Probably the biggest change to the process came with the unbundling of rollback in 2008, at least that was when the biggest drop came in RFAs, and "good vandalfighter" ceased to be sufficient to pass RFA. You also had to show some contribution to building the pedia. We now have over six thousand rollbackers and less than 900 admins, so I think that unbundling did make it easier to get Rollback.though arguably Rollback itself is now a redundant userright as anyone can just opt in to tools like twinkle.
I wasn't around in the early years, I started editing in 2007 towards the end of the exponential growth era and only started to pay attention to RFA in 2008. Though I have looked at quite a few earlier RFAs. I think that the criteria haven't changed much in a decade - maybe there has been an increase in the requirements for tenure and or edits, or rather someone with 3,000 to 4,000 unautomated edits can expect a few opposes as would someone with between one and two years active editing. What I can't explain is why we appointed 121 new admins in 2009 but averaged less than 20 new admins a year for the last ten years. I really don't think that the de facto criteria for adminship are very different now compared to 2009: There are people who care about the deletion button and don't want someone who will be to soft or harsh with it. There are people who care about the block button, including those who don't want someone blocking the regulars who hasn't gone through the process of building content. There are people who think that all admins should be legally adult And there are those who want to stop certain long term problems returning in a new guise. One assumption made here is that the mask will slip if one of those editors tries to make nice for an entire year in order to make admin. Given that the total size of the community is stable or slowly growing, I don't see why so few candidates are coming forward for RFA. WSC On Wed, 16 Aug 2023 at 03:24, Samuel Klein <meta...@gmail.com> wrote: > The iron law of gaps... > > On Tue, Aug 15, 2023 at 5:44 PM The Cunctator <cuncta...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > IMHO: The amount of jargon and legalistic booby traps to navigate now to > > become an admin is gargantuan, and there isn't a strong investment in a > > development ladder. > > > Yes. More generally, a shift towards a Nupedia model (elaborate seven-step > processes, focus on quality, focus on knowing lots of precedent and not > making mistakes, spending more time justifying actions than making them) is > making sweeping, mopping, and bureaucracy generally more work, less fun, > and more exclusionary. > > Perhaps asking everyone to adopt someone new, or sticking "provisional" > tags on a family of palette-swap roles that are Really Truly NBD > <Wikipedia:Pencils_are_no_big_deal> We Mean It This Time, would help stave > off the iron law in a repeatable > <https://longnow.org/ideas/long-term-building-in-japan/> way// > > SJ > _______________________________________________ > Wiki-research-l mailing list -- wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org > To unsubscribe send an email to wiki-research-l-le...@lists.wikimedia.org > _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list -- wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to wiki-research-l-le...@lists.wikimedia.org
