Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[Phil Nash]

Carcharoth wrote:
>> Agree 100% with David (DGG) here. On the other hand, a careful
>> combination of templates with personalised messages can also work.
>> See
>> this essay here for more on this type of approach:
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ArielGold/Etiquette2

I totally agree with this; it's an excellent exposition of behaviour; 
however, it is always difficult to distinguish between those new editors who 
are in tune with the "mission", for want of a better word, and those who are 
not. I count myself, perhaps optimistically, as an experienced Admin, with a 
nose for the extent to which constructive advice is to be balanced against 
damage limitation. In most cases, it's apparently an open and shut case, and 
I base judgement on the tone of the edits. For a new account to run the 
gamut of warnings and then be blocked, to me shows a deliberate refusal to 
accept standards. Also, I am alive to the possibility that I may not be 
dealing with a native speaker of the English language, and deal accordingly.

But: there are those whose activity is wholly or mainly dealing with 
vandalism. It's a tiresome and mostly unrewarding occupation, and I see many 
editors who have been doing this over months, but don't seek to use that to 
seek RfA. more strength to them.

I think it boils down to a gut feeling as to whether an edit is good-faith 
or not, and whether an editor is here to contribute positively or not. In 
some cases, one edit may swing it for that account, but I will explain why 
I've blocked it; if that person wants to start over, without the stain of a 
block to their name, I don't have a problem with that. Sometimes lessons are 
hard.



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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[Carcharoth]

Agree 100% with David (DGG) here. On the other hand, a careful
combination of templates with personalised messages can also work. See
this essay here for more on this type of approach:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ArielGold/Etiquette2

Carcharoth

On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 7:47 PM, David Goodman  wrote:
> Look again at those messages. The succeed in sounded cold, formal, and
> sent by a computer without human intervention--which is just what
> twinkle etc. make it so easy to do.  They talk too much about
> complicated rules, and they sound more defensive than helpful.
>
> I  almost never use them, except when I'm dealing with someone I
> suspect to be in bad faith.  And even there they don't send a true
> warning--people treat them as forms. a personal message to say that
> one is personally and specifically watching can be much more
> effective.
>
> They've gotten a little better over the last year or too, but most of
> them need to be thought out differently. when one starts off
> criticising, most people don't read to the bottom.
>
> and the reason people don't complain, is indeed because the
> unsophisticated editors move on. They move on out of Wikipedia and we
> lose them.
>
> But some people do complain: that's why we have the rule about not
> templating the regulars. the regulars get insulted. They're right to
> get insulted. Anyone would. But we only care about those who are
> already regulars.
>
> Don't  routinely direct people to our overlong, overcomplicated,
> inconsistent, and frequently ignored guidelines, explain it simply: A
> wording I sometimes use is  "you need to become famous first, & then
> somebody will write about you" . Now, that's not exact, but it's
> understood, and nobody gets insulted--they know perfectly well they're
> not famous, and it sort of makes a joke out of it.
>
> and for unsourced, "you really need a published reference for that" --
> they've heard that sort of thing in school, they'll understand.
>
> David
>
>
> On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 9:06 AM, Phil Nash  
> wrote:
>
>>  creating good content through practice, the latter
>> may need educating, and this is normally done through templated messages,
>> the first level of which assumes good faith; however, it is often easier
>> when time is short to revert with an edit summary of "unsourced",
>> "irrelevant" or something equally blunt.
>
>>Again, in my experience, very few
>> "unsophisticated" (and this is not meant to be an insult) editors complain,
>> because they edit and move on.
>
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>
>
> --
> David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
>
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[David Goodman]

Look again at those messages. The succeed in sounded cold, formal, and
sent by a computer without human intervention--which is just what
twinkle etc. make it so easy to do.  They talk too much about
complicated rules, and they sound more defensive than helpful.

I  almost never use them, except when I'm dealing with someone I
suspect to be in bad faith.  And even there they don't send a true
warning--people treat them as forms. a personal message to say that
one is personally and specifically watching can be much more
effective.

They've gotten a little better over the last year or too, but most of
them need to be thought out differently. when one starts off
criticising, most people don't read to the bottom.

and the reason people don't complain, is indeed because the
unsophisticated editors move on. They move on out of Wikipedia and we
lose them.

But some people do complain: that's why we have the rule about not
templating the regulars. the regulars get insulted. They're right to
get insulted. Anyone would. But we only care about those who are
already regulars.

Don't  routinely direct people to our overlong, overcomplicated,
inconsistent, and frequently ignored guidelines, explain it simply: A
wording I sometimes use is  "you need to become famous first, & then
somebody will write about you" . Now, that's not exact, but it's
understood, and nobody gets insulted--they know perfectly well they're
not famous, and it sort of makes a joke out of it.

and for unsourced, "you really need a published reference for that" --
they've heard that sort of thing in school, they'll understand.

David


On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 9:06 AM, Phil Nash  wrote:

>  creating good content through practice, the latter
> may need educating, and this is normally done through templated messages,
> the first level of which assumes good faith; however, it is often easier
> when time is short to revert with an edit summary of "unsourced",
> "irrelevant" or something equally blunt.

>Again, in my experience, very few
> "unsophisticated" (and this is not meant to be an insult) editors complain,
> because they edit and move on.

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-- 
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[Delirium]

Charles Matthews wrote:
> Andrew Gray wrote:
>   
>> Would it be useful at this point to have some idea of how other
>> projects do it? I know some have a "normal" deadminning process, but
>> I'm not sure how this works - do some have a request-based system,
>> some have regular reconfirmation, what?
>>   
>> 
> It's hardly going to be useful to adopt a "doesn't scale" type system - 
> imagine reconfirming (or not) 1000 admins annually, and then ask what 
> else could have been done with that investment of the community's time 
> to improve the 'pedia.  I think part of the answer lies here.

If anything it seems like it'd make it worse. My impression is that RfA 
as currently constituted has a tendency to select for rules lawyers, 
because it's such a heavyweight process full of requirements to be 
familiar with, well, other Wikipedia processes. Idealists who're 
interested in writing a good encyclopedia, and see Process as a 
necessary evil to organize collaborative encyclopedia-writing (a means, 
not an end!), are often turned off by the whole thing and don't bother. 
Several of my Wikipedia-editing-professor acquaintances occasionally 
could use an admin bit to do things like merging histories or 
move-over-deletion, but they IM or email me asking me to do it on their 
behalf, and wouldn't even consider asking for adminship through some 
process that requires them to conduct a multi-stage interview proving 
their familiarity with dozens of arcane policy pages.

If I were forced to "reconfirm" my admin status I'd probably decline, 
because the downside of not being an admin (loss of a few useful 
functions like being able to merge histories) is less than the downside 
of spending more of my Wikipedia time on things that aren't related to, 
you know, writing an encyclopedia. I'd just become one of those people 
who emails my Wikipedia-admin acquaintances pestering them to merge 
histories on my behalf.

-Mark


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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[Delirium]

Matthew Brown wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 6:42 PM, Ian Woollard  wrote:
>   
>> Another issue that admins are quite prone to (along with many seasoned
>> editors) is that they tend to get *really* overprotective of articles.
>> 
>
> Very true, and I suspect most people will get all protective of an
> article they've put a lot of time into.  The other half of the problem
> is that edits from a new user who just happens along are often bad,
> stylistically at least, and thus easy to respond negatively to even if
> they have a good point inelegantly expressed.
>   

Yeah, it's sort of tricky, because both are clearly problems, but I 
think these are somewhat different problems from uncivil admins or 
senior/seasoned/whatever-you-call-it Wikipedians.

I see more of the "cabal of very active editors owning an article" 
problem in controversial areas. I know I don't bother editing in 
Israel/Palestine space most of the time because I figure every article 
is probably owned by some group of people from one side or the other, 
and I don't want to expend the time to deal with figuring out how I'm 
"allowed" to contribute through that screen. There are a few other 
nationalism-related areas I stay out of for similar reasons 
(Poland-related articles seem to be tricky more often than you'd think, 
for example).

But the problematic editors aren't always senior, but sometimes are just 
people who've managed to set up shop for long enough to be a problem, 
especially in a niche. One of the earliest ArbCom cases involved Mr 
Natural Health, someone who had been "owning" a bunch of health-related 
articles, and was a problematically active but not particularly senior 
or process-aware Wikipedian. And actually seasoned Wikipedians are often 
useful in fixing these situations if they crop up in isolated niches--- 
one of the most effective ways to break a cabal's hold over a particular 
group of articles is to bring them to the attention of a wider community 
of editors that can swoop in and impose the usual NPOV and WP:V and 
whatnot in place of that cabal's idiosyncratic take on the matter.

But I'm not sure a general attempt to keep people from owning articles 
is a good solution, either. In many cases, probably a greater number 
numerically, there's the opposite problem. As has been widely noted even 
off-wiki, our very good articles have a tendency to revert towards the 
mean, and there's no particularly good mechanism to keep that from being 
the default without a lot of constant maintenance effort. That's not 
really a Wikipedia-insiders vs. outsiders issue, either, as many of the 
articles that started out good and later degenerated were written by 
newbies (often academics in a particular area). In fact, those are the 
ones that tend to degenerate the most, as occasional contributors write 
a great article but then don't stay around to protect it from junk being 
added. From that perspective, I'd say most good articles don't have 
*enough* protectors. As per Murphy's law, the protectors are all off 
protecting bad articles instead. ;-)

But I might have a biased sample, since the areas I edit in seem to 
accumulate cruft. Good computer-science articles on general subjects 
invariably degrade with drive-by additions of pet language examples to 
the point where an article that might've once given a readable overview 
of a concept is an unreadable mess of "well in Haskell, the syntax looks 
like this, and in Scala, it looks like this, and you can also do it in 
Smalltalk, but slightly differently, like this". History articles on 
subjects even remotely popular also have a tendency to revert towards a 
pastiche of pop-history junk (often with nationalist mythologizing), 
unless someone is actively trying to maintain them.

But I think this is a much trickier and more subtle issue than 
admin-civility or seasoned-editors-vs-newbies. Some articles need fewer 
drive-by edits by newbies adding uncited content, repetition of urban 
legends, or degredation of what was previously a readable exposition; 
one way to get that is more watchlisting and beating back of unhelpful 
'improvements'. Other articles need less attention from people with very 
strong opinions about the subject.

-Mark


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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[Phil Nash]

Matthew Brown wrote:
>> On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 6:42 PM, Ian Woollard
>>  wrote:
>>> Another issue that admins are quite prone to (along with many
>>> seasoned editors) is that they tend to get *really* overprotective
>>> of articles.
>>
>> Very true, and I suspect most people will get all protective of an
>> article they've put a lot of time into.  The other half of the
>> problem
>> is that edits from a new user who just happens along are often bad,
>> stylistically at least, and thus easy to respond negatively to even
>> if
>> they have a good point inelegantly expressed.
>>
>> -Matt

My take is that we have two types of well-meaning editor- those who 
understand our policies and guidelines (including MOS), and those who don't. 
The former are adept at creating good content through practice, the latter 
may need educating, and this is normally done through templated messages, 
the first level of which assumes good faith; however, it is often easier 
when time is short to revert with an edit summary of "unsourced", 
"irrelevant" or something equally blunt. Again, in my experience, very few 
"unsophisticated" (and this is not meant to be an insult) editors complain, 
because they edit and move on. Those who do should be directed to 
guidelines, but it becomes tiresome when they just don't (or won't) "get 
it". The overhead of this detracts from creation of good content; not 
helpful to newbies, perhaps, but I think this is how it is seen.



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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[Matthew Brown]

On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 6:42 PM, Ian Woollard  wrote:
> Another issue that admins are quite prone to (along with many seasoned
> editors) is that they tend to get *really* overprotective of articles.

Very true, and I suspect most people will get all protective of an
article they've put a lot of time into.  The other half of the problem
is that edits from a new user who just happens along are often bad,
stylistically at least, and thus easy to respond negatively to even if
they have a good point inelegantly expressed.

-Matt

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[Ian Woollard]

On 14/02/2009, George Herbert  wrote:
> For what it's worth on the wider question - I've been jumping on civility
> problems that surface on ANI for the last few days - they're all responding
> to calm down warnings (and one block), and I haven't gotten any nasty
> pushback or anything.  Every little bit helps.

Another issue that admins are quite prone to (along with many seasoned
editors) is that they tend to get *really* overprotective of articles.

They tend to get this, 'we have written this *wonderful* article, and
we have established that nobody can edit it without persuading the
Committee Who Likes To Say No to say yes at talk pages X and then
we'll consult different committees at Y, Z and maybe A, B as well if
you get that far, otherwise we'll revert everything you do because it
isn't Our Consensus And You Haven't Discussed It(tm)* and then report
you on ANI for being Disruptive (tm)'.

I mean We Really Like This Article (tm), why are you editing it, don't
you like this article?

> --
> -george william herbert
> george.herb...@gmail.com

n.b. *Consensus (tm) means we simpy vote and you simply lose; what's
that you say? There's a policy about consensus? What's a policy? We
outnumber you.

;-)

-- 
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly
imperfect world would be much better.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[George Herbert]

On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 9:20 AM, Charles Matthews <
charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com> wrote:

> geni wrote:
> > 2009/2/12 David Gerard :
> >
> >> Indeed. As I suggested, a small amount of enforcement of good
> >> behaviour amongst the admins by the ArbCom will go a long way to
> >> getting all admins to behave in a more fitting manner. As Lar pointed
> >> out, the admin bit is so much of "no big deal" that people will do
> >> anything not to lose it.
> >>
> >
> > No. Arbcom needs one of a pretty narrow set of Casus bellis to even
> > act. There are quite a selection of problematical actions an admin can
> > carry out that arbcom will never be a realistic threat against. In
> > theory this kind of thing should be prevented by other admins but that
> > isn't always too effective.
> >
> >
> People have thought that in the past - that the ArbCom won't act against
> admins doing certain things - and they have been wrong. Your theory is
> more like wishful thinking from the admin side: there is a  tariff,
> there are procedural things that are constants. In other words the old
> business of a system that can be gamed in some ways, because it is too
> rigid.  David is essentially correct, and it is faitly obvious that
> sanctions have a deterrent effect on most people (though not all).


Most importantly - even if it was true in the past, there's a problem, and
it can be not true in the future.

I don't think admins are the bulk of the civility / abuse problem but I
think that they're the right place to start for a number of reasons.  More
seasoned users "set the tone" to a large degree.  Admins are supposed to be
trusted on top of being more seasoned, so them setting a bad example is even
worse.  Etc etc.

For what it's worth on the wider question - I've been jumping on civility
problems that surface on ANI for the last few days - they're all responding
to calm down warnings (and one block), and I haven't gotten any nasty
pushback or anything.  Every little bit helps.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herb...@gmail.com
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[Charles Matthews]

geni wrote:
> 2009/2/12 David Gerard :
>   
>> Indeed. As I suggested, a small amount of enforcement of good
>> behaviour amongst the admins by the ArbCom will go a long way to
>> getting all admins to behave in a more fitting manner. As Lar pointed
>> out, the admin bit is so much of "no big deal" that people will do
>> anything not to lose it.
>> 
>
> No. Arbcom needs one of a pretty narrow set of Casus bellis to even
> act. There are quite a selection of problematical actions an admin can
> carry out that arbcom will never be a realistic threat against. In
> theory this kind of thing should be prevented by other admins but that
> isn't always too effective.
>
>   
People have thought that in the past - that the ArbCom won't act against 
admins doing certain things - and they have been wrong. Your theory is 
more like wishful thinking from the admin side: there is a  tariff, 
there are procedural things that are constants. In other words the old 
business of a system that can be gamed in some ways, because it is too 
rigid.  David is essentially correct, and it is faitly obvious that 
sanctions have a deterrent effect on most people (though not all).

Charles


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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[Carcharoth]

On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 7:44 PM, Charles Matthews
 wrote:



> Well, "active" admins are the only ones likely to be the subject of an
> Arbitration case, no?

It's not common, but there are also the cases of admins (and editors)
who take a very long break, and then come back. I'm not talking months
here, but years. Or who are only sporadically active. Consider someone
who became an admin in 2003, then went inactive and resurfaces in
2009. It's not totally implausible. Or an admin who was very active
for two years, then only edited 20 times a year or so for the next
four years and then becomes very active again. There are real reasons
why people would do this (university, jobs, even some kinds of
enforced absences, or just wanting a very long break), but also
reasons for people to be concerned about whether trust and knowledge
of the "norms" (which change over time) have carried over from before
the break (let alone lingering concerns about compromised accounts).
The same applies to editors, though less so (or more so, YMMV).

Having said that, such cases are rare enough that they can be treated
on a case-by-case basis. In the general case, my feeling is that if
you take a long enough break (enough that the community, the
encyclopedia, the "rules" and the editor/admin themselves, may have
all changed), then such editors and admins are effectively starting
"from scratch" and need to rebuild knowledge and trust. The difference
is that admins carry over their bit. Ditto for other tools such as
checkuser and oversight.

Essentially, I'm saying that a certain minimum "activity level" should
be built in somewhere, but how to judge what that activity level
should be is difficult (different people have naturally different
activity levels). Some people will ease themselves back in gently.
Others will wade back in. In both cases, some will succeed, and some
will fail, in adapting to the changed environment.

There is also the case of long-term tool users failing to adapt to
changing times and acting in 2009 like they are in the encyclopedia of
2004 (for example), but the level and degree of the resulting problems
may vary (and the encyclopedia is so large today that the behaviour is
not always consistent across the whole anyway).

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[geni]

2009/2/12 David Gerard :
> Indeed. As I suggested, a small amount of enforcement of good
> behaviour amongst the admins by the ArbCom will go a long way to
> getting all admins to behave in a more fitting manner. As Lar pointed
> out, the admin bit is so much of "no big deal" that people will do
> anything not to lose it.

No. Arbcom needs one of a pretty narrow set of Casus bellis to even
act. There are quite a selection of problematical actions an admin can
carry out that arbcom will never be a realistic threat against. In
theory this kind of thing should be prevented by other admins but that
isn't always too effective.

-- 
geni

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[David Gerard]

2009/2/12 Charles Matthews :

> In other words if you're worried about the admin body as a whole, you
> wouldn't ask the question about "how can I get rid of X?" but "is there
> any control of the admins as a whole?" We currrently have desysopping
> that goes on a "worst-case" basis rather than an "average-case" basis,
> and if you change that you are likely to get more decisions taken, but
> for worse reasons. I don't think the actual quality of admins is
> anything like as low as the argument for mass reconfirmation would suggest.


Indeed. As I suggested, a small amount of enforcement of good
behaviour amongst the admins by the ArbCom will go a long way to
getting all admins to behave in a more fitting manner. As Lar pointed
out, the admin bit is so much of "no big deal" that people will do
anything not to lose it.


- d.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[Thomas Dalton]

2009/2/12 Charles Matthews :
> Thomas Dalton wrote:
>> 2009/2/12 Charles Matthews :
>>
>>> The
>>> ArbCom culls around 1% of the admin body annually
>>>
>>
>> Is less than that, surely? 1% of the *active* admin body, maybe.
>>
>> Ok, I've done the sums:
>>
>> Special:Statistics says we have 1623 admins, 1% of that is 16.
>> Wikipedia:Former_administrators shows 10 admins desysopped
>> (involuntarily) total in the last year (to end of January), 7 by
>> ArbCom, 2 of which were only for 6 months. I don't know what the
>> average number of admins during that year was, but it looks like
>> ArbCom permanently desysop less than 0.5% of the admin body annually.
>>
> Well, "active" admins are the only ones likely to be the subject of an
> Arbitration case, no?  And that's said to be around 800.

Sure, there's no problem with just considering active admins, but you
need to be clear about what you're discussing.

>  But in any
> case taking one year's numbers isn't particularly the right way to look
> at this issue.  One good wheel-war ...

Of course, but things change so rapidly that I'm not sure data from 2
years ago is relevant. For information only, there were 11
desysoppings in the year to the end of January 2008, 9 by Arbcom. I
don't know how many admins there were at that time, but I'm pretty
sure there were more than 900, so 1% is still an overestimate.

If you do restrict it to just active admins, it's probably a decent estimate.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[Charles Matthews]

Thomas Dalton wrote:
> 2009/2/12 Charles Matthews :
>   
>> The
>> ArbCom culls around 1% of the admin body annually
>> 
>
> Is less than that, surely? 1% of the *active* admin body, maybe.
>
> Ok, I've done the sums:
>
> Special:Statistics says we have 1623 admins, 1% of that is 16.
> Wikipedia:Former_administrators shows 10 admins desysopped
> (involuntarily) total in the last year (to end of January), 7 by
> ArbCom, 2 of which were only for 6 months. I don't know what the
> average number of admins during that year was, but it looks like
> ArbCom permanently desysop less than 0.5% of the admin body annually.
>   
Well, "active" admins are the only ones likely to be the subject of an 
Arbitration case, no?  And that's said to be around 800.  But in any 
case taking one year's numbers isn't particularly the right way to look 
at this issue.  One good wheel-war ...

My gut feeling is that 99% of active admins are not a real problem, and 
that this is the right figure to hold onto in discussion. There are only 
two patterns I see for admins getting into serious trouble: those who 
have been about three months in the job, and turn out not to cope well 
as far as judgement goes; and those who really are resistant in the 
longer term to "admonishment".

That leaves random life-events as quite a significant contribution to 
those stats.  I'd like to make the point that reconfirmation procedures 
are hardly a help with those - too blunt an instrument.

Charles



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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[Thomas Dalton]

2009/2/12 Charles Matthews :
> The
> ArbCom culls around 1% of the admin body annually

Is less than that, surely? 1% of the *active* admin body, maybe.

Ok, I've done the sums:

Special:Statistics says we have 1623 admins, 1% of that is 16.
Wikipedia:Former_administrators shows 10 admins desysopped
(involuntarily) total in the last year (to end of January), 7 by
ArbCom, 2 of which were only for 6 months. I don't know what the
average number of admins during that year was, but it looks like
ArbCom permanently desysop less than 0.5% of the admin body annually.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[Charles Matthews]

Andrew Gray wrote:
> Would it be useful at this point to have some idea of how other
> projects do it? I know some have a "normal" deadminning process, but
> I'm not sure how this works - do some have a request-based system,
> some have regular reconfirmation, what?
>   
It's hardly going to be useful to adopt a "doesn't scale" type system - 
imagine reconfirming (or not) 1000 admins annually, and then ask what 
else could have been done with that investment of the community's time 
to improve the 'pedia.  I think part of the answer lies here.  The 
ArbCom culls around 1% of the admin body annually, and those decisions 
are seriously taken.  enWP has a real, daily need of admins to do 
adminstrative work on what is a very large, very complex, and 
(crucially) very inhomogeneous site - there is huge diversity in terms 
of users and tasks.  Desysopping shouldn't be about people fussing on 
about some limited number of admin actions they don't like, especially 
(given the grudge-bearing that happens) things that were years ago. 
Re-election cannot prevent that being what it all hinges on. 

In other words if you're worried about the admin body as a whole, you 
wouldn't ask the question about "how can I get rid of X?" but "is there 
any control of the admins as a whole?" We currrently have desysopping 
that goes on a "worst-case" basis rather than an "average-case" basis, 
and if you change that you are likely to get more decisions taken, but 
for worse reasons. I don't think the actual quality of admins is 
anything like as low as the argument for mass reconfirmation would suggest.

Charles



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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[Andrew Gray]

2009/2/11 David Goodman :
> It might be reasonable for all active admins for whom there is not an
> AfD to be reconfirmed.

[RFA, yeah :-)]

I think the problem here is mission creep. RFA is just the most recent
iteration of how we picked admins, after all, and it itself has
evolved.

If we say now that we want to reconfirm all pre-RFA admins, then I can
easily see (in a year's time) someone saying, well, RFA used to be a
lot laxer, we should in principle reconfirm all those early ones
because they might not pass now, etc etc etc. I believe this is what
happened with the various content-grading review processes.

If you want to do this sort of thing, it might be simpler to say
"reconfirm after X years" and apply it on a rolling basis to everyone
still active.

(This then turns into a proposal that we've had before, which is
infrequent but periodic reconfirmation)

Would it be useful at this point to have some idea of how other
projects do it? I know some have a "normal" deadminning process, but
I'm not sure how this works - do some have a request-based system,
some have regular reconfirmation, what?

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[Carcharoth]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 8:19 PM, Thomas Dalton  wrote:
> 2009/2/11 David Goodman :
>> It might be reasonable for all active admins for whom there is not an
>> AfD to be reconfirmed.
>
> You mean RfA, yes? I think it's perfectly reasonable to invoke the
> principle of "time immemorial" and not worry about it.

Sometimes. I tend to think of the way articles that passed FAC
(featured articles candidate) years ago are brought up to today's
standards by FAR (featured article review). If there were reasons to
think an admin was operating as if it was still 2002, 2003 or 2004,
and was not aware of the standards of 2009, then maybe there would be
good reason to question whether a review was needed. Certainly many of
the admins from the mailing list period, if not all, would easily pass
a reconfirmation RfA. There is no practical reason why they should,
and many good reasons why they shouldn't, but I'd be impressed if
someone who had been around that long recognised that maybe there is
something in the idea, and did so anyway.

It's another of those perennial ideas that doesn't gain much ground.
But consider this. The number of admins (actually, looking at the
editors would be more interesting) remaining from very early on is not
that high. But in five years time, how many of the admins from 2005,
2006 and 2007 will still be around? Will things have changed even
more? Will there be 50+ admins from that era, or even more? How many
of them will have adapted and changed? Is adapting and changing a
requirement of admins (let alone editors)? I know 12-18 months (or
something) is considered the average time people spend in an online
community, but what about those who have been around for years, in a
few years time some will have been around for a whole decade.

That's quite frightening, actually. Is it really only two years until
Wikipedia has been around for 10 years? When are we projected to reach
3 million articles (currently 2,736,436), when can we get to 5000
featured articles (currently 2,420)? When is someone going to do
another statistical analysis or history of Wikipedia?

Sorry, got a bit off-topic there! :-)

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[David Gerard]

2009/2/11 geni :
> 2009/2/11 David Gerard :

>> I have occasionally referred to some of our more common-sense disabled
>> editors as "Turing Test failures" ...

> Which is a bit of a problem if you want to have credibility addressing
> a civility issues.


Well, I don't say it about specific ones. I also admit my own failings.


- d.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[geni]

2009/2/11 David Gerard :
> I have occasionally referred to some of our more common-sense disabled
> editors as "Turing Test failures" ...

Which is a bit of a problem if you want to have credibility addressing
a civility issues.

-- 
geni

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[David Gerard]

2009/2/11 Scientia Potentia est :

> Carcharoth: In fact we do have quite a few mailing list admins around. These 
> include: Pierre Abbat, Brion VIBBER, Robert Merkel, Manning Bartlett, Vicki 
> Rosenzweig, Bryan Derksen, Taw, AxelBoldt, The Cunctator, Magnus Manske, Tim 
> Starling, and several others I've neglected to mention. As far as I remember 
> they do not seem to have done anything that would violate the community's 
> trust.


I still haven't seen a compelling case that there's a problem. The
ArbCom has had no problems at all desysopping people for cause in the
past few years. "Community confidence" appears to be a codeword for
"we think we can get a lynch mob up even if they haven't actually
broken any rules or done anything wrong."


- d.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[Scientia Potentia est]

Carcharoth: In fact we do have quite a few mailing list admins around. These 
include: Pierre Abbat, Brion VIBBER, Robert Merkel, Manning Bartlett, Vicki 
Rosenzweig, Bryan Derksen, Taw, AxelBoldt, The Cunctator, Magnus Manske, Tim 
Starling, and several others I've neglected to mention. As far as I remember 
they do not seem to have done anything that would violate the community's trust.

bibliomaniac15

--- On Wed, 2/11/09, Carcharoth  wrote:
From: Carcharoth 
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping
To: "English Wikipedia" 
Date: Wednesday, February 11, 2009, 11:01 AM

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 6:46 PM, Thomas Dalton 
wrote:
> 2009/2/11 Charlotte Webb :
>> On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 11:48 AM, Patton 123
 wrote:
>>> I know a de-admining process is proposed practically every other
day, but this
>>>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:EVula/opining/RfA_overhaul>doesn't
appear
>>> to have had much discussion. What do you think about it?
Personally I think
>>> it's a good idea, the only draw back being new accounts
abusing it.
>>
>> If the numbers really matter so much, the simplest and fairest
>> approach would be to a reconfirmation poll, where anyone can raise
>> concerns but "voting" is limited to those who participated
previously
>> in the user's successful RFA. Sure there may still be sockpuppets
or
>> meatpuppets, etc. for or against the user in the reconfirmation
>> shin-dig, but only if they were already present during the first RFA.
>> If we are only looking at the net change in approval rating within the
>> same audience, they would not likely have a pivotal impact.
>
> That doesn't work for admins that have been around a while - most of
> the people that contributed to their RFA will have left the project.

And that tells us what? That they were trusted at one stage and might
or might not be now. Someone should bring up a list of the really old
admins (in terms of RfA) and how many people commented at their RFA
and how many of those people are still around. Are there any "mailing
list" admins still around (in the very old days, admins were given the
bit based on a mailing list discussion)? Of course, many of these old
admins are themselves inactive now.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[David Gerard]

2009/2/11 Thomas Dalton :
> 2009/2/11 David Gerard :
>> 2009/2/11 Thomas Dalton :
>>> 2009/2/11 David Goodman :

 It might be reasonable for all active admins for whom there is not an
 AfD to be reconfirmed.

>>> You mean RfA, yes? I think it's perfectly reasonable to invoke the
>>> principle of "time immemorial" and not worry about it.

>> Admins for deletion?

> Am I the only one that got a vision of Cybermen attacking admins from
> reading that?


I have occasionally referred to some of our more common-sense disabled
editors as "Turing Test failures" ...


- d.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[George Herbert]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 12:30 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:

> 2009/2/11 David Gerard :
> > 2009/2/11 Thomas Dalton :
> >> 2009/2/11 David Goodman :
> >
> >>> It might be reasonable for all active admins for whom there is not an
> >>> AfD to be reconfirmed.
> >
> >> You mean RfA, yes? I think it's perfectly reasonable to invoke the
> >> principle of "time immemorial" and not worry about it.
> >
> >
> > Admins for deletion?
>
> Am I the only one that got a vision of Cybermen attacking admins from
> reading that?
>

A horde of Dalek sockpuppets, myself.  But close enough...


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herb...@gmail.com
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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[Thomas Dalton]

2009/2/11 David Gerard :
> 2009/2/11 Thomas Dalton :
>> 2009/2/11 David Goodman :
>
>>> It might be reasonable for all active admins for whom there is not an
>>> AfD to be reconfirmed.
>
>> You mean RfA, yes? I think it's perfectly reasonable to invoke the
>> principle of "time immemorial" and not worry about it.
>
>
> Admins for deletion?

Am I the only one that got a vision of Cybermen attacking admins from
reading that?

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[David Gerard]

2009/2/11 Thomas Dalton :
> 2009/2/11 David Goodman :

>> It might be reasonable for all active admins for whom there is not an
>> AfD to be reconfirmed.

> You mean RfA, yes? I think it's perfectly reasonable to invoke the
> principle of "time immemorial" and not worry about it.


Admins for deletion?


- d.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[Thomas Dalton]

2009/2/11 David Goodman :
> It might be reasonable for all active admins for whom there is not an
> AfD to be reconfirmed.

You mean RfA, yes? I think it's perfectly reasonable to invoke the
principle of "time immemorial" and not worry about it.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[David Goodman]

It might be reasonable for all active admins for whom there is not an
AfD to be reconfirmed.

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 2:01 PM, Carcharoth  wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 6:46 PM, Thomas Dalton  
> wrote:
>> 2009/2/11 Charlotte Webb :
>>> On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 11:48 AM, Patton 123  wrote:
 I know a de-admining process is proposed practically every other day, but 
 this
 doesn't 
 appear
 to have had much discussion. What do you think about it? Personally I think
 it's a good idea, the only draw back being new accounts abusing it.
>>>
>>> If the numbers really matter so much, the simplest and fairest
>>> approach would be to a reconfirmation poll, where anyone can raise
>>> concerns but "voting" is limited to those who participated previously
>>> in the user's successful RFA. Sure there may still be sockpuppets or
>>> meatpuppets, etc. for or against the user in the reconfirmation
>>> shin-dig, but only if they were already present during the first RFA.
>>> If we are only looking at the net change in approval rating within the
>>> same audience, they would not likely have a pivotal impact.
>>
>> That doesn't work for admins that have been around a while - most of
>> the people that contributed to their RFA will have left the project.
>
> And that tells us what? That they were trusted at one stage and might
> or might not be now. Someone should bring up a list of the really old
> admins (in terms of RfA) and how many people commented at their RFA
> and how many of those people are still around. Are there any "mailing
> list" admins still around (in the very old days, admins were given the
> bit based on a mailing list discussion)? Of course, many of these old
> admins are themselves inactive now.
>
> Carcharoth
>
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-- 
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[Carcharoth]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 6:46 PM, Thomas Dalton  wrote:
> 2009/2/11 Charlotte Webb :
>> On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 11:48 AM, Patton 123  wrote:
>>> I know a de-admining process is proposed practically every other day, but 
>>> this
>>> doesn't appear
>>> to have had much discussion. What do you think about it? Personally I think
>>> it's a good idea, the only draw back being new accounts abusing it.
>>
>> If the numbers really matter so much, the simplest and fairest
>> approach would be to a reconfirmation poll, where anyone can raise
>> concerns but "voting" is limited to those who participated previously
>> in the user's successful RFA. Sure there may still be sockpuppets or
>> meatpuppets, etc. for or against the user in the reconfirmation
>> shin-dig, but only if they were already present during the first RFA.
>> If we are only looking at the net change in approval rating within the
>> same audience, they would not likely have a pivotal impact.
>
> That doesn't work for admins that have been around a while - most of
> the people that contributed to their RFA will have left the project.

And that tells us what? That they were trusted at one stage and might
or might not be now. Someone should bring up a list of the really old
admins (in terms of RfA) and how many people commented at their RFA
and how many of those people are still around. Are there any "mailing
list" admins still around (in the very old days, admins were given the
bit based on a mailing list discussion)? Of course, many of these old
admins are themselves inactive now.

Carcharoth

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[Charlotte Webb]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 12:46 PM, Thomas Dalton  wrote:
> That doesn't work for admins that have been around a while - most of
> the people that contributed to their RFA will have left the project.

I wasn't entirely serious and I know it won't be tried, but it would
at least prevent sock-bombs from being orchestrated in response to a
user's actions as admin, which was the concern expressed in the
previous comment (though not in those words).

—C.W.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[Thomas Dalton]

2009/2/11 Charlotte Webb :
> On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 11:48 AM, Patton 123  wrote:
>> I know a de-admining process is proposed practically every other day, but 
>> this
>> doesn't appear
>> to have had much discussion. What do you think about it? Personally I think
>> it's a good idea, the only draw back being new accounts abusing it.
>
> If the numbers really matter so much, the simplest and fairest
> approach would be to a reconfirmation poll, where anyone can raise
> concerns but "voting" is limited to those who participated previously
> in the user's successful RFA. Sure there may still be sockpuppets or
> meatpuppets, etc. for or against the user in the reconfirmation
> shin-dig, but only if they were already present during the first RFA.
> If we are only looking at the net change in approval rating within the
> same audience, they would not likely have a pivotal impact.

That doesn't work for admins that have been around a while - most of
the people that contributed to their RFA will have left the project.

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[Charlotte Webb]

On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 11:48 AM, Patton 123  wrote:
> I know a de-admining process is proposed practically every other day, but this
> doesn't appear
> to have had much discussion. What do you think about it? Personally I think
> it's a good idea, the only draw back being new accounts abusing it.

If the numbers really matter so much, the simplest and fairest
approach would be to a reconfirmation poll, where anyone can raise
concerns but "voting" is limited to those who participated previously
in the user's successful RFA. Sure there may still be sockpuppets or
meatpuppets, etc. for or against the user in the reconfirmation
shin-dig, but only if they were already present during the first RFA.
If we are only looking at the net change in approval rating within the
same audience, they would not likely have a pivotal impact.

—C.W.

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[WikiEN-l] Desysopping

[Patton 123]

I know a de-admining process is proposed practically every other day, but this
doesn't appear
to have had much discussion. What do you think about it? Personally I think
it's a good idea, the only draw back being new accounts abusing it.
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