big motivations for unbundling. It would be very useful for more people to have least some of the tools on-hand. If we can make more of the tools not-a-big-deal to have, people who need those tools will be able to avoid the overhead and drama imposed by RFA. Instead, they can quietly get on with the task of improving the encyclopedia.
--Kim Bruning (talk) 23:08, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
Do you have an example of a "most competent" editor who was culled by RFA? - Dank (push to talk) 02:50, 10 September 2009 (UTC)
I can up with several, but are you going to then argue that "hey, they were rejected by the community", or "well, they clearly did nasty things x, y, z" (where x,y,z would be admin-like actions)  ? --Kim Bruning (talk) 02:55, 13 September 2009 (UTC)
Wishful thinking. Anyone can watch BLPs and "quietly get on with it" (Monty Python fans, anybody?) right now, with or without FR and without any tools. Bundling shmundling does not make a slightest difference. NVO (talk) 00:03, 13 September 2009 (UTC)
And you're telling me that? ;-) --Kim Bruning (talk) 02:55, 13 September 2009 (UTC)
  • We should let "reviewership" evolve on its own rather than following the RfA model. Let it start simple, be able to learn and discover its own sets of problems and to allow the community adapt to it, rather than pouring politics down right at the beginning. Requests for rollback and even CUOS has went surprisingly well in this regard. - Mailer Diablo 00:13, 10 September 2009 (UTC)
tl:dr - rollbackers need *less* trust, because rollbacking is clearly defined and it's easy (and usually not controversial) to remove rollback, and rollback can be got again. It'd be great if all admin actions could be unbundled in a similar way; clear definitions of acceptable use, easy to grant, easy to remove, easy to re-gain. 87.115.88.250 (talk) 23:06, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

An observation about the state of administrator promotion

There has been a lot of talk on here about how administrator promotion is being dropped to harder and harder levels, and how admins in the job have too much work to do. I've just come back on Wikipedia after a long wikibreak, and wouldn't mind being given the tools, although they wouldn't be much use (I have reported 2 (and a 3rd that was reported before me) people to AIV, who were subsequently blocked, and added one db-author in the few days I've been back. Hardly the work of an active admin. Anyway, my point is this: why are people who would not do too much work, the odd block or delete there, but in general trusted members of the community, not from what I can ascertain generally given the tools? Adminship is no big deal, as I am constantly reminded. Surely a group of another 10000 admins that hardly ever use the tools, say once per day, lessen the load on the hardworking ones by 10000 edits? -- Casmith_789 (talk) 21:18, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Indeed, the argument has always been frowned upon by many regulars but it's a common and longstanding nonenonetheless.--92.251.128.244 (talk) 21:24, 18 September 2009 (UTC)
Personally, I love this type of admin... I'd rather we have more part time admins and specialist admins. I have zero problem with a person who only uses the buttons sporatically. I don't use them often, but I have them for the few times that I find the need.---Balloonman NO! I'm Spartacus! 21:27, 18 September 2009 (UTC)
If you are trusted by the community and go through RfA, you'll pass. The problem is, people won't trust you if they haven't viewed your capabilities. So if you merely submit 3 AIVs, they may be right, but there aren't enough to judge whether you're making the right calls in hard decisions. That fourth submission could be bad, and if you had the tools, you might have blocked a good-faith, productive editor. If you want the tools, put in some work and prove you're capable of using them properly. If you do, and don't make too many mistakes, you will earn community trust and respect, and you'll probably pass given no one with socks hates you. In theory. My two pence... Regards, --—Cyclonenim | Chat  21:28, 18 September 2009 (UTC)
To be honest, I'm sure the admins here are perfectly capable, and my couple of reports have been done quickly and efficiently. I'm not sure I want to put in the kind of effort required to pass an RfA :) -- Casmith_789 (talk) 21:51, 18 September 2009 (UTC)
It's because so many voters are really, really foolish. And their votes count the same as the sensible ones. The argument that we should demand a certain level of participation is really ridiculous with volunteers, yet it persists. People just don't think about it rationally. Friday (talk) 21:53, 18 September 2009 (UTC)
Many organizations require that their volunteers commit to a level of participation in order to fill certain jobs, or demonstrate trustworthiness through tests or evaluations. No one can make volunteeers volunteer, but if they do so then it's reasonable to set participation or trustworthiness standards for jobs that require them.   Will Beback  talk  22:17, 18 September 2009 (UTC)
Sure, if you agree to man the suicide hotline from 3-5, you better do it at that time. But Wikipedia doesn't work like this. There's no central organization- people can pop in, do something useful for 5 minutes, and then go away for a month, and this works fine. If someone wants to do something useful with the tool only occasionally, and they're competent, there's no reason not to give them the tools. Yet this "insufficient need for the tools" basis for opposition persists, despite there being no rational basis for it. Friday (talk) 22:43, 18 September 2009 (UTC)
In this case, I think that the implied requirement is for sufficient past activity (at any hour) to establish the trustworthiness of the editor. Reviewing thousands of edits may not be the ideal way of judging an applicant's suitability for adminship, but since we have no other test or credentialling standard it seems like the best we've got. That said, the idea that a candidate needs to commit to a future level of participation seems unnecessary.   Will Beback  talk  22:58, 18 September 2009 (UTC)
That logic only applies to a certain extent, though. As I said above, a certain level of experience in tool areas such as AIV, CSD, AfD etc. is necessary because we need to know the potential candidate has the reasoning necessary to use the tools correctly when they get them. If someone only has a few edits at AIV and wishes to work there as an admin, they should not be given the mop until they have more edits there. Trust is essential, we don't need any backwards admins. Believe it or not, damage can be caused by rogue admins because they can scare off good users, thus why adminship is at least partially a big deal. Regards, --—Cyclonenim | Chat  22:11, 18 September 2009 (UTC)
Since this topic has been raised... were I ever to become an admin, I would be one of the sporadic ones. But here's the thing—and I'm sure this has been discussed a hundred times before—I would only use certain tools, but there is only one type of adminship, and it involves all the tools. Because there are several different 'powers' in adminship, many users, when considering candidates, take the approach of Cyclonenim and others: they will want to see your efforts in all areas that might be affected by the tools. Given that the tools come as a package, this is quite understandable. But, while some editors may have the temperament to be admins, they aren't going to go to the effort of developing those skills in ways that distract them from their preferred tasks—and indeed may lead them to involvement in tasks for which their skills are not a good match—just to qualify to use a mop. I don't know that potential good admins who are not very active, or are only active in some areas, would ever develop the profile of experience that would get them through RfA. Which brings me to my last point. Cyclonenim uses the phrase "If you want the tools, put in some work and prove you're capable of using them properly". The mistake here is to think that good potential admins necessarily really "want" the tools. Adminship isn't a reward or prize. Some editors—I count myself here—would be good at using the tools in some areas, but we don't want all of them, wouldn't use all of them, and certainly wouldn't want the grief of RfA, just in order to get to occasionally share the burden of keeping WP's cogs turning smoothly. I hope I'll be an admin here eventually (actually, given my real-life, perhaps i'd be better as a bureaucrat:-)), but those are some of my concerns about the way it is structured, and how potential candidates may regard the process. hamiltonstone (talk) 22:13, 18 September 2009 (UTC)
Whilst I do think you raise some compelling arguments for the splitting of tools, I think your point about people "wanting" the tools is irrelevant. Whether you want them or not, you still need to prove you'll use them well. Whether or not you've stumbled across potential adminship by someone nominating you, or whether you've decided to run yourself, it's still essential you have the necessary experience (I'm not asking bucket loads, I'm asking for enough to prove you'll use them sensibly) for each tool. In an ideal world, we'd split the tools and anyone who wanted them and was trusted would immediately be given them, but this is not the case and I highly doubt it ever will be. If you say you want to work in deletion only and that's the only tool you'll use, it still doesn't stop the fact you'll have access to the block buttons. I'm afraid in this imperfect world, your word isn't enough, I need proof through experience. Regards, --—Cyclonenim | Chat  22:42, 18 September 2009 (UTC)
You see if people are competent in their own areas they'll almost certainly be competent admins. And if the make a bad decision or whatever it can easily be undone, and an admin getting a bollocking is a far better way for them to learn how to do things well than failing RFA over some slight mistake and never have a hope of passing again. Besides, "no need for tools" means they trust them but they see no need. If they didn't trust thecanidate they would say it.--22:52, 18 September 2009 (UTC)
Are you trying to suggest to me that someone who spends all their time discussing AfDs would be equally competent at AIV? They're different areas, they use different policies. I need evidence of a well-rounded administrator if they're getting all the tools. Easily undone? If you block a good-faith user who then runs away from the encyclopaedia and no longer contributes, that can't be easily undone and does a lot of damage. Regards, --—Cyclonenim | Chat  23:20, 18 September 2009 (UTC)
I must agree with hamiltonstone. If I were an admin (ha, ha--look, I made joke!), it would be sporadic--and that is a model we should seek. Concentrating the power--and let us not kid ourselves; admins have more power than the plebes--in a few hands is a bad idea. → ROUX ₪ 04:08, 19 September 2009 (UTC)
Some very interesting points about experience in administrative areas highlighted: work at AIV, CSD, AfD, use of block button. I'd add to that RPP as a "nice to have". Administrative (janitorial) jobs, yet there are many "Not enough (audited) content work opposes" at RFA. That said, a recent RFA springs to mind where the now admin was a proficient vandal-fighter with a number of automated edits did succeed, so perhaps all is not lot lost for people like me who are not natural writers. -- Александр Дмитрий (Alexandr Dmitri) (talk) 07:03, 19 September 2009 (UTC)

Why?

After reading the above, it just makes me wonder - Do we always have to have an open rfa? I see many editors making an effort to nominate users just to have several open rfas. There is no doubt that rfa is one of the most drama-ridden processes we have here on Wikipedia. Although there is a serious dearth of sysops, I think it's a good thing that we periodically have no rfas - This project needs more content, not drama. When non-admin users feel they are ready to take up the mop and bucket, they will naturally be inclined to ask for a nomination or nominate themselves; adminship is never a responsibility that should be shoved upon others. -FASTILY (TALK) 02:24, 19 September 2009 (UTC)

Sure, and if we spend the next month giving everyone who isn't prepping for RFA the stink-eye, that will be obnoxious. I see this as more like a celebration; we all need a little push sometimes to get out of our shells and join the party. - Dank (push to talk) 02:31, 19 September 2009 (UTC)
I wouldn't be worried about it. We're just silly people. @harej 03:01, 19 September 2009 (UTC)

A fork in the road

There are several big questions floating around ... how to ensure that Assistants get sufficient RFA-style feedback and sufficient oversight by coaches, what subset of the tools to give them, and how high to set the bar. (A major problem is the objection of the WMF lawyer and others that there should be a fairly high bar to clear before someone can see deleted material.) But putting those aside for a second, imagine that we succeed in creating some kind of Assistant role, carrying some or all of the tools; then either the tools expire automatically in 3 to 6 months unless the Assistant does an RFA, or they are automatically granted admin status by applying 3 to 6 months later if their tools haven't been removed. To maximize the chances of success, it would be a good idea to figure out which way we're pushing. Feel free to add pros and cons:

Convert automatically to adminship after 3 to 6 months if the Assistantship tools aren't removed:

  • Pro: This year, Arbcom has been more than willing to desysop admins for misuse of tools (the recent WMC-Abd case is a clear example), but not everyone has gotten the message yet. If the community gave Arbcom clear guidelines for what should trigger a fast-track tool removal of whatever tools we give Assistants, not only would it get the people who know best (Arbcom) involved with tool removal, it would allow Arbcom to better get their message out about what kind of tool misuse can get any admin into trouble.
  • Pro: A lot of people don't prepare for and run for RFA because they think it's too hard to pass, and they're wrong, they could make it with a little effort. One option is to do a single RFA with 3 options (fail, promote to Assistant, promote to admin), which would give us some "accidental" admins from candidates who thought they were running for Assistantship. Sometimes the voters really like modesty.
  • Con: If the tools don't get removed for misuse in cases where the community would have wanted the tools to be removed, There Will Be Blood, so there has to be a lot of communication between Arbcom, RFA voters and candidates for this to work. - Dank (push to talk) 15:55, 16 September 2009 (UTC)


Tools expire automatically unless candidate does a normal RFA:

  • Con: We'd need a second RFA-like process to promote an Assistant to adminship. Twice as much work, more opportunity for things to go wrong.
  • Pro: OTOH, the lack of RFA-style input before a candidate gets to RFA is a big part of what's wrong now, and maybe this would provide that input. Also, until the community feels sure-footed with this new process, it might be a good idea to force the community to do it twice, so that everyone can check their own assumptions ... "Oh, I was worried about X the first time around, but now I see I shouldn't have worried" ... or "I told you guys this would be a problem, and no one listened to me ... see, I was right".
  • Pro: The people who oppose at RFA don't generally get off on opposing, they have legitimate concerns. Most of them would be happier if they weren't forced into the bad-guy role, and the candidate would be happier to get the same advice with a Support vote. The lower standards (lower tool-expertise standards, not lower standards for honesty, civility and trustworthiness) at RF-Assistantship would allow a greater percentage of voters to shift to Support, and the training during the Assistantship period would both prepare the Assistants to pass RFA and warn them if they're not going to pass. Happier candidates, happier voters. - Dank (push to talk) 15:42, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
The first option seems more problematic to me. For one, as you mention, should something go awry there will be hell to pay, and all it will take is a single "oops" to throw the entire process into disarray. Regardless of that happening, I still have a feeling that the intial review process will quickly evolve into what RfA is now; the community will want to retain a certain "gatekeeper" status on the entry to the Admin pool. Knowing that passing a candidate for "Assistantship" means future decisions are out of their control, the community will almost invariably tighten their control on that first review and turn it in to a mirror of the current RfA - and who would want to subject themselves to the rigors of RfA for a kind of admin-lite?
I understand that option two introduces a double-review process: once to become an "Assistant" and once to become an administrator. This shouldn't necessarily mean a much higher workload. The second review need not be an onerous affair. Questions of trust and the like can be dealt with up front, while the second review need only ask the question "Has this candidate used the temporary mop wisely?" There should be no need for a cavalcade of questions covering hypotheticals. The second review should be a much more straightforward affair, a simple yes-or-no kind of situation. Shereth 16:00, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
Some have said in the past that they could never support 2 review processes, although we haven't heard from them recently; also, I'm curious about whether this is something Arbcom might want to do for reasons of their own. For myself, I agree with everything you just said. - Dank (push to talk) 19:10, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Whether we have one or two elective reviews, I really like your idea of the third possible rfa result: "promote to assistant". Assuming we're able to build a convincing case that we have an urgent problem , we can combine this nicely with the threshold lowering suggestion WSC and SPhilbrick have been advocating. That is , at the crats discretion a % slightly below the current norm will now be a pass if it's a long term editor, or coaching offer for a fairly new editor. E.g.

+> 70% generally an automatic pass

60 – 70% typically an offer of coaching for a new editor , or a regular promotion for a new editor.

< 60% generally a fail.

This takes into account the fact that established editors have a lot to offer, likely have less need & desire for coaching , and are more likely to narrowly fall below the pass threshold due to the grudge factor. FeydHuxtable (talk) 20:42, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Initial reaction: that can't possibly work, because sometimes the issue at RFA is trustworthiness, and we're agreed that we don't want to give people the tools if we can't come to something approaching agreement that they're trustworthy. Second reaction: maybe it could work, if we can impress on voters the need to come back and take a second look in close cases (and contrary to the rumors, I think most voters do take a second look ... they just don't change their minds as often as some would like!). If we're agreed that we don't want untrustworthy Assistants, and that's the issue in their RFA, then everyone will know it and switch to Oppose if necessary to push it under 60% (or at least push it under 80% (or 75% or 70%) so that the crats feel they have discretion ... they should be able to figure out if the issues are a stopper for Assistantship). I'm still a little skeptical, but it would be so great not to have two different processes and not to have 4 different voting sections in an RFA (promote to admin, promote to Assistant, oppose, neutral) that I'm willing to keep an open mind. - Dank (push to talk) 21:28, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
OTOH ... of course we'll need to have a trial period, and for the trial, one option is to convince at least one crat (hopefully most of the crats!) to pass candidates with 60%-70%, convince coaches to watch them, work with them and revert them as necessary for 3 months, and if they can't pass a second RFA, convince at least one steward (hopefully more) to desysop them after 3 months on the grounds that they didn't have community support for anything but 3 months with the tools, or convince Arbcom to desysop them for the same reason they'd desysop anyone, misuse of tools. We can still talk about whether a different system would be desirable if the trial is considered a success, if you like. - Dank (push to talk) 22:21, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
If we create 'provisional adminship' I think we have then created a need to give 'crats the technical right to desysop, removing one of my objections to that particular user right. We would be best off using a low level solution like that rather than calling a steward. Protonk (talk) 22:33, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
Sorry to interject out of thread order, but requests to turn bits on or off at m:SRP that are clearly in policy (in this case, linked to a discussion at a standard page and requested by a closing crat or whatever) are among the easiest tasks for stewards to do, and there is rarely any great lag in getting them done. It's the harder stuff like cross wiki CU, usurpation that requires investigation, and the like that lag a bit. Just thought I'd point that out... a well formed request like that usually takes me under 2 minutes to do.. and that's if I'm dotting every ï twice and double checking all the T crossings. Hope that helps. It's not intended to argue against giving 'crats the turn off right, just as a datapoint. ++Lar: t/c 03:11, 18 September 2009 (UTC)
Agreed. I don't remember the link, but I believe that proposal got majority support, but not support from you or me, Protonk, on the theory that the poll was bass-ackwards ... first come up with a reason, then give crats the desysopping tool. If there's community support for even a trial of Assistantship, that's a good enough reason for me to switch my vote, too. - Dank (push to talk) 00:57, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Removing administrator rights/Proposal 2 and Wikipedia:Bureaucrat removal. MBisanz talk 00:59, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

What problem is this supposed to solve?

What problem is this supposed to solve? --Hammersoft (talk) 16:15, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

The admin corps growing steadily smaller via attrition; the replacement rate is negative. → ROUX ₪ 16:20, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
Hammer, you gave your position on RFA and on RFA reform above, and I respect it. One of the things that's been discussed at WT:CONSENSUS is that people who prefer "no change" in a policy discussion will sometimes achieve their result (intentionally or not, I'm not asserting bad faith) by objecting to every little step along the way, as if the smallest points were all critical, when in fact they simply object to the whole idea. If neither of these options is appealing to you, then say so; all I'm trying to do here is to lower the total number of options under consideration, so that when we take this to WP:VPP, we don't all die in a big combinatorial explosion. No new process will be approved here today. - Dank (push to talk) 16:28, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
  • And what I'm getting at is that before a solution can be carved out, you have to understand what the problem is. You've advocated a solution. You've not identified what actual problem this solves. It might increase the number of administrators. Let's assume it does. Let's assume it doubles the number of administrators. Does it matter? No, because no problem has been identified. You're asking us to assume that fewer administrators is a problem. I call that assumption into question. I'm not suggesting no change in policy or procedure. Let's just stop discussing that, ok? --Hammersoft (talk) 16:37, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
And I'm saying that your perspective is very welcome, but not in this section. Many people disagree with you and think that the case was made above that admin jobs are not getting done, and that the trend is bad. I know you don't agree; you said that. This section is for the other side to prune away some of the options on the table, so that when we take this to WP:VPP, it doesn't become so confused that nothing gets done. - Dank (push to talk) 16:44, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Don't presume to tell me where I can and can't comment. If you don't want me commenting in sections you start, then don't start sections. I look at the "Is there an admin shortage?" and I see a lack of consensus, and not "many people" agreeing that a shortage of admins is bad. If you take this to VPP without figuring out what problems this proposal solves, it will go up in flames. I'll guarantee it. Identify the problem first, then work towards a solution. See Problem solving. --Hammersoft (talk) 16:52, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
Good point; this is a question for WT:CONSENSUS ... the question has been debated before, with informal understandings but no update to policy, perhaps it's time to add something to policy. See you there. - Dank (push to talk) 17:26, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
  • I'm not interested in chasing a rabbit into the brush regarding whether the noted section had consensus or not. Identify the problem, then work towards a solution. If you don't, this proposal will not fly. Look, I'm trying to help you. I'm showing you where your plan fails. If you want to charge ahead without ever identifying what the problem is that this proposal is supposed to follow, it will fail. These proposals are a dime a dozen, and have been tried many, many times before. Every time they've been proposed, they've been shot down. There's a reason for that. Believing that reason is going to go away because we're at some crossroads we were never at before is resting this proposal on a belief, a belief that isn't supported by evidence of backlogs. --Hammersoft (talk) 17:29, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
Hammersoft asks for the problems to be identified, which is fair. It seems the consensus at Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_adminship#Is_there_an_admin_shortage.3F is that:
  • Admin recruitment is below replacement rate.
  • CSD is understaffed. The problem may partly that geography makes holes in coverage over the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The best realistic solution might be to look for additional admins located on the east coasts of the Atlantic and Pacific.
  • Category:Temporary Wikipedian userpages and Wikipedia:New histmerge list are heavily loaded, but it's uncertain that addig admins will help.
  • Wikipedia:Requested moves is struggling to keep up, but not all of that needs admins, non-admins could do some of it. I suggest that a non-admin who's not really confident about the rules would be unwilling to get involved in case a blows up, and an editor who knows the rules well is probably already an admin. --Philcha (talk) 17:31, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

<left adjust> Responding to perceived problems outline by Philcha:

  • Recruitment below replacement rate: Acknowledge this is the case. Not acknowledged this is a problem. Without companion analysis showing admin workload increasing in concert with this rate, it's meaningless.
  • CSD understaffed: If it is, then we should see high CSD backlogs. We don't.
  • Histmerge needs help: We don't know if more admins will help or not.
  • Requested moves backlogged: but non-admins can do it.

Great to bring these points forward! But, so far we're not identifying a problem that having more administrators would solve. Other thoughts? --Hammersoft (talk) 17:56, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

There is no point in worrying about not having enogh admins. If things do get so bad that we need more people will reduce their standards, which will result in more passes and as a feedback effect more candidates, untill we reach this stage again when the cycle will start over.--Patton123 (talk) 17:59, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
  • (ec) Is there any reason to believe that these new semi-admins would work in those areas as opposed to the areas that are already well staffed? It seems that the first step would be some sort of encouragement to existing admins to take a hand in these underworked sections.--Cube lurker (talk) 18:02, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
    • This spring and summer, I deleted a ton of promotional pages from userspace, most of them tagged by User:Calton (who rarely seeks or gets credit for his hard work, btw). The majority of these pages had been around for at least a month, some for years, and anyone doing a Google search on any of those terms (and many of these pages used search engine optimization techniques, and were probably pulling more hits than most of our articles) got a very poor impression of the quality control on Wikipedia. The fact that we patrol for that kind of stuff was a major factor in drawing people to Wikipedia in the first place, and WP:CSD#G11 deletions are a critical admin job that never gets finished. Others have pointed out other jobs above that aren't getting done. - Dank (push to talk) 18:12, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
      • The G11 category currently has 20 pages awaiting deletion. That's not a backlog. Sure, it was a problem. But the problem was taken care of by the existing admin corps. Show a chronic problem that the current admin corps isn't handling well, and a problem that is truly a problem. For example, WP:AIV being backlogged (which it isn't...occasionally it is, it's brought up at WP:AN, and the backlog vanishes...that's an admin corps that is working well). --Hammersoft (talk) 18:19, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
        • That's not the only issue; there are at least 3 others. Almost every morning, there are pages in the G11 queue that were there the night before. Some are still there 8 hours later. What effect does this have on taggers, knowing that we're only barely keeping up and probably couldn't keep up if they did more tagging, and knowing that we don't consider their work urgent enough to recruit more admins to get the deletions done? Second: tagging is not done in a vacuum; it's an exchange of information between admins and taggers. The more and smarter admins, the more successful tagging gets done. Third: although taggers as a group are happy with the occasional barnstar, many of the more prolific ones would like to at least hope that they'll become a part of the admin corps some day. We've got a lot of evidence that indicates that when these hopes are dashed, they get a lot less interested in tagging. Providing an intermediate step that seems attainable to them can only help.
        • On the other point ... are we good? I'm seriously not pushing back against you; what I'm saying is that there are people on the other side who need to talk about this very complex issue in order to get anywhere with it. If people who don't buy the premise keep jumping in the middle, then people stop watchlisting and the critical prep work never gets done, and the proposal can't proceed. Not that that's going to happen in this case; I'll keep bringing these questions up until the community provides answers. I don't have any serious disagreement with your point that there are other options that don't involve RFA that could be tried and ought to be discussed. And I never said you're not welcome; comments that aren't relevant to a particular conversation are not welcome in that section. I created your own section, you converted it to a subsection, and that works for me. - Dank (push to talk) 19:00, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
(ec) Thanks to both of you for the work. However this anecdote completely ignores my question. Is it too few admins, or to few who want to do those jobs. What reason do we have to think that the new trainee admins will move into these areas?--Cube lurker (talk) 18:21, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
Cube lurker, we cant be sure, but if we increase our aggregate admin function in line with the perceived aggregate admin workload , theres a fair chance things will balance out on there own, especially if we promote enough gnomnes \ vandal fighter who enjoy doing the more process orientated work. FeydHuxtable (talk) 20:59, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
Also, I recall reading something somewhere else where Wikimedia and Google agreed not to have anything other than article, image, and portal space indexed. I don't think that's been put into play yet (a casual test showed it hasn't), but a solution like that obviates the need for user space to be patrolled for spam. --Hammersoft (talk) 18:32, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
That's a long story, and it doesn't look like we're going to get anywhere with that. A proposal to noindex user pages was defeated (by a whisker) in July. - Dank (push to talk) 19:03, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Additional analyses of admin workload and queues would definitely be helpful. However we don't necessarily need to demonstrate those rising in concert with the declining numbers. There's very often a time lag between the decline of an essential resource and the subsequent collapse of the community it supports.

Example: The Easter Island culture collapsed due to the lack of trees, but authorities like Jarred Diamond suggest that their quality of life wasn't much effected until very near the end. They would have had little shortage of firewood and the like even close to the last tree being felled, just less dead wood being left to decompose. Even with no trees they still would have had a stockpile of rope to build statues, and for a while plenty of crops as it took years before the deforestation led to serious soil erosion.

King: "What do you mean we need to replenish the forests? We're good as gold here, folk have as much food as ever, babies are still being born, and even if you're right about firewood its summer now and nice and warm! Lumberjacks, off to work!"

Easter Island scientist: "You just signed our death warrant"

King: "Prophet of doom!! Away with you and your perceived problems!"

Succesful communities act to head off potential problems before cast iron evidence exists, as by then its often too late. No ones saying Wiipedia is going to collaspe if the active admin ranks arent replenished in the next few months, but it would probably be wise to address the issue. FeydHuxtable (talk) 20:25, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

  • How about ANY evidence that a problem exists? So far, I've seen none. I noted much earlier on this page that there are a number of things that have taken the place of the traditional role of administrators, frequently reducing or eliminating their workload. Case point; administrators don't have to manually update WP:AIV anymore when they block someone. A bot does it for them. That makes it less time consuming to patrol WP:AIV. I do think it is worth studying what is happening to the community and identifying potential problems. But, to use another analogy akin to the Easter Island one but with a rather different outcome; nobody thought the end of the horse drawn buggy was an imminent sign of the end times. Yet, we have an awful lot fewer horse drawn buggies than we did a hundred years ago. I simply fail to find a reducing number of active administrators to be a problem since no negative outcome of their being fewer administrators has been determined. None. --Hammersoft (talk) 20:45, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
    • Replacement rate is negative. Mean time since last admin action for active admins is growing larger. Your argument relies on a notion of increasing productivity subsuming losses in labor, which is true but has special connotations for small communities. As the admin community grows smaller, the active admin community provides a bigger and bigger share of actual task completions (deletions, protections, moves, etc.). The marginal impact of desysopping or retirement becomes much larger. The comparison to productivity and labor is that increasing returns to scale from productivity gives us an incentive to build fewer factories. In a world where factories disappear over time that is a losing strategy. In english the fewer admins we have the more important admins like WMC become and the more desysopping him or him retiring impacts us. Protonk (talk) 20:53, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
      • Totally agree with what Protonk's said. The horse drawn buggy was replaced with vehicles that could 100% duplicate its function several times over, unless you count the cuteness factor. No large human organisation has ever managed to do without administrative personal that I can think off, it's a function that technology can enhance but never replace. Some of the specific area's suffering from the lack of admin attention have been summarised over at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Draft presentation for admin reform. Nothing new there though, I agree you’ve identified our weak point. FeydHuxtable (talk) 20:59, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
        • Well I want to make clear that I agree w/ one point of Hammer's. the productivity of admins has increased dramatically over time thanks to improvements in the interface, semi-automated tools, and bot accounts (e.g. I don't de-link images after I delete them in most cases, a bot does). Protonk (talk) 21:12, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
Protonk: Suppose there is, indeed, a problem. And all the king's supermen who victoriously cleared the allegedly draconian RFA hurdles cannot solve it because there's too few of them. Now you suggest to lower the standard, let in a bunch of users who would not otherwise make it or even try to, and expect significant relief? Why? Their skill set and productivity is lower; their functionality is limited by design; they will drain your own batteries because they need to be coached and watched, right? I have no evidence to back up my feeling that sub-sops will actually reduce the capacity of the system, only a live test will show. Get a Joe from the street and a stopwatch, and a few uninvolved Swedish wikipedia referees to double-check the records... NVO (talk) 21:10, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
A few things. (1) I don't necessarily support the admin-lite issue. (2) I have no evidence that RfA is a good check of productivity or skillsets. On the contrary I would imagine that productivity is relatively uncorrelated with RfA success for candidates, given that the candidates wouldn't be snow closes. (3) I think rollback offers a great example of how assigning subsets of admin rights to users makes everyone better off, even if those users can't do all the things admins can. Protonk (talk) 21:17, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
Ah. Perhaps I shoudl actually respond to your question. :) I didn't fully get it until I saw the edit summary. I don't think that coaching from current admins will appreciably reduce their productivity. The reasoning follows my discussion w/ Timmeh over the productivity lost in status indicators (here). The common belief, best summarized by the admonition "let's get back to work on the encyclopedia" is that content work trades off with non-content work (WP space stuff, drama, talking, etc.). While this is generally true, we make the further implicit assumption that the marginal productivity is the same, which is obviously not true. By that I mean we often say things like "in the time we spent arguing about blah, we could have improved 10 articles on generals in the War of Jenkin's Ear". That assumption is false. It is much easier to undertake some tasks than others and the relative ease of those tasks differ between individuals. So I don't suspect that admins who are productive will lose so much productivity from coaching that the net effect of their loss and the coachee's gain is <0--this is doubly so because coaching is not time sensitive. I could chose which part of the day I respond to questions or check up on actions. Does that make sense? Protonk (talk) 21:31, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Editing break, editing break

Another general point I will make. I am open to debate on a lot of things, but My reservoir of goodwill runs dry when I am engaged in a debate where someone sees this graph this graph and this graph combined and does not see the problem. Slightly decreasing number of admin actions, combined with a negative replacement rate and a clearly decreasing admin stock spells disaster in the future. Period. Full stop. End of story. We don't have to assume linearity. We can adopt reasonable assumptions about the existence of inflection points, but even if we do so, the future is that fewer admins do fewer total actions all while increasing the number of actions done per admin and increasing the hazard rate for admin attrition. That doesn't have to continue very long before there isn't a wikipedia anymore. Meaning before we have to lock page creation and semi-protect articles in order just to keep content manageable. And it will happen very drastically. One month we will have enough support to get by and the next a few admins retire or are removed and we literally don't have enough volunteers to overcome the flow. This will be true even if we make reasonable assumptions about increasing productivity of admins as a decreasing function of the number of admins (obviously we can make an unreasonable assumption about that function and be fine forever). There is a problem. We need a solution. Protonk (talk) 21:51, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

  • We can probably hold out a couple of months beyond the "danger point", if we don't mind letting low priority tasks stack up.
  • Some kinds of action that are currently being done by admins can really be done by anyone, if people were willing to be a tad flexible.
  • There's a lot that can be done with a little smart systems-design, depending on whether the community is still flexible enough to allow folks to do it. (granted, the whole "policy must be stable" movement doesn't really inspire confidence here ^^;; )
  • We could probably do without the specific admin role. The buttons are (almost) (all) sufficiently nerfed that most people can use them without harming the wiki. For instance, when the admin flag was first created, "deleting an image" actually physically and irrevocably deleted the image file. Nowadays there's an undo option, thank goodness. (a few known exceptions exist)
The wiki probably won't die over this issue, and it won't drop dead tomorrow. But we *do* need to start thinking and planning as to how to prevent it from failing in the course of the coming year or so.
By analogy: Driving a modern car is quite safe, but if you don't turn the wheel when you come to a corner, you're still going to crash ;-) Same for the wiki: we can see the corner down the road. We have plenty of time to decide to turn the wheel and change gears. But when we get to the corner, we do need to be ready and do so.
--Kim Bruning (talk) 00:13, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
  • The problem here is we do an absolutely shitty job of looking down the road and seeing what the problems approaching us are. We do a masterful job of saying "Hey, there's lots of roads in this country and some of them have bends in them!" but a crappy job of saying "Hey, we're flying at 100mph down this straight road, but I can see a bend in the road 1/2 mile ahead, I'd better slow down". Almost nobody here is willing to perform any analysis to gain understanding of what the problems are. Instead, everybody and their brother's pet dog's second cousin's cat's pet fish is incredibly happy to come up with solutions (not picking on any one person here. We all do it). --Hammersoft (talk) 13:01, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
I think at this point you're just being contrary for the sake of being contrary. I'll direct you again, as Protonk said, to here here and here. → ROUX ₪ 13:29, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Oh come on. All I'm asking is people approach problem solving with proven techniques. How is that being contrary for the sake of being contrary? I'm not saying there isn't a problem. I'm not saying we don't need to do something. I'm saying that we should figure out just what the problem IS before running off into the sunset on the nearest galloping horse. Solutions are easy to make. Everybody's got an idea. But without some problem analysis and use of problem solving techniques, you're just fumbling about in the dark. --Hammersoft (talk) 13:43, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
Oh come on yourself. You've been sniping here over and over without contributing anything constructive, and indeed flat-out ignoring what people are saying to you. I'll make it nice and simple. The problem: losing admins faster than we replace them. The solution: replace them faster. Again, look at the graphs. The rate of loss is getting faster and faster. Even without assuming a linear progression--even taking best case from this trend--there is a significant downward spirial and it needs to be addressed. You're welcome to continue pretending that it doesn't need to be, and disingenuously claiming that because there are no backlogs at this moment that nobody has shown an actual problem, but those of us who are interested in actually trying to fix this problem will continue doing so, and shall ignore people who have nothing constructive to contribute. You keep saying "Waaaaaah what's the problem waaaaah." And as far as I can tell, that's all you're saying. And yet, you just said you're not saying there's no problem... so put up or shut up. Answer your own question, or to use one of my favourite sayings: lead, follow, or get out of the way. At this point you're just being a particularly loud lump on the side of the road. → ROUX ₪ 13:58, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Just because you don't happen to like my approach to how to solve this problem doesn't give you or anyone else permission to attempt to force me out of the discussion. If you don't want Wikipedia editors contributing to the discussion of your solution, then take it off site and have a discussion among yes-men who are quite happy to go along with your solution.
  • As I've repeatedly stated, losing admins faster than they are being replaced hasn't been shown to BE a problem. It could be a catalyst to a problem, but isn't a problem in and of itself. If some real problem analysis was performed, this would be blatantly apparent. But since none has been done, this is being viewed as the problem. And kindly cut the crap with my noting a lack of evidence of backlogs is disingenuous. It isn't by a longshot. If the number of admins is going down, maybe it's because we don't need as many admins as we did before. Abuse filters in place, bots handling routine work, people using automated tools, uploading interface change, autoconfirmed users, patrolled pages...all of these have had a HUGE impact on the amount of work administrators need to perform. Comparing Wikipedia now to Wikipedia two years ago and saying the sky is falling is absurd on the face of it. Wikipedia has dramatically changed. Just because there are fewer administrators doesn't mean there is automatically a problem. For all you know, the attrition rate vs. promotion rate will level out. You don't know, and you don't know if fewer administrators is actually a problem, because not one of you has provided shred one of evidence that there is an insufficiency in the number of admins to keep up with the work demand. If you'd read my comments, you'd know I already have, as you so eloquently said, put up or shut up. I've been telling you how to begin this process in a proper, logical way. That you don't like using problem solving techniques and therefore discount them as a place to begin isn't my problem. Just because you don't like my suggested course of action doesn't mean I haven't suggested one.
  • Regardless of this ridiculous bickering, I am happy for one thing. It's blatantly obvious this proposal has already gone up in flames for a variety of reasons. A while back, a very hard worker (User:Gazimoff I believe) started a review process that approached RFA reform in a way similar to what I'm suggesting for approaching the determination of whether there is a problem with fewer administrators. Look at Wikipedia:RfA Review. Unfortunately, Gazimoff has largely become inactive. But, that case is a study in how to do it.
  • Coming up with a 'solution' to the 'problem' when you haven't ascertained the problem is highly problematic. Have any of you stopped to consider why the attrition rate is as high as it is? The number of administrators resigning has skyrocketed over the last three years (I'm looking at the table here). The other half of attrition rate is the number of resignations. I don't see people coming up with any effort to interview these people, get them to answer a survey regarding their adminship and why they resigned, etc. Maybe if you did that you would uncover some kernels of truth. But, since no problem analysis is being done, nobody has a clue what the problem is. You're just fumbling about in the dark. So, my suggestion as I've been stating all along here is get off the solution horse and get on the problem analysis horse. If you stay on that solution horse, you're going to find you're trying to win the Kentucky Derby with a Percheron. It isn't going to work. --Hammersoft (talk) 14:20, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
Blah, blah, blah. Are you going to actually contribute something or keep whining that people aren't doing what you have decided they must do? → ROUX ₪ 14:40, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Shockingly, I've decided to keep whining that people should use problem analysis and solution techniques to develop a reasoned, careful approach to this 'problem'. I'll keep maintaining that finding a problem is important to determining the solution. I'll keep suggesting to those willing to listen that solutions are most effective when they address a known problem. I'm terribly sorry this is violating WP:POINT, WP:CIVIL, and who knows what else. But, having a logical, reasoned approach to problem solving is just my queer bent. Go figure. --Hammersoft (talk) 10:50 am, Today (UTC−4)
Are you going to do anything, or are you going to sit there telling everyone that they have to do what you tell them to? → ROUX ₪ 14:53, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Are you going to do anything other than scream at me for suggesting people follow problem solving techniques? --Hammersoft (talk) 14:55, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Scream? No. If I were screaming you would be in no doubt, I assure you. You're not suggesting, you're dictating and bitching when people don't jump when you say frog. Having seen a lot of your posts in various places the past few days, this seems to be par for the course. Again: you going to do anything? Or just keep whining when people don't do what you say? You said you're not saying there's no problem--so identify what you see as the problem. You say people should use problem solving techniques--so use them. Or is this a matter of do as you say, not as you do? → ROUX ₪ 14:58, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
  • I like "Lead, follow, or get out of the way." I try to apply it to how I live. I've never seen a situation where telling someone that resulted in them saying, "oh gosh, you're right." Empirically speaking, it tends to lead to more arguing, which is fun and all... -GTBacchus(talk) 15:00, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
  • And Roux, you're doing the same thing you're accusing me of. You don't like it that I'm not jumping on your band wagon, which is making you angry. Tough ritz crackers. You don't like it, then lead better. Look, I can say there is a lack of using problem solving techniques and not have to do a million man hours of work to conduct the work myself before I have a right to say the lack of using the techniques is an issue. I honestly was trying to help yours and Dank's efforts. Instead, both of you have attempted to railroad me out of this conversation. Frankly, I'm done talking with you. If all you can do is yell at me for not jumping on your band wagon, keep on yelling my friend. The soapbox is all yours. --Hammersoft (talk) 15:05, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
  • See this? It is the wrong end of the stick, and you are holding it very firmly. What you are doing here is this: "You go do what I tell you to do. What? No, of course I'm not going to do it. You go do it." You fail to see how that is not constructive in any way. And Protonk has done an excellent job of clearly and concisely explaining one enormous facet of the problem: fewer admins means more actions done by each admin, increasing error rates and rates of burnout. Again: do something constructive or shut the hell up. That you disagree is immaterial; it is that you refuse to actually do what you are telling other people to do that is the problem.There is no railroading here; you are showing that all you are interested in or capable of doing here is sniping from the sidelines. That is not constructive and it is not a contribution that is useful in any way. If you would actually do what you keep telling everyone else to do, you'd be worth listening to. Since you're not, well... old saying: you're part of the solution or you're part of the problem. You're not solving anything here, so I leave it as an exercise in your own self-awareness to figure out exactly what you're doing. → ROUX ₪ 18:10, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
  • (I don't understand how you cats indent, and) I think that Roux thinks that if he keeps criticizing you, such criticism will somehow become effective, or have a beneficial result other than feeling good to him. He's wrong, which is a shame, because he's usually very smart. In this case, he prefers the psychological satisfaction of yelling at you to the real-world effectiveness of using his time for something useful. That's right, Roux, yelling at Hammersoft is useless, because it will have no effect on him or anyone else. I have no idea why you, who are intelligent, don't realize the utter fatuity of bitching this guy out. Sad, really. -GTBacchus(talk) 19:13, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Then he should do something effective, not something juvenile like filling up this page bitching about his personal frustration. Adults know the difference between venting and getting something done. This website is for getting something done. For venting, get a punching bag. -GTBacchus(talk) 19:34, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
  • I suffer from a terrible affliction: the vain hope that people can actually use what's between their ears, or at least learn to. Alas, I am proven wrong time and time again. → ROUX ₪ 19:53, 17 September 2009 (UTC)


I tend to agree that looking at Wikipedia from the perspective of a reader, I have a hard time understanding how the decrease in active administrators has harmed my experience. Vandalism control does not seem to have suffered, control of spam in widely viewed articles does not seem to have suffered, the content dispute mechanisms that maintain quality in widely viewed articles does not seem to have suffered. I wholly support lower RFA standards since I think the rise in standards has been unfair to new editors and harmful from a morale perspective, but I don't see that the quality of our final product is threatened. Christopher Parham (talk) 14:46, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
I may be a heretic here for saying this, but I think RfA is broken (that is, it's not pleasant for candidates and it has a tendency to select successful MMORPG players rather than thoughtful leaders by example) and I don't see that the case for more admins has been made. Here's a radical idea: If you're concerned about the admin workload, examine the tasks to see which ones really need doing and which ones can be eliminated. Sometimes changing assumptions is the way to go... One way to get rid of a lot of busywork is to eliminate the incentive. People vandalise? Eliminate the incentive, implement flagged revisions. People post spam? Eliminate the incentive, noindex everything but articles, and put linkfollowing utilities in place that make it less useful to put URLs in articles. People post conflict of interest material? require real names and disclosure of CoI in advance. And so on. Trying to get more admins to do jobs is one fix, but "work smarter not harder" tells us to examine our assumptions instead. ++Lar: t/c 03:27, 18 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Heretic! Get the stakes! Get the fire! What you describe is, as of course you know, what has been happening. Which is why the number of required administrator tasks to keep things going has gone down over time. Wikipedia is a lot less vandalized now than it used to be. Less vandals, less blocks. --Hammersoft (talk) 12:58, 18 September 2009 (UTC)


  • Hammersoft makes the important point that forecasting suffers from the fundamental fallacy of extension of current trends. This is a point which should be shouted from the rooftops. I don't think he deserves the hassle that he is getting for it. However, we have to accept it and move along. As I see it we have a few trends at work: slightly decreasing total activity, decreasing individual activity and increasing loss rate. All three of those are general of course and can be broken into their principal components. Those three trends result in a sort of meta trend (through nothing other than division): an increasing share of admin actions are undertaken by more active admins. That meta-trend has the important implication that it exacerbates the impact of the third component--admin loss rate gets more painful. This doesn't even include the allied problems with more tasks undertaken by fewer people. In order for things to get worse we don't need to assume that all these trends continue along their merry way. Indeed the admin activity graph looks to be at an inflection point (making forecasting especially difficult). We can even assume (As I said above) reasonable counter-trends like increasing admin productivity as the number of admins decrease (again, just talking about quantity and ignoring the obvious issue that quality suffers). We can assume that total admin activity remains constant, that the replacement rate stops decreasing (or growing more negative if you prefer) and that the hazard rate for admin loss decreases mildly. Even under those assumptions the meta-trend gets worse. And making those assumptions requires that three reasonably unrelated characteristics of the 'pedia get better (or their 2nd derivative gets better) simultaneously. So my point above is that opposing the forecast requires that all three components reverse their trend (even if they stop growing worse it isn't enough). When does it become more sound to argue that simultaneous across the board improvement might occur? Why is that the grounded approach? I don't think it is. I think the sober approach is to review the data, conclude that we have some problem in the future and try to undertake some solutions. More important is the historical understanding. Wikipedia will not be the same resource it was in 2003 ever again. In 2011 it will not be the resource it is today. If we are not cognizant of that we fail. Protonk (talk) 16:27, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
    • One more comment. In order for me to believe that trends will reverse I have to be given some way to rationalize it. I don't see how fewer admins causes the loss function to decrease (and I can see a half dozen reasons along w/ some empirical support indicating that it might increase). Ditto the other trends. This may be due to lack of imagination on my part. So let me know what I'm missing. Protonk (talk) 17:02, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Admin retention

Hammersoft has rightly pointed out that we should consider the attrition side of this as well as the dearth of new admins. My view is that attrition is very much the lesser side of the issue - we expect to lose a proportion of admins, not all of those who have ceased to be active are actually lost, and as expressed on a graph the fall in new RFAs seems to me the main problem. However I would support doing some sort of survey on our formerly active admins, and I see no contradiction into looking into this at the same time as trying to resolve the larger problem of the dearth of new admins. I'm hoping that such research would show that many of our inactives may come back at some point in the future, and that the increasing numbers dropping out is in part a reflection of the high numbers of admins appointed in 06 and 07 coming to the end of their wiki careers but that is mere speculation on my part - we need research on this. I'll see if I can track down some of the researchers who presented at Wikimania. ϢereSpielChequers 15:01, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Upsetting the cart

(being jokingly facetious here to start off; smile people) I know one of the worst things you can do in a debate is introduce statistics that flip the cart over. Nevertheless, at the risk of incurring the wrath of many...

I did a synthesis of the data presented at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Draft presentation for admin reform and User:JamesR/AdminStats (updated daily by bot) to generate figures on the average number of actions per admin per month for the last several months, going with the 17th of each month to the 17th of the prior month for that month's numbers. What I found:

  • May 2009 : 129 actions per active admin
  • June 2009: 118
  • July 2009: 120
  • Aug. 2009: 105
  • Sep. 2009: 104

If anything, the number of actions per active administrator is going down, not up. I don't see any trend supporting the idea that each administrator is having to carry additional load to keep things going.

Another factor to consider; have a look at User:Katalaveno/TBE. The amount of time it takes for our editors to accumulate 10 million new edits has effectively remained static for more than two years, varying between 6 and 9 weeks. Yet, thanks to things like edit filters, the numbers of actual vandalism has gone down. With less vandalism, there's less need to block (just one example of many). There really is less work for administrators to do around here. --Hammersoft (talk) 19:55, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

I don't think you can draw too many conclusions from these data. If it was stretched out over several years, sure, but I bet there could be seasonal shifts accounting for this. IronGargoyle (talk) 22:00, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
This seems like a very reasonable conclusion. It's also worth noting that on the vandalism front, active admins are complemented by the growth of the rollbacker class. Christopher Parham (talk) 22:15, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
I agree with IronGargoyle. Five months worth of numbers doesn't tell us much in terms of trends. We really shouldn't conclude anything unless we have data going back at least a year or two. Timmeh (review me) 22:27, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
I'm not sure that the edit filters alter the admin workload - we are still getting ten million edits in the same time period, the vandalfighting bots are reverting vandalism but we still need admins to block people. What the vandal fighting bots have replaced are some of the vandal fighters who once would have been huggling towards adminship. I suspect that in the longterm our indef blocking of millions of IP addresses has reduced the admin workload, but cost us an unknown number of potential editors. As for admin actions per "active" admin, those admin actions won't include declining incorrect speedies, and those "active" admins will include a fair few editors who still do the 30 edits every 60 days needed to count as active editors but haven't done any admin type things for yonks. If we are going to try and live with fewer and fewer admins then I think we need a better definition of an active admin, preferably not including people who are currently retired, on extended wikibreaks or who haven't recently done anything admin related. ϢereSpielChequers
We should distinguish though, that reverting vandalism is a critical task (we don't want readers seeing vandalism) whereas blocking is a non-critical task (if we can revert consistently and quickly, blocking may not be necessary - i.e. it may improve efficiency but isn't itself productive). If our reversion mechanisms have greatly improved, reduction in our blocking capacity is probably okay. Christopher Parham (talk) 16:06, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Admin editors, admin bots, and admin editors who act like admin bots

This is essentially an insulting comment, and purely my own anecdotal opinion. It is not meant as an attack on any one person. Probably the worst possible way to start off an observation, but here goes. We all know that there has always been attrition in Wikipedia, outweighed by new blood coming into the project. There are a thousand reasons for attrition, and as everything pointed out above explains, there are also a thousand reasons why things are in decline here this year. Additionally, in the past few years we've rolled out various bots and admin bots which have taken away much of the busy work that admins performed in the past. Meanwhile, many of the admin tasks that remain are those which require critical thinking, which still requires a human who is willing to put in the time to apply some analysis before using the extra buttons. Thinking is tough, so I think that many of the admins who essentially performed the tasks which are now handled by various autonomous tools really found themselves in a role they had never wanted. This means that many of the experienced admins who are still around, such as myself, are the old vandal fighters and peace keepers; and editors like us would probably not find our way to the mop becuase vandal fighting does not require the same human touch that it did when I was active in it. Thusly, fewer people like me want the mop, or ever want to do those things they now need to do to get it. All of this has been said above in some form. So while you have bot-like admins with nothing to do, anti-vandal editors like myself suddenly found that conflict resolution was one of the only things left to do. ArbCom has busied themselves this year with taking the mop away from a whole bunch of admins of this type, so it strikes me that many such as myself have dialed it way back.

I've made a lot of noise on this point, and accused ArbCom of being inept, or corrupt, or lazy, or simply out of touch. The actual members are mostly great people, who are highly dedicated to this project, but the decisions they have made this year on removing the mop have struck me as largely emotional, rather than rational. A lot of talentented, smart, highly active, and dedicated admins have lost their mops, or resigned in disgust, or simply faded into the background as a result of frustration with admins having their hands tied to deal with persistently disruptive and contentious editors. I think there is consensus that editors who push Holocaust denial should not be allowed to insert holocaust denial into our content. Yet it happens. I can't imagine that there is consensus for Wikipedia to be a nationalist battle ground, yet spend some time on the Greek and Turkey pages and you might think that there has been a long violent struggle between these two countries that is active today. You would not get the impression that they are actually NATO allies. Dealing with this kind of stuff is neither fun, nor simple. It involves actively monitoring heated disputes over a long period of time in order to identify patterns of behavior. As a recent and former member of ArbCom proved, it is not that difficult to conceal your misbehavior for an extended period of time, whilst gaining the respect of those around you. None of his is an official admin responsibility or user right, but rather an abstract set of actions that have to be taken in order to execute the admin duties in these areas.

Of course, these are heated, emotionally charged areas, and they often result in admins losing their cool. I've done it, and I know of few who haven't: In response to an angry action, another editor has an angry reaction. An admin is called in and tries to help, but the series of angry reactions continues, and the admin soon finds themself "involved" and on the receiving end of a high volume of further angry reactions for failing to see the "truth". Mediation fails. RfC fails. Blocks result in a landslide of socks. Eventually, after the community's mechanisms have all failed, the admin finds they are alone in trying to fix the issue. If they lose their temper in any way and make a rash decision... BOOM, here comes ArbCom to the rescue to... remove the admin's mop, maybe block a few socks, and then do nothing viable to stop the underlying disruption issues. Maybe the admin gets the mop back a short while later, or maybe they just leave in frustration, but many other admins just sit by watching in frustration as a great project which managed to get some hip social cache for a few years sinks into a static mediocrity. Saying as much just invites criticism, which I have a very difficult time understanding. Hiberniantears (talk) 23:16, 19 September 2009 (UTC)

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