Misplaced Pages talk:Requests for adminship: Difference between revisions

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Revision as of 05:20, 12 August 2006 editMasssiveego (talk \| contribs)3,088 edits →People not discussing their positions when challenged.← Previous edit		Revision as of 05:30, 12 August 2006 edit undoOcee (talk \| contribs)Extended confirmed users5,643 editsm →Child abuse: - changing headerNext edit →
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	:I know people are rule-phobic around here, but this "rule" would only kick in when a problem emerges. I.e. in most RfAs, where the candidate just quietly accepts after they see the nomination then lists it before any votes appear, nothing new needs to happen at all... we just would now clearly have a process so occasional hiccups don't cause drama every time they occur. Yeah it's a rule... but at this point on Misplaced Pages I think having a clear process is much preferable to a system of vague unwritten rules and learned behavior dictating how things operate.--] 03:23, 12 August 2006 (UTC)		:I know people are rule-phobic around here, but this "rule" would only kick in when a problem emerges. I.e. in most RfAs, where the candidate just quietly accepts after they see the nomination then lists it before any votes appear, nothing new needs to happen at all... we just would now clearly have a process so occasional hiccups don't cause drama every time they occur. Yeah it's a rule... but at this point on Misplaced Pages I think having a clear process is much preferable to a system of vague unwritten rules and learned behavior dictating how things operate.--] 03:23, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

			== Young administrator candidates ==
	== Child abuse ==

	Do we ever take notice of the fact that the nom is obviously a kid, or do we just keep going like he was an adult?] 03:13, 12 August 2006 (UTC)		Do we ever take notice of the fact that the nom is obviously a kid, or do we just keep going like he was an adult?] 03:13, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Revision as of 05:30, 12 August 2006

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Format change?

Is it deliberate or inadvertent that the questions, statistics, etc. are now coming before the "votes"? I cannot see anything indicative of the format change in the history, so it may just be the way the last two nominations were created. If it was a deliberate change, I can see why one would want to put the discussion first, but after the recent "section-break" matter, it might be best to discuss format changes before making them. Agent 86 01:22, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

I concur. In the interests of maintaining a reliable service I will be thinking about changing my bot to support both types later. However, I would still have liked to see some kind of discussion, as well as a sample test case as mentioned earlier in the discussion above. It's okay to be bold on articles and other, non-bot pages - but the Requests for adminship page is processed by no less than three bots, so please be civil to bot operators and notify them before any significant changes are made. - Tangot a ngo 03:47, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

There should have been some discussion about it, but I do agree with the format as format. People should read the questions before the comments/votes (some of which refer to the questions). Now if there were some way to make the associated Talk page more used: People should feel free to ask simple or minor questions of the candidate that are in a centralized place for everyone to read, but that aren't major enough, "top-level" enough, or are such that an answer would resolve it rather quickly. It would also all for more questions and general discussion, whereas the present or at least recent format encouraged more straight-up voting and was not suitable for discussion of various sections. So, I think it should be directly, and perhaps Largely, linked in the main text. As of now, someone browsing the top RfA page (rather than the subpages) doesn't see or isn't reminded that there exists that discussion page. —Centrx→talk • 04:03, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

I agree. It was weird to see, but people should actually need to go past the questions (and actually read the responses) to make a decision which should be based on merit, not just one that goes along with the concurring majority. MichaelZ526 04:11, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

No matter what the format (and I agree that questions should be before supports/opposes) the bot generated infoboxes should be at or near the bottom since if nothing else they get in the way and are distracting not to mention the fact that people shouldn't be basing votes purely on those stats anyway. Thygard - Talk - Contribs - Email ---- 04:29, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Indeed, though they do attest to how much one has actually done on Misplaced Pages and the various means of involvement. MichaelZ526 04:37, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Having the stats for RFA's are definitely a double edged sword, back in the old days people actually had to work to find this information and learnt a bit more about the candidate in the process, now you have the stats at your fingertips and many people vote purely on that without a second thought or a second glance. Thygard - Talk - Contribs - Email ---- 04:47, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

At least they still give it a first thought ;-) Stephen B Streater 08:40, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

I should've thought of the bots, sorry. A few days ago I remembered the old discussion linked above, wondered what had happened to it (recalling general support for the measure), went back to look, saw that there was clear consensus, and so implemented it. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 20:51, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

What discussion was that? I don't see the link you refer to. --Michael Snow 22:35, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Ack, I could have sworn somebody linked to it. I gave it in the diff where I made the changes; it's Misplaced Pages talk:Requests for adminship/Archive 60#Moving around stuff in RfA. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 20:03, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

One of the main problems of RfA are that ~~voters~~ opinioners don't look at the information, but judge the first oppose votes. Hopefully this will force the information onto them before the oppose votes. This should be a change for the better, Highway 20:55, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Man, this format looks weird. 1ne 22:37, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

It probably looks weird because you're not used to it. ;) I think it's useful, in that it makes people at least scroll past the ~~EULA~~ questions and stats before they jump into X per Y. -- nae'blis 00:56, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

The job-interview format trending towards safe and "approved" answers to questions has been criticized just like the "vote"-oriented aspect of support/oppose discussions and the reliance on edit-count metrics. So this isn't necessarily an improvement, it's just rearranging the furniture. --Michael Snow 22:35, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Nothing set in stone

I was amazed, excited, and shocked to know that I was nominated for RfA. However, I was displeased with the information I found after reviewing and participating in a few other RfA's. I found that there is no set guideline or requirment for RfA outside personal criteria. This strikes me as very strange, as I have turned more recently into a process wonk, and feel that there should in fact be such a criteria for handing out the mop. I cant believe that there isnt one already. I take adminship very seriously, and believe that supporters and opposers do the same. I would never abuse such a privelage, but looking over my current RfA, it seems that there are minor mistakes which hold a serious and hard working candidate back, which are based off of either personal views or POV criteria. So my main questions is, and this does not reflect my RfA, can we propose such a guideline (even if it means I fail it)? SynergeticMaggot 12:00, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

It's notoriously hard to narrow down RFA criteria among RFA participants, and usually trying to do what you suggest during your own RFA hurts the RFA. —Quarl 2006-07-31 13:12Z

Hard criteria has always been rejected in favor of just letting people (and b'crats) decide on a case-by-case basis. There's simply no objective criteria that determines a good admin. You can set the editcount bar as high or low as you want, and there will always be a glaring example of someone who has a zillion edits yet would make a terrible admin, and someone with relatively few edits who makes a great admin. The main criteria (should be) that a user is unlikely to abuse admin tools... and yet there's no real way to quantify that. --W.marsh 13:15, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

(edit conflict) In addition to what Quarl says, what would a set of RfA criteria look like? The current process is intended to be a debate, focused on editors' evaluations of whether the candidate will make a good admin (or alternatively, would they abuse the tools, which is not quite the same thing). That has to be a fairly subjective judgement call. It would be possible to have objective RfAs: the criteria would ultimately have to be based on edit counts. Do we really want a system where all editors over a certain edit count (or number of months editing, or with a certain percentage use of edit summaries) automatically become admins? It has some advantages, but any such system would automatically be open to abuse. RfA is about judging a person, so it has to be subjective and to some extent POV. To me its the lesser of two evils. Gwernol 13:20, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

I dont mind that it hurts my RfA, Quarl, as I previously mentioned. This is neither a complaint nor reaction to anything that is specifically mentioned in my current nom. I'm merely concerned, and its just a thought I wouldnt mind having feedback on.

W.marsh: I dunno. I've seen great minds across all areas of Misplaced Pages. And more great minds reaching consensus to suggestions and proposals. So I cannot share the opinion that it is all together out of our reach from creating a proposal that lists and requires at least a few notable qualities in admins. Clearly if there are so many people willing to add their personal criteria to the current RfA standards page (linked as a sub page :) ), then I believe we can all work together in agreeing on these criteria.

Any such criteria as edit counts, helping others, responding in a civil manner in disputes, and many other qualities can be gone over in the proposal. This just requires effort. And I wouldnt mind being the first to slap my signature down, in efforts to create such a proposal. I feel that this is a must have for editors wishing to make the leap, in an interest of conensus among editors. And I thank you for responding.

Gwernol: Its subjective only because, as the header says, nothing it set in stone. The only way to make it objective is to reach a consensus as to what the exact requirments would be. To achieve this we need only look over the AfD standards sub page, and start a poll, adjusting to specific concerns. I fail to see how anything like this can be abused, since we have a number of guidelines already in place, that we reached through consensus. SynergeticMaggot 13:32, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

(de-indeting for clarity) Here's an example of why objective criteria are a bad idea. Let's say we chose 2500 edits over at least 3 months with no blocks as the criteria. Yes, its simplified, but just for argument's sake let's use those. So every editor who passes those requirements automatically becomes an admin. Let's say I'm user User:HairyVandal. I set up a new user account User:SmoothAdmin and plug away vandal fighting (look, I even blocked nasty old HairyVandal once!) and generally racking up edits. 3 months later I become an admin. Are we confident this is a good idea?

Of course, the current system can be abused as well (no system for RfA can be perfect). But, the advantage with the current system is at least we have a lot of eyes on the candidates and there is a better chance we'll find something suspicious. Maybe SmoothAdmin got a couple of warnings on the way, or there are suspicious timing coincidences between HairyVandal and SmoothAdmin; at least there's a chance to spot those during the RfA vetting process. Any set of fixed, objective criteria make it much easier for someone to cheat a sockpuppet into adminship. Gwernol 13:54, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

For the sake of the hypothetical, we should also require a check user or ip then, to avoid complex problems such as those. But on another note, do you honestly think that arguing an editor into adminship is any different? A criteria would only serve to express the desires of mutiple users through conensus, either way, there will be issues of who is who. It wont stop by adding a proposed criteria, or leaving it like it is. It my understandin if anything can be proven, then admin powers are taken away, and I agree with this. But to deny a user adminship just because so and so did something here or there is not helping the system. Who knows? What if the editor that was refused went on to do a better job of securing the values and principles of Misplaced Pages? I'd hate to be one to oppose.

With regards to the current system yes, nothing is perfect. But I wish to contribute anyway I can, and I believe a proposed criteria will help regulate such tasks as admin requests. We can only go so long without one, and fear of this circumstance is no excuse for there not being a criteria already when it could happen with the criteria. Everyone has at least one eye on them on Misplaced Pages, I'm not worried. SynergeticMaggot 14:06, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Who would you run CheckUser against? At the moment that SmoothAdmin crosses the threshold (s)he automatically becomes an admin. Because no-one is looking at their record we can't know that we should check them against the IP of HairyVandal. The only way to spot this would be to run CheckUser against every IP in the system. That would be technically unfeasible, not to mention a violation of several privacy-related policies.

I don't know what you mean by "arguing an editor into adminship". What I do know is that in a typical RfA somewhere between 50 and 100 editors go through the contributions of the candidate and look at the breadth, depth and quality of their past work. No doubt some do this more thoroughly than others, but we do sometimes turn up disturbing evidence on candidates who on the surface appear good (I'm not referring to your specific RfA, by the way).

Setting up a criteria would indeed express the consensus of multiple editors, as you say. The problem is it would quickly become either ignored or something that would be subject to wikilawyering. Let me expand on that. If we have a policy-level criteria, then any candidate who passes it would have a case to say "I must be made an admin" regardless of anything else in their record. What do we do then in the case of SmoothAdmin where someone discovers they are a sockpuppet of HairyVandal? We have to give them the tools, because the policy says "this is the criteria for making someone an admin".

To get around this we could include a clause that says (something like) "editors expressing an opinion can oppose candidates who pass these criteria if they have reasonable grounds to do so". But now we're right back to where we are today: subjective loopholes. The only thing a fixed criteria would guarantee is a minimum standard for adminship. No-one who didn't meet the threshold could ever become an admin. once they passed the threshold, we have the system that's in place today. Is that better? Perhaps, but I don't think it addresses the issues you are raising. Gwernol 14:29, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

This is getting kind of long! I'm glad to have generated such a response.

Who would I use a check user against? Your hypotheical RfA candidate, that is, if there is reason (only if ther is reason). I never implied we should check their history or contributions. Your hypothetical RfA candidate would become an admin regardless of the proposal.

What I meant by arguing into adminship, is this. It appears that since there is no criteria, although I have since found snippets on pages, its soley based on an arguement to oppose, or support, and others will notice this and say "support per him/her" or "oppose per him/her". And I take none of this the wrong way, and will not, and have no inclination to suspect this reflects my RfA :) (no sarcasm at all).

Ah. No one should just walk up and say "I should be an admin". They should in fact be humble about it. And I wouldnt par with the term wikilawering, more like adhering to so and so, whichever policy or guideline apply. I always side with policy in the end. And who says that we should leave these loop holes in that you are bringing up? I'm happy you have found them, and exceptions can be made, and we should not ignore large mistakes in a users history, nor make a big issue out of small mistakes. We dont have to give out the tools just because they meet x amount of the requirements. Its the same judgment call that gets made on AfD's, and these RfA's. Any of the opinions editors may have, can be worked into the proposal, based on said situations, like aformentioned loopholes you already brought up.

And lastly, the only issues I bring up, is that a proposal be at least attempted. We need only start with the personal requirements listed on the sub page, and work them all in :) Doesnt seem that hard at all. SynergeticMaggot 14:52, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Actually I'm all for you making the attempt. But you should be aware that similar proposal have been made (several times) before. They have always been rejected by the community because they attempt to make an inherently subjective process into an objective one. You'll need to overcome the objections outlined above (and others) if you want the attempt to succeed. These attempts tend to fail because you have to put so many subjective loopholes into any proposed set of criteria (to avoid cases like my hypothetical HairyVandal) that you end up back where we are today - editors making subjective judgements - but you've added an extra layer of rules which don't achieve what you want and make the process overly complex and open it to wikilawyering. If you can solve that, then more power to you. Gwernol 15:18, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Thank you. I take all feedback into consideration. SynergeticMaggot 15:20, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Totally objective criteria are impossible; there must be some case-by-case evaluation. But I think that we, as a community, should work out strong guidelines on what sorts of criteria people should use. Principles like (to give some examples, ignoring the specifics):

Having contributed only slightly to certain specific tasks, such as article content or vandalism reversion, should not be held against a candidate, except insofar as they may correlate with knowledge or ignorance of policies relevant to admins.
Admins should be civil.
Overall edit count should not be held against an admin with over 1000 edits, and time spent here should not be held against an admin who's been here for at least three months.
Although edit summaries should be used extensively, this is not relevant to adminship unless the candidate fails to use summaries even for major or controversial edits.
Admins should be willing to discuss their actions with others.

Assume further that some kind of rationale is required for every RFA vote (even if it's just "per X"). Then if someone clearly ignores these principles and gives a rationale in violation of them, their votes could be discounted by a bureaucrat. I expect such votes would become rare, however, with the guideline in place. Of course, people might try to evade the rules, but that's true for any kind of rule, and can be dealt with by a bureaucrat if necessary. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 21:03, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Of course. They way I see the possibility of a proposal such as this, would be the same for any other, with the exception of the case specific. But if I were to list all of my suggestions, this talk page would get pretty long. One such suggestion, would be somewhat similar to how you choose which speedy delete tag to put on, or under which area of say, WP:NOT your basis of deleting an article is, etc. etc. It would be like "Support per this section, this section and this section", or "Oppose per this section of the criteria or A7". This would cut back on alot of "Sorry but..." and "Try again next time and..." or "I'll support you later if..". It would be a straight decision, still based on their personal views mind you, but specifically stating the number under a specific area of the criteria they either most see in the candidate, or dont see. The only difference is, we reach a consensus as to what exactly should be on these lists. SynergeticMaggot 21:49, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

We have had candidates who appear to meet commonly-stated criteria (high edit count, reasonable amount of time spent on the project, not Willy on Wheels, etc.) but who nevertheless would quite possibly make Dave Letterman's "Top 10 Really Terrible Candidates for Adminship". I recall one particularly woeful candidate actually wiki-lawyering when it appeared his RfA was going down the gurgler; even complained to Jimbo that the words at the top of WP:RfA guaranteed him adminship, and us miserable peasants were breaking the rules by refusing to give it to him.

Even in less extreme cases, there's nothing wrong with a somewhat nebulous criteria being used. Personally I don't support unless I believe a candidate possesses (or will obtain before he does any damage as an admin) Clue. How do you legislate that? More rules invariably leads to more attempts to use the exact wording of the rules to damage Misplaced Pages; I don't want people who are inappropriate candidates for the role of admin squeaking in because they found an obscure loophole. I want the freedom to oppose any candidate, simply because I do not believe they will be good admins. I trust the bureaucrats here to disregard my opinion if they feel I'm being unfair to any particular candidate, but I don't trust the idea of a group of users forced to support if they can't pick acceptable "oppose" reasons off a list to prevent RfA being unfair to Misplaced Pages as a whole. fuddlemark (befuddle me!) 11:18, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Yup. We elect our presidents and prime ministers without strict criteria or technical requirements. Each voter gets to make their choice on whatever they want, and many will vote on their gut feeling that candidate X is trustworthy or has common sense or many other very subjective measures. We also need to allow for very subjective gut feel voting in RfA. I suspect many people who say "not enough WP edits" are just being polite, they may actually be voting on the basis of "I don't trust this guy". Let's continue with the nice flexibility and ambiguity of the current RfA process. NoSeptember 13:15, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

The harsher side of RfA

I'm not being a moaner here, I'm serious, RfA has turned from a "friendly discussion" into a hate camp. Candidates either get humiliated, or have their egos groomed. Most candidates which aren't landslides, get pulled because they either -

Get extremely unfairly treated, such as Moe Epsilon's RfA
Get a pile of Oppose votes all "per Whatshisface" at once
Receive several pointless votes, such as "no AfD participation", when the nominee is a vandal fighter
Receive harassing votes because of definite lack of experience
Realise their RfA is premature

Now, except for the last one, this really shouldn't be allowed to fly on RfA, candidates are starting to pull their hair out. We all know the tag lines, "RfA isn't a big deal", but I think that RfA has moved one step from "tough love", to "how far can we push candidates". Highway 22:16, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

I understand your frustrations, but I'm not sure that this is the proper forum to vent. I suggest revising your header and comments a bit, as a slight change could significantly alter how this discussion unravels. I imagine you're wishing for a constructive discussion on how better to go about the RfA process, so perhaps word your comments to reflect your desires. As an aside, if you do wish to vent, I'd be happy to lend an ear on my talk page. Cheers hoopydink 22:24, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Same here. SynergeticMaggot 22:26, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Hopefully cleaned up. Highway 22:28, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

RfA is the first time most people here get a chance to receive criticism from strangers. It's like going into an exam without knowing the syllabus. And today we're going to test you on... Your contributions to the Help pages. There does seem to be a supply of very good experienced candidates this week though, so some of the newer candidates are getting rejected mostly for being not perfect. Stephen B Streater 22:32, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

I agree that the RfA can be harsh, having seen some very angry/aggressive comments. People cast votes on a whim in many situations. Another thing is that with everyone having different criteria, there are problems in regards to various people analyzing and criticizing every detail of your existence of Misplaced Pages and perhaps tearing apart one minor detail where perhaps you were new and did not know a rule or obviously have poor communication skills since their Misplaced Pages space edits are not large in number. Two of the same candidates may be treated entirely differently. It definitely has the potential to be a bad experience for some, and I agree with you, but what else could be done? MichaelZ526 22:36, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

It's not the rejection, I'm referring to, its the users that take it a step too far and scare or pester users into pulling their RfA or even leaving the 'pedia. People have too high standards, and when people fall short, then can come down fast and hard. Highway 22:38, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Some of whats being said is true here. I've noticed alot of inacurate decisions in RfA's. Some are small and petty, while others would make the next user decide to oppose so fast the nom has no chance. See the above header for discussion on what can in fact be done. SynergeticMaggot 22:42, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

I've noticed that those that fail by a landslide often get criticed heavily for one particular issue. This can look like "Get a pile of Oppose votes all "per Whatshisface" at once" mentality but usually reflects an issue that many users sees as a big flaw. It is possible that there are many other flaws but most people will not dig more to further humuilate a candidate. I believe this is the real reason for many oppose votes being quite similar.

If a candidate is really getting harsh treatment then they do have an opportunity to put out the fire and sway the voters opinion with good counter arguments. However, i have rarely seen this type of constructive (admin material like) reply. More often the candidate gets overly defensive, or worse has a tantrum. This then leads to everyone to consider that the user is NOT ready to be an admin (rightly so too). How users respond to the oppose opinions is as key to the success of an RfA as their past editing history.

In general, it seems that the right candidates get selected. For those that try again, i think they are vastly improved next time around and this is good for wikipedia whether they are doing admin duties or not. While adminship is apparently no big deal, I don't think the bar should be so low that it becomes a wikipedians 'right' and it is definitely wrong to kick candidates when they are down. It is also wrong, however, to humor a candidate when there are clear flaws in the candidates editing patterns or behavior.

Nevertheless, if we really want to change RfA to be be a kinder place we should just lower the bar and let all candidates with 3000 edits become admins. Those that then abuse the tools should be desysopped and encouraged to change their ways and reapply later. Is it possible that everyone will rise to the responsability? I believe that is possible and I would be interested to see if wikipedia is willing to experiment and be more liberal with handing out the tools, so liberal that RfA could become redundant and replaced with RfD (request for desysop), that would hardly ever be used. David D. (Talk) 23:01, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

The problem with any experiment that makes the RfA process more lenient is that it's very difficult to desysop an admin. Yes, it does happen in extreme cases, but the process is very time-consuming and almost always causes huge amounts of ill will. Therefore, changing the RfA procedure may well require a change in the desysop procedure. While RfA certainly isn't a perfect system, it does work "well enough" that changing multiple processes isn't a task many would like to undertake. Aren't I Obscure? 23:35, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

I have to say I am of the opinion RfA works well and those that fail do learn something constructive about themselves. My extreme suggestion of every 3000 edit user has the 'right' to be an admin was more an observation of an alternative model. I don't agree with it, but I do think it is possible it would not be the total disaster than some might imagine. David D. (Talk) 23:55, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

I agree with you that RfA generally works well and even failures can be useful to candidates. I also think that an experiment such as the one you described might not be a total disaster...at first. However, any system that's set up so that you gain adminship by achieving certain metrics is bound to be abused by trolls/vandals/POV pushers, etc... Aren't I Obscure? 00:00, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

I think you mnade a good point below about the desysop criteria would need to be relaxed. Initially this would probably be OK but you're right about the trolls. It would not take them long to realise that they can game the system and bait admins into losing their admin tools. This would be an unacceptable handicap for admin and a very strong rationale for maintaining the current status guo with respect to RfA nominations. David D. (Talk) 00:04, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

I stumbled across Misplaced Pages:Requests for de-adminship. Who knew? Highway 23:38, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages gets many RfAs from users who just aren't ready for adminship yet. Is having an RfA stressful? Certainly: the potential of having your every edit scrutinized and every bit of dirty laundry dragged into the open is daunting. But a candidate who can't handle the stress of an RfA is, in my opinion, not ready to handle the greater stress of dealing with vandals, blocking users, etc. There is a growing trend of some strange "standards" from people who appear to be unfamiliar with the RfA process (oppose !votes based on strict percentages ("7/24ths"), help space edits, etc). Those just don't make any sense to me, but at the same time, I don't feel the RfA system is failing. I agree with David that it's wrong to give a candidate false hope, or humor a candidate who doesn't exhibit basic admin skills. If the user isn't ready, it's just better to say so, even though it may seem harsh. I've tried to stick the word "reluctant" in there when I oppose a nom, and give several reasons why; I tend to shy away from "per above" in those cases. I'd rather give reasons so the candidate can improve for the next time. --Firsfron of Ronchester 23:45, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Yep, it currently is possible to desysop an admin, but this requires intervention of the ArbCom or Jimbo himself. While this system can deal with a few (4-5 a year) rogue admins, it's not very scalable and would collapse if we implemented a scheme such as "all candidates with X edits are made admins." Thus, the desysop process would have to be made more lenient, which has its own problems, such as encouraging trolls to harass admins who block them. Aren't I Obscure? 23:50, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Plus, a system where "all candidates with X edits are made admins" could be easily gamed. Vandals could amass X edits of any quality and then would get shiny new tools. The possibilities are chilling.--Firsfron of Ronchester 23:58, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

It is actually quite surprising they do not already try to game the system. How hard is it to act a model user for a while? I hope this is not a case of WP:BEANS. I suppose the reality is that it rarely happens suggesting the vandals don't have the patience. David D. (Talk) 00:08, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

We have some very patient (dedicated?) vandals on WP. I mean the ones who keep coming back, like CapnCrack. I wouldn't put it past these types, though their temptation to vandalize might be be too hard to resist.--Firsfron of Ronchester 00:21, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Jayjg once remarked (roughly, this is from memory) that he could create a new account and spend a half-hour a day on it for six months, and become an admin by a landslide. This is, I think, quite true, but I'm not aware that anyone's tried it. freestylefrappe did, but of course he failed. I think the key would be to make yourself look knowledgeable, be friendly, but remain totally uncontroversial (e.g., avoiding issues of copyright where possible and taking a moderate stance on notability). However, you would have to know the process quite well to have a chance at pulling this off, whereas a simple standard would be very easy to game. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 20:23, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages is too big now for a "one-size-fits-all" requests for adminship system. It is like trying to have one court room for every legal case. We could have one requests for adminship page that specializes in editors who have mainly done vandalism patrol and others that are suited to other types of editors. We need admins who cover the whole spectrum of editor types. --JWSchmidt 00:52, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

A similar proposal for piecemeal power assignment was discussed (but is labeled as "rejected" in the archives TOC) here. There are, of course, other failed proposals in the archives and at User:Linuxbeak/RFA Reform.--Kchase T 02:18, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

I was not trying to suggest giving different powers to different admins. I was suggesting that there are different types of Wikipedians and they do not all have to be measured by the same criteria. --JWSchmidt 04:28, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

I understand what you suggested. They're similar but distinct approaches.--Kchase T 04:32, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

The flip side is that as a regular contributor to RfAs, I have seen some fairly significant failures to assume good faith on the part of some of the critics of the present system. To suggest, as some have, that oppose opinions are left without adequate thought or consideration is pretty insulting to those who are contributing here in order to make Misplaced Pages better. Just because you disagree with someone does not give you the right to question their motives and the quality of their contributions like this. For example, suggesting that editors are trying to see "how far can we push candidates" is pretty hard to justify, in my opinion. Just a thought... Gwernol 01:13, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree with Gwernol. While I readily grant that some contributors to RfA may in fact be making trivial oppose votes, there are certainly those that feel "X" quality is important in a potential admin and like to see that quality. Others think that quality is a silly requirement. Neither is right, and neither is wrong. RfA is NOT objective.
Any objective measure that we attempt to apply to RfA will fail. Edits, for example, are very easy to accumulate these days, with a number of editing tools available that make it easy to rack up edits. RfA by its very nature needs to remain subjective. It isn't about numbers, it's about trust.
Something else to consider; we've heard various comments essentially asserting that we're not promoting enough admins. These assertions are based on a number of factors, including the declining acceptance rate of admins, the rise in standards at RfA, and a perceived decline in the number of admins promoted per month.
I disagree with the last of these assertions. While the number of admins promoted per month is lower than it has been in the past, it is well within the first standard deviation of the results over the last year. Thus, this can easily be ascribed to normal distribution of data over the time period; note as others have that we've had a recent increase in the number of generally acceptable nominees. Perturbations in the rates are to be expected, and I don't see a reason to fear a problem as yet.
Secondly, there's a dizzying array of ways in which to evaluate whether we're promoting enough admins or not. How backed up are processes at Misplaced Pages? Are they more backed up than typical? What is typical? Are we keeping vandalism in check? And on and on and on. One way in which to look at the data is the number of articles per admin. Some of you may be surprised to know that the number of articles per admin has risen just 11% in the last 1 1/2 years; virtually static, and given the increase in the presence of vandal fighting tools, we're probably doing a *better* job finding and fighting vandalism than we were in the Spring of 2005.
In short, I think we need to be more careful in our assertions that we aren't promoting people fast enough. Perhaps we're doing a better job of filtering than ever before? Just a possibility, and one that hasn't been discussed in great depth. --Durin 13:29, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree with the oppose per above or support per above point. I wonder if it ought to say on the RFA page - no per above votes, try to give an individual reason... --Errant Tmorton166(Review me) 13:46, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

So if a candidate is found to have moved a page or two to "...on wheels", only one person is allowed to use that as grounds for opposing? -- Steel 14:04, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Well no thats not what I meant but rather than saying oppose per userx people should say oppose due to moving pages to "...on wheels". It doesn't take much to type and clarifies exactly what they are opposing - which is kind of useful. --Errant Tmorton166(Review me) 14:15, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

If user x identifies the pagemoves, then it makes absolutely no difference whether people oppose "per user x" or oppose "per pagemoves". -- Steel 14:30, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

I strongly feel that RfA is not a one size fits all. It is also nearly impossible to change the reasons for which people !vote. As a suggestion, shouldn't we rather insist that candidates/nominees go through the logs of RfA to find out what lies in the future. Also, for those who aren't sure, Editor review should be publicised. Though ER rarely gets the "enemies", issues like low edits in certain namespaces, experience, etc. are handled well in it. — Ambuj Saxena (talk) 14:01, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree about publicising editor review, I added a sentence and link to it in the About RFA section (under Decision Process section where it says you can self nominate). What do you reckon? --Errant Tmorton166(Review me) 14:21, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

A brief look at Misplaced Pages:Editor review suggests it to be rather useless. Users seem to be recieving very few comments. The user currently at the top of the list seems to be getting laudatory reviews, yet is about to be banned for a year by the Arbitration Committee. Perhaps this sample is distorted but it is not looking like a process that will help people prepare for RfA. Christopher Parham (talk) 03:52, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Receive several pointless votes, such as "no AfD participation", when the nominee is a vandal fighter I view this as one of the strongestreasons to oppose around. We select admins who can help the 'pedia and have good knowledge of process. You can't have that if you dont participate in that process. I like RC patrollers, and do more then a bit of it from time to time, but vandal-fighting is not the be-all and end-all of being a wikipedian, and it does not make you a saint. Go contribute some, go help in the XfD proccesses too. Too many people RC-patrol to inflate edit counts and race toward the perceived goal of adminship like this is a game and their racking up points. -M 03:42, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

I was making an example. I don't see any point to users complaining "nominee has not asked for pages to be protected", when the nominee doesn't wish to do that, and has noted that what they want to do wil help the 'pedia. If you're only trying to promote über admins, who will destroy our backlogs in hours, then your plan isn't working, editors are just leaving because they're sick of jumping through hoops, just to become an admin. But we all know, It's not a big deal. Highway 07:22, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Vandal-fighting is a necessary activity, and one to which adminship is highly relevant (rollback and block). Why does it matter whether someone who wants to revert and block vandals has contributed to AFDs? If they indicate any intent to start closing AFDs, then they had better have contributed, but asking people to participate in all the important Misplaced Pages processes when they only want admin tools to contribute better to one makes little sense. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 20:07, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

It wouldn't matter if we were just giving them rollback, but we're not, were giving them ALL the admin tools. You need not be a crazy-awesome AfD closer, but I'd (and others) would prefer that you have at least some experience with all or almost all areas, not just one. (edited for spelling, typing while standing does not behoove me.) -M

02:11, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

I think some RfAs are getting ridiculous in terms of the volume of nit-picky hypotheticals thrown at candidates. Has anyone yet had the balls to respond along the lines of "I haven't got time to answer all of these questions because I'm busy contributing usefully to Misplaced Pages"? --Dweller 17:15, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Resurrecting a proposal: jury voting

Whose consensus is RFA supposed to represent?

Well, let's look at how we currently determine it. What we have now is a conventional vote: anyone who stops by can throw in their opinion. So whose consensus do we gather? That of RFA regulars, of the nominee's friends, and probably of the nominee's enemies. Assuming there's significant off-site discussion of Misplaced Pages matters amongst the wiki-savvy, such as on IRC, and given that people who have had interactions with someone are more likely to notice that person's RFA on RC or wherever, it's safe to say that a very large percentage of those who currently vote in RFA will have preconceptions as to the candidate's worthiness.

Is this good or bad? At first glance, it would seem good. Who better to judge a candidate than those who know him? But actually, I think it's probably not good. The acquaintances of a candidate surely have better knowledge, but they may also have unusual opinions. One example of this is, of course, where a candidate has consistently enforced an often-resented policy, such as WP:FU: those who have had their images removed (the minority of active Wikipedians who disagree with the policy) may feel resentful, and as discussed above are probably more likely to see the RFA than others. Basically, someone's pool of acquaintances may be skewed due to the spheres they walk in. Likewise, people may hold personal grudges if they were involved in a difference of opinion with a user. These people are not impartial, but they'll be disproportionately likely to vote in the candidate's RFA.

Now, the current process is not "broken". That's true. Most people it lets through are deserving, most people it bars are undeserving (or at least not clearly deserving). But "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is a recipe for perpetual mediocrity. The current system could use improvement; the mere fact that it works at an acceptable level is not reason to fail to improve it. Let's not oppose change just because it's change.

So, I would argue that consensus should be the informed opinion of the Wikipedian community as a whole. Obviously, we can't ask every single Wikipedian what they think of every single admin candidate. But an interesting possibility comes from jury votes, and the idea of a statistical cross-section. Select fifty or a hundred people randomly from the community for each candidate. (A bot could pick them and leave messages on their talk pages linking them to the discussion.) Have an open discussion for perhaps three days, longer if necessary, where people present diffs and other evidence and discuss the candidate's merits. Then let those in the jury (who showed up) vote. If they agree by a margin of 80% that the candidate should get the tools, then they get them.

Of course, many of these people may be inexperienced in RFA. They might not understand what adminship means exactly. But I think this could be overcome quite easily: just tell them all when they're selected what powers an admin gets and how difficult it is to remove them. It's really quite simple, not something that you need any experience to grasp.

Is the scheme overcomplicated? I really don't think so. A simple bot running on open-source code could handle all this quite invisibly. And unlike the present system, it's also completely immune to vote-stacking of any sort. People with open minds and average opinions will consider the matter, not people who may have preconceived opinions based on personal slights or out-of-date facts.

Of course, the question of how to select the jury remains, but that's more of a detail not important to the main thrust of the scheme. What are people's thoughts on this? —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 21:04, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Is the system broken? What percentage of RfA's do objective wikipedians think have been opposed with unfair predjudice? David D. (Talk) 21:11, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

The system is not broken. It is merely imperfect. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 20:33, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Since it would be bad to block people from raising legitimate concerns, uncivil diffs, etc., comments to that effect would be made and allowed anyway, and the jury members and the closing bureaucrat will see them and they will have a similar effect as they do now; and supporters will object to those objections and bring up countervailing diff's and we have a similar system as we do now. Except, the selection of the jury is the key part. If they are randomly selected, a significant majority will have no idea what an admin does, etc., and many of them will, aside from being new, be uncivil or fringe or otherwise problematic; it is not sufficient to give a paragraph explanation, even if they are all good faith jury members. So we end up with people raising objections about the qualifications of the jury in any particular case. That is—if more than a handful of the randomly selected jury cares to give any careful evaluation, if they do anything at all. I think, if anything, this will result in a less careful evaluation or less discussion. If the current RfA participants were to still review contributions of the candidate in this proposed system, we would then have a situation where the people who know the most about the candidate have their opinions not count, and then the people who just happened to login one day so they can edit their favorite band article don't know the qualifications, haven't reviewed the contributions, and may not even vote reasonably if they had. —Centrx→talk • 21:26, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

I think problems with the current system are related lack of thorough discussion. —Centrx→talk • 21:27, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

That's because RfA is a vote. We're kidding no one. Highway 21:32, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

With the proposal, keep in mind that not everyone is on every day. Some may visit once a week-maybe less. It also doesn't seem right to block some from having the ability to vote. MichaelZ526 21:39, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

In addition to the problem of people's schedules, the idea depends on having enough "jurors" feel an obligation to participate. In a volunteer project, that's a dicey proposition to rely on, and the combination makes me skeptical about whether the result would be a reasonably representative body. And that's without getting into the technical challenges of selecting them, which may not be critical to a theoretical discussion, but which are large enough that the theoretical side may not be worth spending much time on. --Michael Snow 22:54, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Yep, current "bottom up" system works best. Misplaced Pages is a distributed, community based system. For certain very exceptional things, like ArbCom, etc., it is important to have a "top-down" approach. However, for editing articles, voting things for deletion, voting for admin, and others, it is best to let things at the hands of the community (will all the disclaimers of the supposed silliness of the masses, etc.) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 00:39, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

The technical challenges are negligible. Anyone familiar with pywikipediabot could probably knock up a bot to do this in a day. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 20:33, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Somebody could easily create a bot to pick a jury pool, no doubt. What I meant by technical challenges was the issue of making the pool random, or otherwise ensuring that the jury is a representative sample of the person's peers. Addressing those problems goes beyond mere skill in programming. --Michael Snow 20:57, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Those who only visit once a week will, of course, not be able to participate as often. There will be an inherent bias toward more active members of the site, but I don't think that's a bad thing: they're the ones who will most likely have to deal with the new admin, after all. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 20:33, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

You raise a few concerns here. First, as you say, the jury will not know what an admin does. As I said: so? What's there to know? Be told what they can do, what use giving someone the tools is and what harm it could cause, and you're pretty much set. You don't have to be an expert in Misplaced Pages policy to judge admin candidates, any more than you need to be a lawyer to judge a legal case.

Second, you suggest that the jury might be uncivil or otherwise fringe. To that, I think all I need to say is, are contributors to RFA at present really all civil and mainstream? You'll always have some jerks in the crowd.

Third, you suggest that the jury won't review the evidence. Maybe. My belief is that given the small number of RFAs, no one of our tens of thousands of active members will be picked often enough for the jury to lose its interest. I would guess that given editor turnover, a large percentage of people will only ever be picked once. Put a big notice up saying DO NOT PARTICIPATE IF YOU ARE NOT WILLING TO SPEND AT LEAST AN HOUR DISCUSSING AND CONSIDERING OVER THE COURSE OF A WEEK, and I think the large majority will put more effort into it than most RFA voters currently do. (How much time do you spend when deciding how to vote on an RFA? I doubt I've ever spent more than half an hour.) —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 20:33, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

I still like the idea of the juror voting. Juror's can be randomly selected from the pool of people registered for the juror's duty, so to prevent from choosing people, who are not interested. People who edit wikipedia are usually fast learners and it is not that bad if the nominated admin and the people arguing his case will be a little more verbose explaining their arguments to the Jury. After all in the real courts of law the Jury is usually less educated than a typical wikipedian, the instructions are more complex and the results are much more important abakharev 03:02, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Jury cases in courts of law are quite different that this proposal. Courts of law are a negative process. They would be more similar if all it took were a single wiki-juror to deny adminship, in which case we wouldn't get any admins. There are many other dissimilarities too; the analogy doesn't hold. —Centrx→talk • 03:55, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Sure it does. The principle in both cases is this: a random selection of an individual's peers are the most neutral possible group to judge him. The exact requirements for conviction versus adminship aren't the point of this suggestion. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 20:33, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

I still think it's a terrible idea. One of the principles behind the ideal of consensus is "those who are there to make the decision are the right people to make the decision". By saying we need a juried system, we're demolishing a huge chunk of good faith in our editors, and for no proven gain. RFA needs help, probably, but this isn't it. -- nae'blis 03:22, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

I strongly disagree that that's a part of the ideal of consensus. Consensus is of the entire community, not just of people who happen to be there. The people who happen to be there may be better-suited to make the decision . . . or they may be just the opposite. And as for assuming good faith, that is completely unrelated to assuming beneficial action: I can assume someone is acting in good faith while still saying they should not be allowed to act that way. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 20:33, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Any substantial RfA reform is unlikely, I'd say, because there is a substantial group that views RfA as one of the smoothest-running, most effective processes on the English Misplaced Pages. This despite the vocal group that believes otherwise. A reform that is, like this one, purely experimental and not modelled on other process that have a history of success, is especially unlikely to find purchase. Christopher Parham (talk) 03:41, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

In keeping with the spirit of RFA:

Oppose Bad idea. FeloniousMonk 03:57, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure if I was the first to propose this, but I've certainly brought it up before. The current processes at RfA, CfD, AfD, etc. are all "consensus" based, but based on consensus of whoever shows up to participate. This makes all of these processes extremely subject to manipulation by any organized group. If we actually want these processes to reflect community-wide "consensus" I don't think there's any real alternative to some sort of random sampling technique. The "jury" analogy is not really accurate. It's more like statistical polling. With sampling techniques, and a small amount of statistics, it's possible to figure out what the +/- percentage is for a given (random) sample size. A self-selected sample (what we have now) has a +/- of 100% (might be completely wrong). If we want 80% approval, I think we could get within 2% of this by sampling something like 30 randomly selected users (I am not a statistician, so this number might be extremely inaccurate). If we allowed users to elect to be part of the population from which a random sample were selected, I think we avoid most of the infrequent participant problems. I'm not claiming this is necessary, but I think it's quite doable. -- Rick Block (talk) 04:44, 2 August 2006 (UTC)\

The way I see it here's how a jury type system would ideally work:
- A set group of trusted Wikipedians would be overseers or selectors if you will of the jury pool and are selected through some way that is acceptable.
- Anyone with X edits or more may put their name on a page to be eligible for the jury pool
- The overseers/selector group selects the jury group for each, to make sure the overseers don't rig it it would be simple to have multiple groups and even possibly have a 2nd group that decides which overseer or overseers choose the jury for which case to avoid jury rigging.
- Once a jury is chosen there would be a period of time for comment and diff presentation from the public. Comments and diffs would have to be regarding the candidate's past behavior and any reasoning based on possible actions would have to be justified based on past actions (to avoid mudslinging).
- Supporters could also present diffs and well based reasoning to why the person would be a good candidate for adminship
- Responses to criticisms and supports alike would be allowed but not required of the candidate who would also be able to present diffs. Room could also potentially be given for outside supporters and opponents to counter given diffs.
- Jury members could excuse themselves if they felt they could not make a fair decision and would not be allowed to comment or provide diffs on the nom either for or against unless they excuse themselves.
- After a given amount of time (7 days or 14 days would probably be best) the chosen jury pool will discuss among themselves whether the person gets promoted, a consensus would be required to promote and jury votes would have to be reasoned in explanation.

Please give your feedback on this idea, I'm more than willing and ready to write this into a proposal but would like some comments on it first lest I waste the effort to have it shot down immediately. Thygard - Talk - Contribs - Email ---- 05:29, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
- I think this concept of jury voting is one of the best suggested reforms of the RFA process that I have heard. It allows us to get away from voting and reach a consensus for every nomination. I would definitely volunteer to be on the jury. -- JamesTeterenko 16:23, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
- Volunteering for jury duty is one way we could do it, randomly selecting from registered users active within X days is another, picking edits off RC is still another; it's the concept that matters more than the implementation. However we do it, though, the jurors should not be selected by a human group, but rather at random, possibly with some kind of criterion for removing anyone who knows/has strong feelings toward/whatever the person. And jurors should most definitely be allowed to comment on the case, ask questions, and join the discussion; I know real jurors aren't allowed to, but AFAIK that's more of a relic than something with a real purpose. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 20:33, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

This proposed jury system strikes me as taking a fairly simple and transparent process and making it pretty complicated. Do we want to risk breaking something that, by many accounts, isn't broken? Let's keep it simple. Sxeptomaniac 21:22, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Types of potential admins, and how each type fares in RfA

I think it would be good to look at recent RfAs and determine how the community responds to each type of admin candidate. When I say type I mean: 1)the vandal fighter, 2)the article editor who could use the tools, 3)the tech expert 4)the WP policy wonk, and so on. Which types are being most supported and which are being passed over for adminship. Ultimately, what mix of admins are we creating? Six months from now, are we going to have a group of admins dominated by one or two types? And how is this going to affect the ongoing operation of WP? This is so subjective, I am not sure where to start, but I think looking into this sort of thing would be useful. Any ideas of how to analyze this? NoSeptember 08:49, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

We can look into his/her contributions and identify his edits. This is a tough one though, but I like the idea. --Ter e nce Ong _{(Chat | Contribs)} 09:47, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Vandal fighters and AfDers are reigning supreme, because if you don't do those things, you are absolutely worthless. Highway 14:49, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

No one's ever said Article Editors are worthless, but I have seen many people !vote oppose for these folks based on "doesn't need the tools".--Firsfron of Ronchester 14:55, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

But even then, AfDers are only reigning supreme if they're supporting the right articles. --badlydrawnjeff talk 14:59, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Well I don't think that's a very good view, because article editors can do everything, they revert vandalism, they protect, they move and they occassionally log AfDs. So Article Editors are Jack-of-all-trades, is that a bad thing? Highway 15:11, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

To get back to NoSeptember's original question... I suppose, for new RfAs, you could simply ask each candidate which category s/he felt s/he was in. For analyzing old data, you could compare them with the "what would you do with the tools?" question, which is asked in many (certainly not all) RfAs. Making some sort of chart might be useful. Didn't User:Durin create something like this? I don't rightly recall.--Firsfron of Ronchester 15:03, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

I like the idea, and I think between the nom statement, the answer to "what would you do once an admin?", and the supports/opposes, you could get a (very subjective, but perhaps useful) metric. Maybe rate them on each of the four types? That gives you an automatic fifth type: the eager newbie who applied WAY too soon. I like the idea. -- nae'blis 15:42, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

I think we're kind of barking up the wrong tree here, although the study could be interesting if done the way Nae'blis describes. The point is that people who are exclusively any one of those stereotypes are more likely to fail than editors with experience in all four areas, or at least the first, second, and fourth. My perception of votes is that people are lookin for a balance. But, as I said, if someone comes up with some rough rating in each area as Nae'blis said, perhaps it will reveal how much experience is being required in each topic, and we can evaluated if that's a good thing. -- SCZenz 16:31, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

There's probably archetypal categories you can pigeon-hole candidates in, but the above four doesn't get at the two things I see most often taking candidates down in flames: civility and POV-pushing. Maybe a "skill" based analysis would be better than the above categories:

a) article-writing

b) civility

c) NPOV

d) general policy knowledge

e) anti-vandalism

f) MediaWiki knowledge (trying to get at the "technical" type).

Try to rate them from 1-10 (obviously former admins like Sean Black would have a bonus in some categories), and see where we end up? I'd hypothesize SCZenz is right, about the well-rounded candidate being best, but some will likely come up as more consistently high than others. I know where I'd rate myself... -- nae'blis 16:41, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

If you try something like that, be sure you include things like inclusionism/deletionism and copyright stringency. Opinions can count for a lot; many RFAs fail because the person is too harsh/lenient on notability or copyright in particular (since both are very relevant to many admin tasks). Likewise belief in IAR vs. consensus vs. process regularly comes up. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 20:37, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

If you want a Guinea pig to first disect this thing, you can use me when I'm not so shiny new. Yank sox 20:42, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

I believe inclusionism/deletionism is too subjective to be measured (as is eventualism/immediatism). IAR/process is likewise very subjective, though you could argue it falls under "does the user known/is familiar with policy?". Copyright definitely comes under policy awareness IMO. I was trying to limit the list to things that were unequivocally good, but individual standards may vary as to what "score" is needed. -- nae'blis 20:49, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Along the same lines of what the candidates do, another polarising factor seems to be does the candidate hang out in IRC. It seems that those who do get an initial rush of support. The oppose votes tend to come later when others happen to pass through RfA. At least this is my impression, has anyone esle noticed this phenomenon? David D. (Talk) 16:50, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

If an editor has a record of contributions to the project and no history of causing problems and they want to be an administrator then they should be an administrator and it should be no big deal.--JWSchmidt 17:02, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

"no history of causing problems": And there lies the subjectivity. David D. (Talk) 17:37, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

"Current Misplaced Pages policy is to grant administrator status to anyone who has been an active Misplaced Pages contributor for a while and is generally a known and trusted member of the community. Most users seem to agree that the more administrators there are the better." (source) --JWSchmidt 17:07, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Wikimedia conference and administrators

Will there be an opportunity for discussions about administrators at the upcoming Wikimedia conference? Perhaps it might be beneficial to talk about issues surrounding adminship there as well? --HappyCamper 17:04, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

I hope so, even if only informally. Anyone that wants to buttonhole me, should... ++Lar: t/c 17:26, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

In my opinion, it would be an opportunity lost if there is no productive discussion about this at the conference... --HappyCamper 17:33, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Indeed. Administrator status will become, I think, a focus of greater and greater attention and problems. As the chance of passing an RfA goes down over time (and it is dropping), the frequency of complaints about administrators will rise. The more selective the group, the more negative consequences there will be. --Durin 17:36, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. As the number of administrators in Misplaced Pages rises and the chance of having a successful RfA (in the first attempt) decreases, ordinary users would demand and expect a high standard of behaviour (as well as edits and vandal fighting) from admins. There should be a productive discussion about this at the conference. --S iva1979 18:03, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Whether there is or is not, it might behoove us to consider having a discussion about this here, on Misplaced Pages, and consider the consequences of this shift. --Durin 19:11, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

For me, I think I'm going to sit back and wait for another Wikipedian to take the initiative to do that. --HappyCamper 21:00, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Taking up your offer, it appears there is a growing trend for some users to be excessively harsh and oppose candidates because they have not been involved in a particular issue (e.g. not going to WP:IFD can be construed as lack of knowledge about image and deletion policy), yet they do not consider whether the admin candidate would actually stop down and ask how to do something if he were faced with a particular situation. That's why specialist admins aren't such a bad idea to begin with, and I guess that's something that will get the ball rolling... Tito xd 22:00, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

I disagree, my opinion is that admin should at the base knowledge of other tasks. --Masssiveego 08:13, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

July 2006 WP:RFA in Review

All RfAs	36%	33%	45%
	This month	Last month	Six months ago
New RfAs posted:	78	79	83
Successful RfAs:	28 (36%)	26 (33%)	37 (45%)
Early withdrawn RfAs:	38 (49%)	38 (48%)	29 (35%)
Self nominations:	39 (50%)	40 (51%)	30 (36%)
Noms with <1000 edits:	19 (24%)	22 (28%)	13 (16%)
Average number of votes per successful RfA:	91	88	61
Success rates based on edit count of all nominees with at least...
>1000 edits	47%	45%	53%
>2000 edits	53%	49%	59%
>3000 edits	58%	54%	65%
>4000 edits	54%	50%	63%
>5000 edits	57%	47%	65%
Success rates based on time on Misplaced Pages of all nominees with at least...
>2 months	38%	38%	49%
>4 months	41%	39%	52%
>6 months	42%	41%	54%
Average edit count of successful noms:	6713	7039	6701
Average edit count of unsuccessful noms:	3157	3144	2871

1 - July data is preliminary and assumes success of Ambuj.Saxena, Phaedriel, Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington, Crazycomputers, MisfitToys, GHe and failure of SynergeticMaggot.

--Durin 21:27, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

I don't know what's worse, the statistics, or the fact I'm not suprised. Highway 21:54, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Not surprised at what? The one thing that surprises me is that there is a large increase of self noms. Do most unsuccessful RfA's come from this group? David D. (Talk) 22:13, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Probably. In the past, I imagine nominating someone was a nice thing, now nominating 90% of editors is generally tying a noose around their neck. Highway 22:19, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes, don't they just show the world collapsing around us? We had better throw RfA in the bin, and begin the weekly hue and cry about it. Are you volunteering for this week? Where did you pull 90% from? -Splash - tk 22:25, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

There has been no particular decline in the number of candidates.
People are more inclined to withdraw a failing RfA recently than in February.
1. Probably relatedly, there have been a sharply higher proportion of self nominations.
2. Also probably relatedly, in this pair of months with sharply higher self-nominations than in February, more have failed. Perhap self-nominators are less able to judge when they are ready, or perhaps they are less qualified candidates, or perhaps people are more likely to oppose self noms. There could also be generally worse candidates, more choosy people participating, a spate of patently unacceptable candidates, the oft-reported but rarely-sighted 'rising standards', an unusually well-established crop in the arbitrary 4 week period selected for comparison.....
The average edit count requirements are essentially unchanged.
The proportion of success based on edit count fluctuates wildly from month to month and no particular conclusions can be drawn, particularly considering that one month is compared with an arbitrary other month, rather than the interverning averages.
The proportion of successful RfAs went up this month.
There are more people participating in the average RfA (unsurprisingly; Misplaced Pages grows).
Accounts of all ages are affected approximately equally by the lower success-rate this month, and so there is little discrimination on account-age basis apart from "don't be really new" (4 and 6 months are just as likely to be ok, but 2 is bad).

-Splash - tk 22:27, 2 August 2006 (UTC) 22:25, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

I think the best figure for looking at the "big picture" is the success rate of candidates with over 1000 edits (those with less are almost always rejected). In July 47% of these candidates were successful, up from 45% in June and down slightly from six months ago. Doesn't seem like there's too much to panic about here. Aren't I Obscure? 22:37, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

I just did a review of all nominations since June 27 of 2005. In that time, self nominations of all candidates with >2000 edits have had a 49% success rate. Non-self noms, 75%. At 26%, that's a big difference. --Durin 22:43, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Well, this is my edit 3163, so perhaps I'd better avoid a self-nom ;-) Stephen B Streater 22:53, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps, yes :) --Durin 22:55, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Apparently, I'm a statistical anomaly. My self-nom with only 2200 edits passed, although I had been here for 18 months, and only 54 votes were cast in my entire RFA. If you think you're ready, go for it. RyanG e rbil10(The people rejoice!) 08:24, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

There might be a correlation between the increase in number of self nominations vs. perception that RfA standards have risen. Maybe the most significant factor in the "rise" is not in edit counts or time here, but in the rise in number of self noms. --Durin 22:55, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Would you happen to have any stats on the average edit counts and time for self noms vs. non-self noms? Great work, BTW. Aren't I Obscure? 23:01, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Durin, you wouldn't have to use preliminary numbers if you used the date the RfA ends or is withdrawn (like on my chart) instead of the date it is started ;). NoSeptember 23:31, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Patience young grasshopper :). It won't be preliminary in a few days, and results are skewed per month by using a less than firm date of end or early withdraw. I prefer to use the incept date for each nom. --Durin 01:21, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

So can you chart how many admin have been removed from their position , for what reasons, and how many complaints on admin in the recent days? --Masssiveego 08:15, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

For your first question, have a look here; and concerning the complaints: do you mean complaints in general, or founded complaints? Lectonar 08:57, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes. both Misplaced Pages:Requests for de-adminship and User:NoSeptember/Desysop can help you track desysopped admins. With complaints, there are so many bogus complaints mixed in with the legitimate ones, we can't quantify it objectively. NoSeptember 10:51, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

One could get some general idea by going through the admin user WP:RFCs. Some may be spurious, but the effort of an RfC suggests that they're largely not "bogus". Jkelly 20:35, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Durin has posted some other charts in the past here at WT:RFA, I collected those I could find here. If you find more, please add them. NoSeptember 10:54, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

My imaginary self-nom

The following is officially semi-humorous material under the little-used but critical standard WP:Not Really Very Funny. I’m way too exo to even vote on an RfA, must less submit myself to the ~~torture~~ process.

Uh, hi. You probably don’t know me because I stay out of trouble and edit articles like Escrow payment that nobody with a life would ever read. My big claim to “fame” (ha-ha) was getting Henry James (the article, not the guy’s ashes) up to FA status. FAC was almost as much fun, frivolity, and fabulousness as RfA. But then some admin said I couldn’t call James’ autobiography “charming” because that was POV. Really p.o.ed me. But hey, who am I to argue with an admin?

Anyway, I’ve got about five or six thousand edits now, though a couple thousand or so were anonymous when I was trying to dodge admins like the anti-charming lady. Now I don’t care because, gee, I’m going to be an admin myself (I hope)! I’d like to give you a breakdown of my edits but Essjay’s edit counter is busted or he took it down and I can’t get that damn Java doohickey to work.

If promoted to admin I’m not going to do a lousy thing except what I’m doing now. That’s right, I ain’t gonna promise to AfD and RC and PDQ and Zowie and all that other junk admins promise to do but then they never do it, anyway. (That’s what SlimVirgin says and I don’t argue with virgins of any weight class.) If somebody vandalizes an article on my watchlist I’ll fix it and forget it. Otherwise, I’m just gonna write articles. This is an encyclopedia. You don’t like it, vote me down!

I will promise to be brave, trustworthy and clean. I will take four showers a week, help old ladies across the street into the crack house, and not eat what I find when I pick my nose. I also won’t post on ~~Misplaced Pages Review~~ (oops, I'm not supposed to link to that) and I think Kelly Martin and Tony Sidaway are just swell as long as they don’t bother me. Plus, I’ll read all the TROLL stuff in the Signpost and made stupid remarks about it on my user page.

Thank you for your consideration. If I don’t get 80% support, I won’t kill myself. This is no big deal, right? Casey Abell 13:46, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Well, you'd have my vote! --W.marsh 13:52, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Luckily, there are backup counters available:

Edit count for User:Casey_Abell
Counted at 15:48, Thursday August 3, 2006 (UTC)
(main)         2706
Talk           238
User           363
User talk      36
Misplaced Pages      132
Misplaced Pages talk 56
Image          248
Template       53
Template talk  1

Or see these results in a stupid level of detail

Article namespace: 2706: Manual vandalism reverts: 39; Manual reverts not marked as vandalism reverts: 10; Removals: 31; Redirects: 62; Deletion-related edit summaries: 16; Addition-related edit summaries: 202; Non-deletion voting-related edit summaries: keep: 1, oppose: 0, support: 0; Unknown abbreviation (≤4 characters): 146; Unrecognised edit summary: 1461; No edit summary: 738
Talk namespace: 238: Manual vandalism reverts: 1; Addition-related edit summaries: 1; Unknown abbreviation (≤4 characters): 10; Unrecognised edit summary: 108; No edit summary: 118
User namespace: 363: Manual reverts not marked as vandalism reverts: 1; Removals: 3; Welcomes: 1; Deletion-related edit summaries: 1; Addition-related edit summaries: 150; Unknown abbreviation (≤4 characters): 13; Unrecognised edit summary: 141; No edit summary: 53
User talk namespace: 36: Welcomes: 3; Addition-related edit summaries: 2; Unknown abbreviation (≤4 characters): 2; Unrecognised edit summary: 22; No edit summary: 7
Misplaced Pages namespace: 132: Removals: 8; Non-deletion voting-related edit summaries: keep: 3, oppose: 0, support: 0; Unknown abbreviation (≤4 characters): 1; Unrecognised edit summary: 26; Edits to sections, with no further summary: 22; No edit summary: 72
Misplaced Pages talk namespace: 56: Unknown abbreviation (≤4 characters): 2; Unrecognised edit summary: 14; No edit summary: 40
Image namespace: 248: Manual reverts not marked as vandalism reverts: 1; Addition-related edit summaries: 2; Unrecognised tag ({{ in summary): 1; Unknown abbreviation (≤4 characters): 4; Unrecognised edit summary: 240
Template namespace: 53: Addition-related edit summaries: 2; Unrecognised edit summary: 51
Template talk namespace: 1: Unrecognised edit summary: 1

There's probably some spurious information in the above, as my edit counter is new and tries to figure it out from the summaries with a bot-like intelligence level... anyway, reasonable, but probably too exo for you to be voted in, as you say. (You'll get people complaining about the low Misplaced Pages: edit count.) See, just posting on RfA's talk page will get your edit count dissected and insulted. (Revenge attempts to count my edits are welcome, so long as there is some comment about why the User: space count is skewed). --ais523 15:57, 3 August 2006 (U T C)

I figure I'm a shoo-in. I got "non-deletion voting-related edit summaries" for crying out loud. If that ain't admin material, what is? Casey Abell 17:23, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Honestly, I'd be tempted to vote for you. I would probably just ask that you participate in a little more process first. (And yes, that means getting the WP count up.) Themindset 22:29, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

I'd vote for you in a heartbeat, which probably tells me you wouldn't pass at the moment. I'm somewhat of an iconoclast on RFA now. Honestly, during my RFA, I was angry at the reasons people opposed me, but I held my tongue. Now that I'm an admin, though, I guess I could launch on an emotional tirade now, and just block people who complained about me :) . My advice is to read RFAs which are failing, and make sure you could dodge having the same criticisms leveled at yourself. RyanG e rbil10(The people rejoice!) 01:03, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Halfway seriously, I don't know how anybody can go though RfA without spouting off. I know you're expected to just take the less-than-flattering comments, but sometimes the talk gets pretty trying. Funny thing, the admin who got her knickers in a twist over my use of the dread word "charming" was sysoped way back in February, 2003. Back then they did it on the wikien-l mailing list, and it was maybe a half-dozen people deciding. Getting adminship really was no big deal. Now it's become ~~godawful torture~~ a lot tougher. Casey Abell 04:09, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

You're not an admin already? alphaChimp 01:09, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Jeesh, I'm hardly even a respectable editor. Though the more I post here, the less exo I get. Casey Abell 04:09, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Heh. More edits in Misplaced Pages space would be good, but you seem to have a good attitude.--Firsfron of Ronchester 01:13, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Increase your shower count and we're in buisness. Yank sox 01:15, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

According to the edit counter from ais523 I have 47 edits in Showers Talk. Is that enough? Casey Abell 04:09, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Requests for adminship/Ambuj.Saxena

Would a bureaucrat please close this RFA; it's already 12 hours overdue; the actual time for closure being 5:50, and currently it is 16:30. --May the Force be with you! Shr e shth91 ($ |-| ŗ 3 $ |-| ţ |-|) 16:33, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

I believe that the crat's are consciously letting it go a little longer since it is so close and previous votes are moving around. JoshuaZ 16:34, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I believe there has been a flurry of activity recently. Oh the tension! Sukh | ਸੁਖ | Talk 16:39, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

I have extended this RfA until 16:50 (UTC) on August 4. In advance, please do not ask for the specific reasons, as those will not be discussed while the RfA is still active. Thank you. Redux 16:52, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

New user vote

Hi,

What's the policy regarding completely new user's voting? I.e. users that haven't contributed on any other Misplaced Pages page but except for a particular RFA? User:ManhattanNY has done so on Misplaced Pages:Requests_for_adminship/Ambuj.Saxena. It seems a bit odd that an anonymous user cannot vote, but a brand new user account can (which essentially may be the same thing). Sukh | ਸੁਖ | Talk 20:32, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

First, they ain't votes. It's a consensus gathering excercise which means that Supports or Opposes from new or anon users are usually given much less weight by the 'crats during their decision making. Usually consensus is clear, but when it's tight, those new users who provide some explanation for their opinions will no doubt be considered. A big list of 'votes' should not make the decision, though, as WP is WP:NOT a democracy. - CHAIRBOY (☎) 20:37, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I knew this was coming when I used the term vote, but the section on "Voting and expressing opinions" specifically talks about voting ;) But, my point is, why is an anonymous user specifically bared from voting when a user who has made *zero* other contributions is allowed to vote simply because of the fact they're logged in? It makes no sense to me. Either allow anons to vote or allow neither. Sukh | ਸੁਖ | Talk 20:41, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

A brand new, zero edit user who has registered has made a tiny but significant step towards establishing a reputation in the WP community. Their opinion may not carry the same weight with the 'crat as someone more established, but it deserves more consideration than one of the faceless hoardes of the anonymous community. - CHAIRBOY (☎) 20:43, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm not going to instigate a major policy change, because, well, can't be arsed :) But, I think my point still stands. Especially when it's a case of such blatant "just signing up to vote". Although no doubt the user will now make a contribution to make my point moot! Sukh | ਸੁਖ | Talk 20:47, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Another consideration is that it is possible to look at the contributions of a named account and guage something about them -- at the very least, you can tell whether it is a new account. With an anon, there is often no telling for sure whether the anon's previous edits were from the same person or whether the same person may be a frequent editor but from a rolling IP. —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 20:48, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

In regards to the specific RfA, it was not appropriate to strike the user's Oppose. A better course of action for the future in this situation would be to make a note below the vote making a note to the effect of "Above is user's first edit". This helps the 'crat when he/she is making the decision and closing the conversation. - CHAIRBOY (☎) 20:51, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Duly noted Sukh | ਸੁਖ | Talk 20:55, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes, that would be your main priority. It wouldn't eliminate the vote but give it less credibility. MichaelZ526 07:44, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Further, it seems a bit fishy to me if a brand new user's first edit is to an RfA. How many new users actually know about them for them to be their first edit? MichaelZ526 07:45, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

I'd think hardly any. Personally I just started adding stuff to articles without knowing policy and didn't participate until about my 500th, even though I had already met some admins at maybe the 100 edit stage. Probably not regularly until even the 1500 edits, I didn't care about these things - why I started to, I don't know.Blnguyen | rant-line 07:48, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

That's pretty much the same for me. As time passed, I suppose I became more involved not only in the editing of articles but in other things such as RfA, AfD, and vandal fighting. When I first started, though, I just edited articles with little knowledge of the rest of Misplaced Pages. MichaelZ526 09:01, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

My, uh, new RFA criterion

Dude, I just came up with the perfect way to tell if someone will make a good admin! Witness User:Szyslak/200MWTE. szyslak (t, c, e) 06:02, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Love it! I'm going to adopt to it as well. This, along with 100+ portal talk edits, will be excellent criteria. — Deckill e r 07:33, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Racking up a big edit count in the MediaWiki talk namespace is a great way to show that you understand Misplaced Pages policy, the software behind Misplaced Pages, and Misplaced Pages in general. All things being equal, it might suggest that you're likelier to understand such stuff than are people who don't have such big edit counts. But one trouble with such a standard, once it's announced, is the way it may encourage some people to inflate their counts; another trouble that it's likely to get in people's way. I don't understand Mediawiki very well (I've gone no further than digging around in the stylesheets), I don't think this has crippled me, it hasn't caused me to waste others' time (my only participation was description of a bug and filing of a bug report), and I suspect that people doing good work in the MediaWiki are quite happy not to have people like myself cluttering up the talk namespace with comments ("Yes, I too agree with that. ~~~~", "Sorry, could you explain that once more, this time for non-techies like myself? Thanks. ~~~~", etc.). -- Hoary 07:36, 4 August 2006 (UTC) PS Aha! -- Hoary 08:14, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm inclined to agree. You will find the majority of users will not have MediaWiki edits. Your new criteria seem to reserve adminship for those with more technological inclinations while a more pertinent point with adminship is an understanding of Misplaced Pages policy. I agree with Hoary. Prospective admins will be flocking to MediaWiki to say things like, "I agree with the above user." or "That is true." It would be pointless. MichaelZ526 07:43, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

I think this criterion was meant to be tongue-in-cheek.... — TKD::Talk 07:47, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Especially since Misplaced Pages talk:MediaWiki namespace is old and dusty: it still has unarchived messages on it from 2003. I'd be very surprised if Szy's "new requirements" weren't a clever joke.--Firsfron of Ronchester 07:53, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

And doesn't MediaWiki require a different type of account? How would you check? MichaelZ526 07:49, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

An eerie glow of self-satisfaction as the user goes on to make 150 help edits over at mo: in order to demonstrate an awareness of the wider community would be a good indicator I feel. Rje 07:58, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Well, I've got one edit to MediaWiki talk (from before this was posted), but seeing as it was an {{editprotected}} request I suppose I can count one to the MediaWiki namespace as well. 200MWTE seems a bit excessive; technical knowledge is needed to make any useful contributions there. Perhaps the criterion should be 'at least one edit that resulted in a change to the interface, which wasn't reverted/shot down in flames/got the user indef-blocked', which I'm calling 1MWE. This still only applies to prospective admins trying to get in on a 'technical' remit. And yes, I suppose 200MWTE was meant to be humourous, but there's a possibly good idea here. Extra points if Deckiller can explain why the Portal talk namespace has to be handled differently by my edit counter, and in response to MichaelZ526, all MediaWiki pages are on permaprotection and can only be edited by admins (which is why I used {{editprotected}}). --ais523 08:08, 4 August 2006 (U T C)

I would certainly hope this was a joke. MichaelZ526 08:51, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

OK, it's a joke. I was tired of seeing those inflexible rules some RFA regulars go by, with comments like "Oppose, you have only 5,967 edits. My minimum edit count is 6000" and "You must have 200 template edits and 100 category edits, and half that many for each corresponding talk namespace. You have 289 template edits, but only 92 category edits, so I must oppose". So as a reaction to this trend, which I hereby dub "criterionitis" or perhaps "standardsitis", I came up with the most ridiculous RFA standard I could think of. (How many of us have one MW talk edit, much less 200? And who even watchlists a MediaWiki page, except perhaps MediaWiki:Blockedtext?)

However, I don't criticize those who choose to hold high standards for adminship hopefuls. While I don't agree with the tighening of standards we've experienced lately, I think it's understandable. Early this year we witnessed a series of scary incidents involving adminship: the pedophilia userbox wheel war, the Freestylefrappe fiasco and Guanaco's failed resysopping. And inflexible voting standards aren't anything new. But now it seems like just enough are using inflexible standards that it's causing a few more RFAs to fail where they would otherwise succeed. szyslak (t, c, e) 09:34, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree with the spirit of your comment, but I must admit that I stick to my standards pretty rigidly, as I believe they are easy to meet. Some of the standards some people set (6000 edits, etc.) are unrealistic for straightforward editors who aren't using vandalproof or some such edit-count-booster, and who have full lives with jobs/sports/ect filling up most of their time... I watch some people come in here and rack up more edits in one month than I've gotten in over a year and I can't even get my head around it. Themindset 18:41, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Your criteria are reasonable and simple, and ones almost anyone could agree with. (Someone with fewer than 1000 edits has no chance of passing, anyway). szyslak (t, c, e) 22:29, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

And today's game can be figuring out if anyone actually does have over 200 MWT edits. I've got 27, Geni has about 110, and none of the likely devs seem to have racked up more than a couple dozen. I suppose it could be that in the entire history of Misplaced Pages no one has gotten to 200 MWT. Dragons flight 18:57, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

I hope this is a joke...? --Lord Deskana (talk) 22:36, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

~ PseudoSudo 22:43, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Makes 200 times as much sense as all the 1FA's running loose biting RfA's in the hindquarters. :) Dlohcierekim 04:32, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Edit counter

Just noting, since it was mentioned above on the page, that the kinks that necessitated the edit counter to go offline have been ironed out and it is back online. It can be found at http://tools.wikimedia.de/~essjay/edit_count/Count.php. Essjay (Talk) 06:46, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for posting this link. :) MichaelZ526 08:50, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Very sweet, thank you essjay! Themindset 18:47, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Transfer of Adminship

At the moment I have two accounts, User:Wilfried Derksen and User:Electionworld. Usually I use the latter, but I am an administrator under the first name. Is there a possibility to transfer the adminship to the latter, so that I can limit myself to using only one useraccount (which is more according to Wikipolicy). Electionworld = Wilfried (talk 07:17, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Naturally, users will be rather skeptical of the claim; it would likely spark quite a discussion (and no doubt will shortly) of whether doing so is appropriate. Without commenting on such, the first step would be to log in with the admin account and post confirmation of what you have said; until you do that, it will only be speculation that you control both accounts. Users will no doubt speculate on the possibliy of a hacked password, and will discuss extensivly the motivation for having multiple accounts, regardless of the policy involved with doing so. I steward would be needed to desysop the admin account, and given that the possibility of doing this hasn't been discussed before, to my knowledge, users will likely want to discuss extensively whether a transferral of this nature should be allowed. However, all this is really moot until we hear confirmation from User:Electionworld, though I have no doubt whatsoever that a lack of confirmation will do anything to halt a lengthy discussion of the matter. Essjay (Talk) 07:30, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

You might want to keep in mind your reputation as an admin. under your current status. Which carries the larger load of your work-that may be looked upon by users who may question your credibility. MichaelZ526 07:38, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Just for clarity, you might want to indent back out, as the double-indention makes it look like you're replying to me, rather than to the initial post. Essjay (Talk) 08:10, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

I've posted on User talk:Electionworld asking for the usual confirmation that two users are the same. Essjay is correct in saying that the community almost always doesn't allow one user to have two admin accounts (the only exception I can think of is User:Danny/User:Dannyisme, and that's a pretty unusual case), and so the old account would have to be desysopped. Also, it's usual to give notice of use of alternate accounts rather than just redirecting: see User:Typochimp or User:Shayl, for example (alternate accounts of User:Alphachimp and User:MiraLuka respectively). Even if all the conditions were satisfied, I'd be happier if there was a discussion at WP:AN or a WP:RFA application that showed the community was happy with the sysopped-account change. The stewards at m:Stewards are likely to be happy to do the desysopping required if a 'crat decides the sysopping change is appropriate. --ais523 08:26, 4 August 2006 (U T C)

It's worth mentioning that several Admin nominations were opposed on the basis of the name - or at least this has been a contributing factor (eg Requests_for_adminship/SynergeticMaggot oppose 23 and Requests_for_adminship/CheNuevara oppose 8). I don't see this being a problem here, but worth mentioning nevertheless. Stephen B Streater 08:44, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes, but that was a different type of case when credibility was questioned, thus defeating adminship. I don't think those problems play as much of a role here-just the fact that as an admin., this user will be questioned due to its lack of reputation. MichaelZ526 08:47, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

As you can see, I use in both accounts the same signature. As you can see in the History of this page, the request was done from my adminship account. Now I am editing from the Electionworld account. When I decided to choose the electionworld user name, I didn't know how to transfer adminship. Normally I use the electionworld acount. The old account I use rarely (since you have to log out and in and after finishing, out and in. It just doesn't work. If the adminship is transferred, I will only use the Electionworld account, the old account can be deleted and/or desysopped, and I can make more work out of the adminship. Electionworld = Wilfried (talk 08:49, 4 August 2006 (UTC) (Electionworld account) and Electionworld = Wilfried (talk 08:51, 4 August 2006 (UTC) (Wilfried Derksen account) (check history)

Is there a reason you have two? MichaelZ526 08:52, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

I used to work under my own name. I have seen that that is not normal in Misplaced Pages, so I wanted to rename my user account. At that time not having any clue how to that, I created a new account with a name similar to my previous own website. I had to keep the old username because of its adminship feature. I was allways very clear about having two user names for one user (see the signature and the redirect from the old user name to the new user name. I was done in good faith, not to create a suckpoppet. Electionworld = Wilfried (talk 08:59, 4 August 2006 (UTC) (now logging out as Wilfried Derksen and logging in as Electionworld)

Oh, I see. MichaelZ526 09:02, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

If you just want to protect anonymity (or whatever the purpose of the change), a request at WP:CHU might be easier and faster. Admins change usernames all the time (BD2412 comes to mind). I'm reasonably sure you could even get it changed to Electionworld by changing that one first. Essjay does things like this all the time, from what I can tell of past requests.--Kchase T 09:13, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

That would be option, if I would be sure that I could change it to Electionworld. Can somebody confirm that to me?. Electionworld = Wilfried (talk 09:37, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Why don't you simply change username "Wilfried Derksen" to "ElectionworldAdmin" (or something similar)? I would find this better anyway as system operators do login as root (or whatever) only when needed and do their normal work under a non-root account (here under a non-admin account). --Ligulem 09:59, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Is that compatible with the idea of not having two accounts? Electionworld = Wilfried (talk 10:34, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Obviously not. What's the problem with using two accounts? We also have bot accounts. Some users also use a separate account for their WP:AWB edits. But nevermind, this is Misplaced Pages :). --Ligulem 11:11, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Which account's contributions do you want to be associated with the account you will be using into the future? That should determine how this is done. Since your Electionworld account has been used most recently, you may want to do what you first asked (a sysop of that account, and desysop of the older account) Either the name change option or the desysop resysop option should be fine. This has been done in the past. NoSeptember 10:05, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Electionworld. Electionworld = Wilfried (talk 10:34, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Then after you get a bureaucrat to agree to sysop Electionworld once Wilfred is desysoped, you can request desysopping on Meta. (Or you can get a Steward to do both) NoSeptember 10:48, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm thoroughly confused now; my initial understanding was that you had an admin account and a separate second account (perfectly valid) but hadn't acknowledged the connection between the two. Now, it's sounding as though you created a new account as a rename, rather than getting a rename (also valid, and quite common), and are now wanting to abandon the old (sysop) account entirely and use the new one exclusively. If that's what you're wanting to do, we can do a quick desysop and and resysop the "new" account; I was under the impression that you were wanting to switch adminship from two seemingly unrelated accounts (as though you'd been using one for one thing and the other for another). Provided this is simply an abandon of an old account for a new one, and you want to keep the non-sysop username, I can get this fixed up for you shortly. Drop me a note on my talk page that says "Yes, I want to move my sysop flag from X to Y" and I'll take care of it. Essjay (Talk) 11:52, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Just for transparency: User:Wilfried Derksen has been desysopped and I've sysopped User:Electionworld per the confirmations here and on my talk page. Essjay (Talk) 12:46, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

WikiProject on Adminship

In an effort to boost discussion of alternatives to the present RFA mechanism, I have started a WikiProject on adminship. Membership is open to anyone who supports significant changes to the RFA process. The purpose of having a WikiProject separate from RFA itself is twofold: one, to focus the conversation on alternatives to RFA rather than on whether RFA should change, and two, to provide a discussion forum that is (a) centralized and (b) not affected by the archivings and unrelated discussions which occur here. If you support changes to the adminship process, please consider joining. The Uninvited Co., Inc. 16:31, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

I think that excluding users that do not think change is needed is a mistake. As long as users are willing to stay on topic, all users should be encouraged to participate. FloNight 16:37, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

As with other WikiProjects, everyone is welcome to edit. However, many otherwise promising efforts to make changes at RFA have been shouted down before the proposals had matured; I'm trying to avoid that. I think that many people who have historically been critical of any attempt to change RFA might be better convinced by a more fully thought-out proposal with due consideration both to common objections and to transitional effects. The Uninvited Co., Inc. 17:13, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps, but excluding those people who tend to think RfA does not need improvement will hamstring your development process by muting those voices best able to characterize opposition to suggested changes. Furthermore, by excluding those people from the discussion, when you do bring a suggestion back here it will suffer a great deal under massive rejective scrutiny, even if responses to common objections are well thought out beforehand. I recommend you invite everyone who wants to be involved to help hammer out a way forward. --Durin 17:33, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
And right off the bat, I see problems with the project that fail to address significant issues raised in the objections to WP:DFA. There's a presumption without any evidence gathering that RfA currently fails at (1) selecting the best people for the adminship role and (2) ensuring the enculturation of new admins. I submit that the former assertion is so far without basis (and would be disagreed with by a number of people here) and the latter assertion is not the role of WP:RFA, never has been, and is ill-suited to being such. If you want that, start Misplaced Pages:Newbie admin training school. One of the biggest objections I raised with DFA was no serious attempt at identifying what is wrong with RfA before attempting to find a way forward. This new project fails in the same way. Though, I do like the goal of identifying the goals of RfA. --Durin 17:42, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

This should be a proposed policy changed, not a WikiProject. Misplaced Pages:WikiProjects says WikiProjects are for articles. There's a good reason for this--we should have centralized discussion on Admin policy, not a standing committee for arguing about it. -- SCZenz 17:39, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

SCZenz has a cogent point. Wiki projects are generally for content, although there are probably many examples to the contrary. Themindset 18:55, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Per FloNight this is a very bad idea. By all means have a discussion about what you think needs to be changed or improved, but to suggest that only those of a similar mindset are open to membership of this proposed project is promoting the worst kind of cabalism, and is very anti-wiki. I also agree that the scope of a WikiProject should be restricted to article space, and not venture into policy or procedural areas for these very reasons. --Cactus.man ✍ 19:12, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps it would be better to bring Esperanza's Admin coaching into a proper wikiproject--since it has...um...healthier aims than something focusing on just the Adminship request, and not the adminship itself :). The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 22:43, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Again, there's several issues here: a) There's never enough volunteers as it is an extremely appealing idea ("hey, someone will help me become an admin!!!"); b) How to weed out obviously unacceptable candidates; c) How to make sure the coaching/mentorship does not become focused on the adminship process or unduly glorifies adminship; d) Whether the coach/mentor should be "blamed" for something the candidate did or didn't do, and e) whether that is acceptable or not. Tito xd 06:55, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

Good luck with WikiProject on Adminship. :) I am a bit skeptical of it, but hope some good ideas come out (ideas which will of course need to be discussed with the comunity at large on this talk page before being implemented). Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 01:01, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

As with all the recurring debate on RFA the comments above don't fill me with much confidence that it'll actually come up with something useful. In order to identify a robust and defensible selection mechanism (RFA currently being neither) then there needs to be a clear, pithy, statement of what Administrators are actually for. That is lacking at present and therefore the guidance is open to interpretation by the candidate and the voters. Until that requirement is nailed down then any discussion of the process is moot. Notwithstanding that if the project actually comes up with a Statement of Need to propose to the wider community then that is a useful step, and should mitigate for the endless tedium of 'RFA is broked' discussion. RFA being broked is merely a symptom of the more fundamental issue.ALR 08:15, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

How are the lines on RfA page supposed to be?

After adding my RfA by copy/pasting the line in the instructions ({RFA/name etc} line line line line), it seemed that that horizontal line was in the wrong place, below mine where there already was one, and causing a neutral vote for Mr. ---- for some reason. So I moved it above. But now another RfA is up and again there is no line above the top one. Is there supposed to be? Mine never seemed to show up on the bot til I put one there, and this one isn't now either (maybe a coincidence), but the way the instructions do it, it would seem there wouldn't be one. -Goldom ‽‽‽ ⁂ 21:36, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

I added a line above the comments, where it is unlikely any new nominee will have the urge to remove it. Hopefully, that doesn't interfere with any of the RfA counters. -- tariqabjotu (joturner) 21:47, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

Requirements for RfA

I know this has been discussed 1000 times before, but I want to know right now when the new requirements that a user has to have been here for 6+ months and have accured 2000 edits was put into effect?

It took me over 3 years to achieve 6000 edits, did that make me a bad admin? — Ilyan e p (Talk) 16:55, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Just before someone discovered how to enforce them. It's a full time job to keep up with the new rules. Edit: average failed nom has over 3,000 edits. Stephen B Streater 17:10, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Not everyone requires that. It is usually a good amount of time and enough edits to judge. Other than your lengthly signature, there should be no complains about you :) -- ReyBrujo 17:14, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Looking at the average edit counts of failed noms is not a good way of measuring changes in standards. If you remove failed self noms from that equation, it comes out to an average edit count of 4,742 edits per failed RfA nominee since 1 January 2006. I think a better way of measuring this is where the failure rate stablizes, i.e. the point past which the number of edits does not seem to influence the outcome of an RfA. This point seems to be around 2,000 edits (see above chart). --Durin 17:36, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

I too am disheartened at the standards being put into place at RfA. I see people with over 10,000 edits being opposed because they don't have enough talk page eidts. When I ran for adminship, I too was criticized for not having enough talk page edits. When I pointed out the the vast majority (60 - 70%) of the articles I worked on had talk pages with five of fewer comments on them, and that no less than one-third of the articles on my watchlist has no talk page at all, people suggested I put more active pages on my watchlist so that I can take place in debate! I worked as a German translator prior to my adminship. Most of the articles on my watchlist were articles I had written from scratch, and also were articles where I was the sole major contributor. People were literally telling me to put pages on my watchlist that I wasn't interested in so I could argue with people on those articles' talk pages! It was one of the most ridiculous things I have ever encountered in my time at Misplaced Pages. RyanG e rbil10(The people rejoice!) 18:10, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

RfA is becoming the laughingstock of the Misplaced Pages community. My friends mock some of the opposes and now think their edits will be reverted because they do "not having enough portal talk edits" (taken out of context, but that's what people do). Something needs to be done; otherwise, Misplaced Pages is going implode because of a massive backlog of upkeep work. What we're doing here on RfA is similar to Wal-Mart hiring only people with X number of dollars in the bank. I propose another ammendment to WP:NOT — Misplaced Pages is not a place to put people on "statistical trials". — Deckill e r 18:16, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree with Ryan's statements above. And now it appears we will have a failed RfA for a user with 13,000 edits, who has a featured article, who works on many WikiProjects, who uses vandal-wacking tools already, and who has no civility issues within the last eight months... because of "not enough talk page edits". There is such a thing as standards, and then there's such a thing as going overboard with requirements. :( --Firsfron of Ronchester 18:25, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Who are you referring to as the failed candidate? JoshuaZ 18:28, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Agentsoo's, whose current RfA hovers at 69%. Although the RfA still has several days left, the first 48 hours are usually pretty indicative of how an RfA will turn out.--Firsfron of Ronchester 18:36, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Ok, I was aware of how that RfA was going but was confused because it hadn't been closed yet. I agree that the way it is going is a bit odd (although one of the opposes is Masssiveego and that hardly counts). JoshuaZ 18:38, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

I can only vote my opinion. I fully encourage Wikipedians to excerise their option to vote. Any vote I place will absolutely count, and any new voters should know their votes will also equally count. --Masssiveego 05:06, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

In response to the above (and its accompannying editing summary of "response to belittling personal attack") I believe you have misinterpted what I said. My point was that since you generally vote oppose, your vote could plausibly be removed if one was trying to treat the first few days of an RfA as a sample of how things will proceed. This particularly makes sense when (as the case was when I had written the above comment) only a small number of people had voted in the RfA. JoshuaZ 05:10, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Agentsoo's is the second-most-recent RfA to be added, and with only 17 voters so far, it's a little premature to be casting doom and gloom on it (also, he's now up to 76% as of this writing ;) -- nae'blis 20:21, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Jumping in, perhaps it would be a good idea to come up with something like what's used for featured articles whereby we have a set of community standards (like Misplaced Pages:What is a featured article?) and that any objection should seek to relate to one of those standards. That might help eliminate some of the oppose votes that don't really relate to Misplaced Pages:What is good administrator?, like some of the things mentioned above. It also wouldn't mean automatic promotions once someone reaches a certain edit count, contribution time, etc. Just a thought. -- tariqabjotu (joturner) 18:45, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Interesting thought, and I like it! Problem though is that what makes a good administrator is very subjective. If we can get around that... --Durin 19:17, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

No more subjective than what makes a good FA. FAC is not much less contentious than RFA though, and there are plenty of bad faith/useless objections at FAC from people that don't understand the FAC criteria. But who knows, maybe having a community criteria would be a good thing. It may help make bad faith votes harder to make and or easier to see/ignore. In FAC Raul654 can just ignore the bad faith opposes or those that make it clear they don't know the criteria. It's worth a shot. - Taxman 20:15, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

I don't think Misplaced Pages is about to implode because RfA is not promoting enough people to handle backlogs. If we look at Category:Administrative backlog, the list isn't all that long. Also keep in mind that two different studies have shown that approximately 50% of the administrator work is done by the top 20 most active administrators. Even if we doubled our promotion rates, having a better chance of finding a "top 20" administrator is not necessarily a definite conclusion. --Durin 18:47, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
- True, I was purposely going a little overboard. I still think RfA is becoming ridiculous to a degree (and my friends have laughed about it :) ). I agree with Tari's idea, except for the fact that some questionable users may still get promoted using that system. — Deckill e r 18:50, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

I don't doubt that there are votes that are absurd. I know there are. I do doubt that such votes are predominant or indicative in any respect of the general nature of RfA. --Durin 19:17, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

I think they are though. The general nature of RfA is that people can oppose for whatever reason they want to even if it doesn't help the project. There are large numbers of uninformed votes that make no attempt to truly identify if the candidate would make a good admin. - Taxman 20:15, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Sure. But, I don't think we can conclude a particular case of vote as being indicative. The core problem here is that we passed a scalability threshold of the system a LONG time ago. People don't "know" each other on RfA anymore for the most part. The project is huge now, and virtually ever candidate that comes up is going to be one that we don't know from first hand experience. To review each candidate in detail, to come up with an informed vote....that's very hard. I conduct reviews of candidates against a set of standards I have for people whom I intend to nominate. It takes hours to complete the review. It's only after such an extensive review that I feel comfortable nominating someone. To be honest, I don't feel 100% confident in people that I haven't nominated, but voted support because I can't see spending hours doing a thorough review to come up with an informed vote. It's very hard. Very few people (if any?) are conducting thorough reviews of people prior to voting. Nominating, there's a few of us that do in-depth reviews. But voting? Probably less than 1%. --Durin 20:28, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Hours long completely thorough review is not needed every time, but a complete lack of an effort to review a candidate at all beyond, "no portal talk edits" is a problem, and it seems to be a systematic one. I don't think it has anything to do with the RfA process other than the fact that we prominently paste in edit count summaries that are completely irrelevant to determining if an editor would make a good admin. - Taxman 20:38, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

(Excuse me for barging in) I completely agree and I'm glad people like Taxman feel this way too. I have been rudely shocked by some of the most useless and irrelevant objections. "Too few edits given the time he/she has spent here"; "not enough talk page edits"; "speaks too few languages"; "hasn't made any edits in the last 5 minutes" - too name a few. And what's worse, some of these are from admins. Can we please de-admin such people? :-) - Cribananda 20:47, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Over at Wiktionary (disclaimer: which has a small community where everyone knows each other), it is more or less up to the Bureaucrats to recognize absurd "no portal talk page edits" oppose votes, and to ignore them. I understand that it may not be that obvious here on Pedia, so adopting community-wide standards may be a better idea. But then, doesn't it become very obvious when someone will fail or will succeed? Are there any votes still needed then? I have never voted on RFAs for people that I'd never heard about, but that's an equally bad stance if everyone were to adopt that. — Wildrick 21:06, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

I believe any vote from Wikipedian that qualifies to vote is counted regardless of the reason. --Masssiveego 06:56, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

The one that shocked me, on my RfA, was the person who opposed due to not having 7/24th in WP space. Although the opinion was stuck out, that level of scrutiny makes no sense to me. Portal and help space edit requirements also make no sense whatsoever.--Firsfron of Ronchester 21:12, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

This is one way to look at controversial RFA that are not passing.

Controversial RFAs can be broken down into at least three types. Some RFA's do not offer a view of nom that reassures people unfamiliar with them that the nom is trustworthy and capable. These should be the easiest to fix. A few tweaks to either the nom record or RFA can make a stronger impression. Other times the RFA may provide a good view of the nom, but the particular people viewing the RFA have rigid standards that sink the nom. Still other RFA's have noms that some reasonable people think are prepared to be admins and other reasonable people disagree. The situation is worse when all three problems co-exist. --FloNight 22:31, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, there are silly votes on RfA sometimes. But that's why there is a 75% threshold, you can't fail unless at least a quarter of voting people believe you are unfit to be an administrator. I would like to see an example where a candidate failed primarily because of frivolous votes. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 23:49, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

My Rfa was going down before Taxman came in and called my detractors "unreasonable". RyanG e rbil10(The people rejoice!) 23:59, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

And for that matter, I consider this to be pretty frivolous. RyanG e rbil10(The people rejoice!) 00:02, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

"We have enough admins" ... and yet there's practically fights breaking out between the different wikipedia "departments" over each single qualified admin (we basically just see one or two pop up every month). See also below. Kim Bruning 04:38, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Either the situation has gotten more dire over the past few months while i've been inactive or there are more alarmists. I think a combination of both. Anyways, g'day and I'll try to do a couple more promotions in the future — Ilyan e p (Talk) 04:51, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Let me explain it this way. The shield from lawsuits for Misplaced Pages is the Admin who must select which information must be censored from the public. Too much censorship, and somebody who is doing a research paper will not get the information they need. Too little and we invite legal problems. I obviously do not want a vandal slipping through and misusing admin options to severely damage Misplaced Pages, or it's reputation. Given the long and difficult process of removing Admin, the only quality control toward preventing a system wide shut down by a renegade admin is to screen them before they can do damage. Remember people are donating their money, time and their effort. I rather not see such gifts go to waste because a few bad admin. It only takes a few rotten apples to spoil the barrel. Quoting one actor. "...choose wisely..." --Masssiveego 05:39, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Reminds me of another line, "He chose....poorly". Too many RfA voters are looking for the holy grail. --Durin 12:57, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
Yes, and it's ridiculous because if an admin did do something to "severely damage Misplaced Pages" it could be no worse than many trolls do, and that admin would almost immediately have their admin tools removed via WP:OFFICE.--MONGO 13:19, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Agentsoo now stands at (31/5/2). See discussion at Misplaced Pages talk:Requests for adminship/Agentsoo2 :) Dlohcierekim 02:15, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Edit count tables - hide/show

Is there any reason we couldn't wrap the edit count tables in Hide/Show boxes, such as demonstrated at: User:Kylu. I feel like the edit counts add clutter and forcing everyone to look at them as they scroll past is not really the attitude we want to promote. Dragons flight 00:23, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

The problem with that is that show/hide labels only work with the Monobook skin, with the other skins you don't see the box and therefore cannot see the contents. —Mets501 (talk) 02:01, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

It's still better than nothing. Especially considering most people use Monobook.--W.marsh 02:40, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

That sounds like a good idea to me. To ensure graceful fallback, we'd need to set the default CSS state of the div to ~~display:none~~ display:block, so it'll incur a brief change in the perceived length of the page at every page load for Javascript browsers, but that seems like a small loss for something that could streamline the page. (Perhaps this fallback hack will fix the problem for non-monobook users?) - Tangot a ngo 02:08, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, I made a typo there. The template has to be set to display by default for browser compatibility. But this has nothing to do with Tyrenius' comment (different matter). - Tangot a ngo 10:02, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

I think "forcing everyone to look at them" is exactly what we want. The record of an editor's contributions in this way is one of the fundamentals of judging their suitability (note "one" of). Tyrenius 08:28, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

However, you should look at the contributions, not at edit count stats. Hiding the stats and reminding people to look at the actual edits is a good idea. Kusma (討論) 08:36, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

The reports are interesting, though the length of them does possibly give undue weight to the quantity of edits. We could have a summary at the top (eg total; article/talk; WP/talk; edit summaries major/minor) on four lines with the full amount underneath. Stephen B Streater 08:52, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Admins coming off this page are useless, promote different admins.

I knew you'd look at such a provocative title! ;-) Actually, it's not quite true, the vandalbuster and volume editor admins coming off this page *ARE* useful, and you're doing a great job! It's just that we are running very very very short on admins in all the other categories of admins we can have. (personally I'm running really short on mediators, but I know other people are complaining too)

A couple of people who really need that admin flag are folks like:

Featured article writers
(potential) mediators
Policy experts

Are all not getting the admin flag.

The properties of these people are:

Low numbers of high quality edits in the relevant parts of wikipedia.
Reluctance to become an admin.
the ability to stand their ground when they have to.

These criteria are selected *AGAINST* by the current rfa process.

RFA selects for high number edits per-se. Many people currently don't even look at quality of edits, and looking at quality is strongly discouraged due to the high number of edits required by edit-count criteria in the first place. Please look at things like featured articles most carefully.
RFA selects against people who don't want to be an admin. if you say "I don't wanna" , nowadays people on rfa will just say "ok"... while they should be going the extra mile to drag this person across the line, kicking and screaming if nescesary ;-)
RFA selects against people who stand their ground in a conflict, even when prudent. This is because it's like "ooooohhh.... there WAS a conflict...Oppose". You can't be a good admin if you deal with conflict by simply running away all the time. You have to stand up for yourself and wikipedia, but do so in a calm, polite, friendly and professional way. If you demonstrate that, Great!

Each group needs the admin flag for different reasons:

Featured article writers need the flag to help maintain featured article pages themselves. This is very very important, as the goal of wikipedia is ultimately to create as many featured articles as possible. They will hopefully not need to use their flag often, but when they need it they *really* need it.
Mediators need to flag mostly to protect pages and read deletion histories. Also: "sit down, shut up, and LISTEN to each other, or I'm banning BOTH your asses for a week" , can be effective in a pinch ;-)
Policy experts need the admin tools to be able to continue to work on and build their understanding and experience with policy. Some policy only works for admins, and it gets rather hard to test at times, if you can't use it, as you might imagine ;-)

So could everyone look at their criteria and see if you're not selecting against these categories of people? Please ask your friends to look too! Kim Bruning 04:21, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

The process is also failing to identify people who understand copyright issues.--Peta 04:23, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Maybe an admin test is in order? —this is messedrocker (talk) 04:30, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

I honestly hope we have not reached that point. -- tariqabjotu (joturner) 04:33, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

I personally don't think featured article writers need to be admins unless they need to be admins. Adminship is the set of tools any given article writer doesn't need. Admins do more of the cleaning so the content creators can create. It's a burden to try to do both. Or something. --Keitei (talk) 04:39, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

I totally disagree. Those tools are helpful for article writers. Also though, it doesn't help that when we get excellent FA admins that we run them off by letting editors insinuate they are neo-nazis when they just try to improve articles. pschemp | talk 04:41, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Or worse, when they come in to an ongoing disagreement, edit war, or even worse, breeching experiment, and try to do the job we asked them to do by restoring order and then get labed with a POV label and their block is dragged through (tens of) thousands of words of analysis. ++Lar: t/c 07:04, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Here's a statement that proves true for administrators, regardless of which project: once they get administrator status, they focus much more on things like the Misplaced Pages namespace. —this is messedrocker (talk) 04:45, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm not useless (I'm not saying anyone is saying that I am), but I agree we do need more varied admins. One of the things I laid out in my candidacy was that I wanted to work behind the scenes. I didn't want to go for the (relatively) glorious job of being a troll fighter and a vandal blocker. I earned several support votes for this position, but also several opposes ("I don't see why he needs the tools...") Troll fighting and vandal blocking are both admirable, but what we need to do is promote people who will work. Everyone likes to block trolls, but who is going to close TfD, RfD, SfD, etc.? All are less glorious than AfD and many have admin backlog. We need to promote the type of people who work quietly, behind the scenes. We need more people who will recognize that the symbol of the admin is the mop, not the broadsword (and yes, I got an oppose vote for having that comparison in my RFA candidacy text.) RyanG e rbil10(The people rejoice!) 04:43, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

That's fine, we need those too. I just really really REALLY need people who can learn to be mediators, policy makers, and general organiser types coming out of RFA too, and I've seen them being opposed several times now. Kim Bruning 05:24, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

I think your ladder is on the wrong wall. We need the minimum overhead possible to produce the final product: an encyclopedia. Diverting resources to the social problems probably gets us farther from that, not closer. And by the way, it's generally better to assume whatever roles you believe are important and do the work until people recognize you as a leader, rather than continually reminding us that you believe you are one. - Taxman 15:16, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

I really didn't deserve that. :-( Stupid social issues and stupid overcomplex rules are draining an overlarge part of wikipedias resources, and more every day. I've been doing so much of the work on solving these issues all along, especially since many of my old friends have moved on to other things. I can't do it on my own, the wiki is too big. Can you help me? Can you find people who will help me? Kim Bruning 15:25, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

I wish they'd actually go through with their CSD promises. They forget about CAT:NR, Category:Images with no copyright tag, CAT:NS, CAT:NL, and CAT:ORFU. Speedies, but with time delays to fix the issues. Few admins ever touch them, and they build up until some poor sap has to spend their entire day deleting or cleaning tags off of hundreds upon hundreds of images off of the CATs. I'm not quite sure who those admins are(and if you're reading this, good job), but this is just another backlog that sits and languishes. Kevin_b_er 05:57, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

As an aside, I have been working on a new tracking bot to help identify backlogs like this and call more attention to them. See User:Dragons flight/Category tracker and User:Dragons flight/Category tracker/Summary. Dragons flight 07:26, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Excellent! It's a great thing to have on my watchlist to remind me of which categories need work. Kusma (討論) 07:41, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

As long as you stop calling for featured article writers/wikipedia ambassadors to edit fully protected pages like MediaWiki:Common.css and {{cite web}}, I'm fine with sysopping the FA writers. Adminship should be no big deal. The only question should be: "Do we trust this person not to abuse the tools?". Anything else is ridiculous admin-cult (as we have it at the moment). Maybe an inverse-blocking feature could also be helpful: admin A gives user U the right to edit fully protected page P — an "ambassador" delegates his trust to a specialist maintenance staff member for a specific job and surveys how that job is done. It's like giving the key of your appartment to the plumber. If the plumber does a bad job (site looks like shit after user U edited MediaWiki:Common.css and U has no striking explanation for the botch) then you'll never call this plumber again (A disables U from editing protected page P). --Ligulem 08:06, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

A couple of people who really need that admin flag are folks like:

Featured article writers
mediators
Policy experts

These are all important jobs, but they can be done without the admin flag. Using 'admin' as a marker for 'respected knowledgable person' isn't really appropriate. The later is a precondition for the former, but not (yet) vice-versa. I'd like to keep it that way for a bit longer yet. Regards, Ben Aveling 08:15, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

There's another job which we can't have too many Admins for: educating new users. The more education that goes on, the smoother everything runs later. Stephen B Streater 09:00, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

:-) Kim Bruning

These jobs used to be doable without the admin flag, as you'd just call on a clueful admin to help out. Nowadays it can take over an hour to find said clueful admin. So no dice. We need admins on hand to make sure people do not disrupt these activities. Also, I believe I already pointed out which admin abilities are important to each group? Even if I hadn't, it is so that typically more and better tools are always a good thing.Kim Bruning 15:25, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

To Kim's original point: If the regulars of the FA, mediation and policy areas are not participating in the voting at RfA, you should encourage them to come over here regularly and tell them why they are needed here. As long as it is not linked to a particular candidacy, I don't consider that vote stacking. The ultimate purpose of RfA is to produce good admins for the benefit of all of Misplaced Pages. The regular voters at RfA are not representative of the whole community, but don't blame them, at least they are participating in the process. Instead bring over here the people that are not participating and they will bring with them their perception of what types of admins we need to serve the areas of the project they participate in. NoSeptember 09:15, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

I was going to say it, but NoSeptember beat me to it. This appeal to RFAers is good and all, but getting a wider range of the Wiki community to participate in RFA and the shaping of its standards should be the goal - rather than trying to change the standards of those already participating. Themindset 19:05, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Just a note to say that I have only recently started to vote in RfAs, and I found this discussion extremely enlightening; it's given me quite a bit to think about. My own standards do include edit counts, because I am judging by my own familiarity with policies -- at 1300 edits or so I feel there are plenty of policies I haven't even read yet, much less understand. Hence I feel that someone with 1500 or 1800 edits is also likely to have gaps. But what I found most useful in this discussion is the list of areas where more admins are needed. I'll be thinking about revising my standards and taking a more careful look at edit histories. Thanks. Mike Christie 19:31, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree with NoSeptember. The admins are there to facilitate the environment for productive writing of articles, creating diagrams, audio recordings etc. Unfortunately I see that there aren't enough article writers who actually want to have a say in who becomes an administrator, because this is what the administrators are there for. As for the policy, edit count doesn't really tell you whethere the person is well versed in how to do things unless they demonstrate it by doing it, or by reading the policy. Some guys with 15000 edits don't know the 3RR policy because they simply edit quietly in a corner without ever edit-warring. Also, because OrphanBot does most of the image tagging, most people don't learn about how all the image categories like unsourced, unknown copyright, unused fair use, etc, work, because the bot processes them, but only a few read the CSD for images and participate in deleteing them. I'd guess it would be maybe 10 admins doing 90% of the image deletions or something like that, a greater imbalance than the usual admins tasks and the pictures are oftern backlogged 5-6 days. as far as the coaching at WP:ESP, I don't think anybody does image policy tutorials, and that really needs to change, because what we need is people to delete images and also check them, as there are surely many pictures out there with bogus {{GFDL-self}} and fairuse tags. I'd simply say there are not enough people training themselves with the skills required to be an admin; not enough people do NP patrol or cateogry cleaning and doing notability analysis, and likely there are gigabytes of cruft festering around the place, etc. I get the impression that there are a lot of people simply piling on at AfDs to get name-recognition for RfAs "per nom", rather than researching on dubious articles and AfDing them or making comments which add to the debate knowledge. Blnguyen | rant-line 00:45, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Mike Christie, joining the discussions on this page counts double for Misplaced Pages talk page edits. ; - ) --FloNight 00:12, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

LOL Tyrenius 09:38, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Strange situation on rmrfstar rfa

Several people have stated (paraphrased):

Oppose Great user, made 2 FAs, and I'm sure this user will never abuse the admin tools, but I'm not letting him have them anyway. -- john doe.

There's also several neutrals in the same vein.

Kelly Martin has been marking some of those edits, I think.

Poor bureaucrat who gets to close that particular case!

See also my rant above. I suppose rmrfstar is a fair example of that situation. I took the time to really rake him over the coals in person while at wikimania, and he did pretty well. And then he went to a birds of the feather talk, and showed enormous insight in his questions and comments there.

You can imagine I was pretty surprised when I came home(-ish) today, connected to the internet, and discovered he was doing badly at RFA! ^^;;

Why is his RFA doing so differently from my perception?

Did I miss something in my observations? If so, what did I miss, do you think?

Kim Bruning 07:26, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

I think it's the RfA which misses something, namely the essential character of the candidate. Too preoccupied with exam questions and statistics.Tyrenius
Part of the problem is that people who are focused not on the statistics but on the character of the person and whether he will misuse the tools etc. have a hard time coming to the same conclusion about every candidate of this sort. So those who have interacted with the candidate (at Wiki or in this case in person) perceive things that someone who is merely digging into the person's contributions may miss. So there are not enough support votes because not enough of us have that personal involvement with the candidate. Perhaps we should rely on the judgement of voters we respect, so when Kim says "I know this guy and I trust him", we should give that a good deal of weight even if we didn't perceive that when we dug through the contributions. NoSeptember 10:40, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

God, I wish Kelly hadn't done that. I firmly believe rmrfstar should have the tools, and voiced my opinion. But copying and pasting notices for the closing 'crat to ignore votes like that just doesn't seem right, and I bet several (or many) people will be upset, with good reason. This, coming on the heels of the user lists thing, I think was a bad idea. :( --Firsfron of Ronchester 08:26, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

It's Kim Bruning's fault for starting it previously. However, I'm now coming round to thinking it's not such a bad thing. It makes it a bit more rowdy, but it does mean opposers can't be complacent. Tyrenius 09:24, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

:-) Kim Bruning 09:34, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Well, opposers can do what they often do: don't respond on the RfA page. In which case, it's not really opening up further dialogue, especially when this RfA is so far along. Had there been some grandstanding like this when the RfA was first opened, it might have convinced some people to change their opinions. But this far along, all it's doing is telling the closing 'crat to ignore many !votes, which I don't believe will happen. I feel it's just going to open yet another can of worms. Pity, too, because he should have been promoted, IMO.--Firsfron of Ronchester 09:41, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

My biggest concern about this RfA is the sudden liberal use of the extension of the discussion period beyond 7 days. That's fine on a close RfA, but this one was not even close to being close. Even with all the extra votes added, it remains far from being close precisely because it had so far to go. Having a failed RfA is not the end of the world, you can come back in a month or two and pass. We have a candidate who made some mistakes on this RfA that cost him, doing a bad job with the questions right off the bat, having an RfA when he was busy, etc. Live and learn, this is a good candidate, but the mistakes were his own. Next time, he should get a nominator who will deliver a rousing nomination statement, he should work out well thought out answers before the RfA gets submitted. This is all quite doable, just not on the current RfA. But extending an RfA that would require either 33 more support votes or the retraction of 11 oppose votes just to reach the 75% level (which is where it stood at the scheduled close) is not the right thing to do IMO. We should not start creating special rules for specially deserving candidates, especially when he should be able to sail through next time if he gets it done properly. We are setting a precedent where any candidate with as low as 60% approval can request extension, and that is a big ongoing mess just waiting to happen. NoSeptember 10:17, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Peoples' voting criteria worry me

So, I just made my opinion known at The Thadman's RfA, but I wanted to expand upon it a little here. In cases such as these, I'm pretty worried by the large number of users that mark their opinion as (something like)...

Oppose, not enough article contributions. We're building an encyclopedia, here.

... without even bothering to check whether article contributions would be at all relevant to their intended administrator activities. In the case of User:The Thadman, I'm disappointed that so many people have opposed his RfA on the basis of his low article contributions, despite his extensive experience (and proposed future involvement) in mediation. I guess this is an extension of my dislike for some peoples' FA requirements, applied to users' contributions to writing articles.

Am I alone in thinking that a user's ability to write fluent prose is totally disconnected from their ability to maintain the encyclopedia that hosts it? This is really quite frustrating, at times. RandyWang (/_{fix me up}) 11:07, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

They don't have to be able to write great prose, but many of us do believe that in order to understand the various policies that affect the most important thing we do here, someone needs significant experience in actually working on what we are here to do: write an encyclopedia. Prose mistakes are not a problem, but someone that has no experience writing articles also doesn't know how to negotiate sources, break deadlocks and move an article forward. We are here to write an encyclopedia, not to mediate. - Taxman 15:19, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Then again, if all we were here to do was write an encyclopedia, we wouldn't need admin rights. --Kbdank71 15:33, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Except that ignores the fact that there are people whose efforts are not helping to build an encyclopedia. Many of us believe article writing skills and experience are important to knowing how best to do that, and build the encyclopedia. - Taxman 16:20, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Does this really make sense? How do you react to an individual with enormous experience voting in AfDs, noting 3RR violations and the like - but has a tiny number of article space edits? A user's suitability for adminship isn't utterly dependent on their ability to write articles: it's dependent on their experience in activities specific to adminship tasks. Why else do we consistently vote against users whose sole need for admin powers are "wikification" or the like? RandyWang (/_{fix me up}) 12:57, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Maybe you're assuming I think it's the most important or the only thing. I don't, but it is an important part. A person not participating in creating articles is missing what we do here. If they have exceptional other characteristics I will support them and so will many other people. It happens quite often that people get promoted without much article contributions, but they have to have something else that more than compensates for that. Also note I don't look at number of article edits. If someone has 100 article edits but they are very high quality, then that covers that fully for me. Others unfortunately focus on edit count and that's part of the problem. - Taxman 14:48, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Hmmm, I'm not sure I understand how The Thadman's mediation efforts require admin powers like block, unblock, delete and undelete. It seems to me that if comes to blocking users and protecting articles that mediation has failed. His answer to question 1 did no mention those needs. And I'm not sure how his mediation work prepares him for the top admin needs like *fD-DRV, vandalism fighting, and copyright issues. Cheers. :) Dlohcierekim 16:43, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

I think that experience in article creation should be paramount when considering a potential admin. Would you hire an umpire who had no experience with baseball? Or a traffic cop with no experience with driving? The most common RFA standard is 1000 article edits (which happens to be my standard as well) which is in fact not that difficult to achieve. With even just 5 article edits a day one would achieve that in just over 6 months... to me this is a rather low bar, one that simply ensures that the potential admin has the basic amount of experience in the primary activity on Misplaced Pages. Themindset 18:37, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

""I agree. Article creation/improvement is most important. :) Dlohcierekim 20:52, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

I suppose I'm in the minority here. I had almost no experience in the primary activity on Misplaced Pages when I became an admin, nor do I today. My day-to-day activities have zero to do with article creation/improvement. So I understand where Randy is coming from, and that's why I don't have a RFA standard that is based on editcount. On the other hand, I definitely understand the need for experience, and with everyone else editcounting as a standard, it's not that hard to hit. --Kbdank71 21:10, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

The main issue I see with the logic that people only base their criteria off of the main namespace is that there are many _many_ other areas needing administrator attention - it does not require sysop tools to make a featured article, either. By restricting administrators to only those who focus on the main article namespace, then we'd have none who focus on backlogs and the Misplaced Pages namespace. The notion that it's an automatic oppose unless a cadidate has a certain amount of contributions is simply editcountitis. What if a user actually heavily contributed to policy in the wikipedia namespace instead of creating articles? Now, I'm not saying making a featured article is a bad thing. That of course is very helpful and does show that the user is likely familiar with key policy such as verifiability. However, it is not the only way to determine whether a user is worthy of being an administrator. If anything, sysops deal a lot more with deleting articles than with creating them. Sysops are the framework that keeps the encyclopedia together behind the scenes, blocking users harmful to the encyclopedia, protecting pages from edit wars, closing deletion discussions and managing backlogs. The single most important factor in a candidate for adminship is 'Can they be trusted with the tools?'. I'm very curious to go deeper into the reasoning as to why people have such strict criteria involving main article contributions and featured articles. Is it the fear that users will make mistakes early on due to a lack of experience? Well, administrators are meant to make mistakes. They're supposed to - I would be surprised if an administrator made no mistakes. And, just like anyone else, they're meant to learn from them. Cowman109 21:25, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Well, I would have to say I completely agree with your last point... And yet I feel it actually supports a certain degree of edit counting. Yes, the new admin will make mistakes, but wouldn't it be better to make sure less new admins make less mistakes? And if that can be done by setting a minimum amount of participation in the encyclopedia, isn't that a positive thing? Like I've stated earlier, these edit count minimums that most of us set are not difficult to achieve - and if someone finds that hitting those numbers is an unnecessary burden, they are probably not going to contribute very much as an admin anyways. I don't believe in 1FA, but I respect those who do... and who knows? Maybe there is more than one user who was so intent on becoming an admin that he/she made sure to achieve 1FA before nominating themselves. If that's the case, then the 1FA criteria has helped the encyclopedia. And surely, the experience of 1FA was invaluable to the user themselves. So I believe there is room for understanding, if not agreement, with the variety of different RFA standards set by different users. Themindset 22:17, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

I think that some problems stem from the fact that people usually leave no room outside of 1FA for supporting an adminship candidate. There _are_ other ways to determine whether people are ready. We have plenty of admins who have never and probably have no intention of ever writing featured articles who do plenty of work, so I feel that at least people should be aware that there are other ways of determining whether candidates are beneficial to the encyclopedia. Cowman109 22:28, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Ultimately, I do agree with you - that is why I don't use 1FA as a criteria. I simply respect the choice to use it. Themindset 22:50, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Themindset, to my mind the 1FA is actually harmful to the project. Can you imagine what would happen if every RFA nom-to-be was pimping articles at FAC. FA is not meant to be a stepping stone to sysop. FloNight 22:58, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

I definitely understand that feeling. Have you tried expressing your feelings directly on the talk pages of those who vote with the 1FA criteria? (Like I said, I agree and do not use 1FA as a criteria.) Themindset 23:26, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Comments from the peanut gallery

Hi! I've been following the discussions on this talk page for some time. As a frequent participator in RfA's, I enjoy seeing others opinions on the RfA process. As such, I'd like weigh in. In terms of the RfA process, I don't really think it's broken at all;

The RfA process is dictated by the community, and as such, if the community thought/thinks there is/was a better format, it would be discussed and consensus would be reached.
Candidates only become administrators once the community reaches a consensus that both the candidate and Misplaced Pages would do well to give the user administrator status.

I mention these two points to show that all of RfA is community-based, and I have faith that the community is making the right decisions.

Furthermore, in terms of how people "vote" and the reasons given, I believe that each and every participant should be treated with respect and be appreciated for volunteering their valuable time to participate in the process. I don't feel that standards should be called into question or chastised if they are reasonably explained. If a Wikipedian has RfA standards that include a minimum number of edits or length volunteered to the project, it should be respected. Also, specific standards such as those that include featured articles, AfD participation, vandal fighting, user/article talk participation, etc. should also be given due respect. While we might not agree with certain standards, we should recognize one's right to participate in the RfA process as one sees fit.

If a user participates in an RfA with anything but the best of faith, our community-elected 'crats will see the input for what it is and discount it when making the decision as to whether or not consensus has been reached.

Furthermore, as very few administrators have been desysopped, it's reasonable to say that almost all administrators have helped Misplaced Pages become a better place, and the right people are having successful RfA's.

Also, as adminship is really not that big a deal (and a double-edged sword, at that), I hate to see users become disappointed in themselves and/or the community and leave the project or become jaded on the process because of their or another's RfA. As such, perhaps the WikiProject (which I, personally, am still on the fence about as to it's appropriateness) could actively seek out recent unsuccessful candidates and help them address some of the advice left to them.

Anyways, I just wanted to throw in my two cents. I think the discussions here are productive and enjoyable to watch unfold, and I wanted to comment on what I've seen so far. Cheers hoopydink 18:08, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Hear, hear! It's like you read my mind :-) After reading the discussions on the rest of this page, I thought I was alone. Nice to know someone shares the same views as me! —Mets501 (talk) 23:40, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

It's funny, I missed this little statement, but I've been saying the same things on this very talk page... Hear, hear, indeed! Themindset 23:47, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

To a point I agree with you that the current system isn't terrible, but one thing that I think is really a shame is people failing because of their inadequacy in something they don't intend to deal with, like a vandal-fighter who could really use the tools failing because of lack of experience in other areas. I've written up my (ever-revolutionary) thoughts on this at Misplaced Pages:WikiProject on Adminship/a la carte. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 01:55, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Hoopydink is making a somewhat circular argument, which can be refuted by simply having one or more community members say they want to change RFA.

/me raises hand.

Hi, I'm me, and I'd like to change it ;-)

Here's the thing though. I think the current RFA format can be made to work, but it does need a lot more commitment than that people are currently showing. I'm thinking on changing that.

Kim Bruning 19:20, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Per my 10:40, 9 August 2006 edit of this page, we need an RfA cabal of like-minded editors ;). NoSeptember 19:24, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

I smell irony... We have been talking about changing RfA for what seems like forever, and yet RfA has remained largely the same for years. If you're looking for a process that's inefficient and broken, this is it – not the RfA process, but the process to change RfA. -- tariqabjotu (joturner) 19:40, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Kim Bruning, I would suggest going to the Village Pump or forming an official policy proposal to set the wheels in motion. If the community decides that RfA needs to be changed and your proposal is the way to go, then it will be so. I'm certainly open to changes, so if you do decide do follow through, I'll be very eager to see the developments. Cheers and good luck! hoopydink 00:33, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

RFA has remained largely the same for "years"? Hmm. Let's try two and a half years ago. Timwi's self-nom read,

Hi. I've been around since June, and I've been a well-behaved user all the way through. :) I don't make ground-breaking new contributions very often, but I make a lot of minor corrections and I revert vandalism. I would like to be able to help with this better, and thus, I am requesting adminship. Thank you for your attention.

and he passed unanimously. Fuzheado's vote on Pakaran's nomination read

Defer. Pakaran is a good contributor, but he's been here for just two months with 270 edits of article pages. Perhaps a *bit* more time only because we should be consistent. WP has rejected other folks for too little experience.

and Pakaran seemingly passed. In fact, there were three opposes in the entire timespan, for 38 admin candidates, as opposed to 317 supports, meaning the support ratio was 99.1%. Some of the nominees got in with fewer than 400 edits. Wik, opposing Pakaran, wryly noted: "Actually I'm helping you, as my opposition will move ten other people to support you!"

RFA hasn't changed for years? —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 05:25, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

There was no AWB or scripts back then. 400 edits meant something, especially when you had to press the warm up button to notify the servers that you were about to submit an edit. NoSeptember 08:57, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

I wasn't referring to the standards; those obviously have changed. I was referring to this process / format. This nomination from July 2004 looks quite similar to a July 2006 nomination. -- tariqabjotu (joturner) 12:59, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

A horrible realization!

Essjay has no category talk and no portal or portal talk editsHe needs to be immediately recalled! ! And yet he is not only a sysop but a crat with checkuser as well. What was anyone thinking? JoshuaZ 20:03, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

I know. And not enough user edits either. This is a disgrace. -- tariqabjotu (joturner) 20:05, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Funny how you point this out at a time when Essjay hasn't edited for 2 days ;). NoSeptember 20:08, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

And did anyone see his SIGNATURE?!?! The horror, the agony! -- Avi 20:09, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

And he only had less than 500 main namespace article edits at the time of his RfA! What insanity! Clearly RfA is broken if it let him through! Time to raise the standards. --Durin 21:09, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

This joke appears so many times in so many variations. Just to add fuel to the fire: Jimbo Wales probably wouldn't qualify for most people's RFA standards right now. Themindset 21:24, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Including yours. -- tariqabjotu (joturner) 21:50, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Yup. And I believe it's perfectly reasonable. Themindset 21:55, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

So you support the fact that you are blatantly hypocritical (no personal attack meant) in your standards towards adminship? Thygard - Talk - Contribs - Email ---- 00:29, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

It's not hypocrisy when you consider if that Jimbo was a normal editor, he'd probably have a lot more edits than he currently does, since he wouldn't have to worry about PR and fund-raising. Johnleemk | Talk 17:28, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

But have you ever seen the go it alone, self-important attitude that Jimbo has. Half the time it's like he has no respect for normal policy or process at all, and just does whatever he wants. Why would anyone think it was a good idea to give him admin powers? Dragons flight 22:29, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

I've chastized Jimbo once in the past. He makes mistakes like all of us in fact, it got me on the cabal's black list...Go me! :). At the core should be the question, does Jimbo have the best interests of the project at heart and will he not abuse the tools? Of course he does and of course he won't. --Durin 22:41, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

I don't know whether you're being sarcastic or not... but Jimbo-bashing is at best an unhealthy pastime on Misplaced Pages. From the one incident where I've had to deal with him I found him heavy handed, but also acting in good faith. If I had issue with his status/behaviour I would simply leave the project. Themindset 22:44, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm serious. I took issue with him and told him as much. Told him his behavior was akin to the CEO of a large company coming down to the loading docks and telling the guys in shipping how to do their jobs. --Durin 22:53, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Although I'm not sure where this is going, I would say that your example is not particularly convincing. If I was a CEO and saw the guys on the loading docks screwing around I would probably do something about it. Themindset 23:35, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes, everyone makes mistakes but I think every mistake Jimbo has made has been in a good faith effort, that being said he has to be careful, even more careful possibly, about throwing around his power because if done too often it'll either a) lose all meaning, or b) entirely skew the structure of Misplaced Pages to the point where he ends up being an active dictator of everything rather than a passive dictator who lets the community makes decisions semi-independently. Thygard - Talk - Contribs - Email ---- 00:32, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

de-indent The point is that a CEO showing up at a loading dock might take action, but being that his job isn't shipping, there's a pretty decent job he's going to screw it up. The problem is, when the CEO does something, nobody is going to disagree with him...even if he's wrong. Speaking more abstractly, all of us are human, and all of us make mistakes. There isn't any reason that Jimbo should be treated any better than the brand new editor here who has made one edit. --Durin 01:37, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
- One of the core principles of top management is that you have to choose the areas of involvment where you can have the greatest impact. CEOs who understand operations may well visit the dock if there are problems with shipping and receiving (a far more common scenario that we might like to believe). On the other hand, if the dock is working fine, or if operations is outside the CEO's area of expertise, such a visit would be unwise. I think that Jimbo chooses his battles well; as a rule, if he shows up and edits something, it's because there's a broader point that he's trying to make about the way things ought to be. The Uninvited Co., Inc. 03:39, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
- My comment above is only half-sarcastic. I agree with you that there are examples where, in my opinion, Jimbo has misused his power by asserting his authority over situations he didn't really understand (e.g. Radiant!). I know he means well (hence "misuse" not "abuse"), but he isn't involved in the day to day operations of this wiki and that lack of experience, when coupled with absolute power, can and does occasionally lead to serious mistakes. If you have had a good experience "chastizing" Jimbo, then I congratulate you. The last time I was upset by Jimbo's behavior, his response to my concerns pushed me close to leaving the project. Dragons flight 15:08, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
  - I don't think Jimbo has made any serious fuck ups yet (besides the somewhat depressing case of Radiant!), but I know he has made fuck ups. The problem I see with Jimbo is that he has good theories and principles that we should be applying, but when he butts in and tries to get us to apply them, he fails quite frequently. I'm not arguing against intervention from some higher and supreme authority, but in a company, the CEO (as UninvitedCompany says) ought to pick his battles. There's always some other executive he can have doing his dirty work, which is why I've previously advocated devolving some of Jimbo's authority to a group of people more familiar with the English Misplaced Pages, e.g. the arbcom. Anyhow, I'm quite over these pointless meta-issues now. I'm far more concerned with our article-writing process, which I think more often than not involves well-meaning snot-nosed newbies and equally well-meaning but overly defensive professional academics/people with such experience. (The breaking point for my first and only wikibreak ever was when I was basically told to fuck off when I advocated the removal of trivia sections from an article.) We don't have more than a handful of experienced WPians involved in the policy issues of content, and those who are involved can be overwhelmed by said snot-nosed newbies often enough. (Case in point: Worldtraveller's GA project careening off course into being a less-than-FA-but-still-a-star-for-my-homework process for articles which could become an FA; in the first place, GA was meant to fill a niche for articles which could never be FAs.) Now this would be somewhere worthy of Jimbo-scale involvement (aside from the issue of BLPs, which everyone has been devoting an exceedingly large amount of attention to). Johnleemk | Talk 17:28, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

People not discussing their positions when challenged.

I just checked back on rmrfstars rfa again, and to my dismay, many people didn't answer my questions to them. I don't have much to do with what kelly martin was trying by the way, although she did have some point. I was asking people for their opinions and standards and why they hold them, and how they reached their conclusions.

The failure to answer questions is not a good sign. If you're going to state an opinion, please show some commitment to it and defend your position when someone asks you about it. Holding your position against all logic does not seem very conducive to consensus to me (be it support or oppose). The point is to come to a consensus, and to do that, you do have to respond to other peoples concerns, of course.

Is that logical, or am I going crazy here? :-)

Kim Bruning 19:28, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

One hundred percent reasonable. I also don't like when people say that asking questions or responding to oppose voters makes one confrontational. If this is really not a !vote, that kind of thing ought to be acceptable, and to some degree, encouraged (as long as it doesn't become excessive). -- tariqabjotu (joturner) 19:31, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

There's nothing wrong with asking a question if you're actually seeking an answer. If an oppose comment says "Does not meet my standards", it's reasonable to ask him what his standards are. However, if someone is asking a question in order to discredit an opposer's opinion, that's inappropriate. For example, Kelly Martin's comments on Rmrfstar's RfA were quite obviously not meant to solicit an answer. Aren't I Obscure? 19:41, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

As you say, confrontation of a voter in a challenging matter is highly offensive. Sometimes these border on a personal attack when challenging the value of the oppose reason. Sometimes they read as though they are trying to change a vote. Voters are not obligated to change a vote just because someone else dislikes the reason. Oppose voters are not obligated to to justify their rationale. They do, however, need to make it clear.

One purpose of the RfA is too advise the candidate on how to improve. Clarifying or explaning, or even just stating a rationale is needed for the candidate to understand how to improve. I try to leave a link to my standards if I don't leave a more instructive note with the vote. They are on my userpage for all to read. They are also on the RfA standards page. I think the people who just write, "per my standards," expect people to dig them out of the Standards page. I don't know how long it was before I figured out where it is. It is not very easy to read or make sense of.

To make a long story short, seeking understanding is great. Seeking to brow beat a vote change, or unleashing one's anger because the RfA is going badly , is not. Hope that helps. :) Dlohcierekim 23:24, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Agreed, Kim. If you leave a sincere message in an effort to help improve consensus and the project and the person is not willing to respond to back their opinion, then they can't count on their opinion carrying quite the same weight in the consensus, assuming there is enough time left to respond to the inquiry. Now we do have to be very careful with that because browbeating and pestering a voter to change their opinion is not acceptable. I'm not saying you did that, but others efforts may end up closer to the unacceptable that others have pointed out above. But lets all remember we're here at RfA to build consensus on who should have admin tools, so discussions approach that while drive by votes are not as helpful. - Taxman 23:34, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Indeed there are limits. Browbeating and being exceptionally repetitive is exactly the kind of excessive I was talking about. And that's just not from the candidate, but !voters as well. They need to make sure they're not browbeating or being exceptionally repetitive with their discussion either. -- tariqabjotu (joturner) 23:50, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree that there are reasonable limits but challenging votes and not counting those from people who do not even bother to read that challenge would go a long way to get rid of the disturbing and blatantly harmful trend of drive by voting. Thygard - Talk - Contribs - Email ---- 01:20, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

I think it's generally agreed that "drive-by" voting isn't especially useful to RfA. However, things get rather complicated when we actually attempt to define what a drive-by vote is and what should be done about them. For starters, what about support votes? The focus of criticism is usually on oppose votes, but opposers usually provide more of a reason than supporters. If the supporter provides no rationale (only a signature), is that a drive-by vote? What if the reason is something vague such as "good user"? Should we discount support votes that don't provide enough reasons for supporting? If we're going to talk about ignoring or giving less weight to certain opinions, we need to look on both sides of the fence. Aren't I Obscure? 02:06, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Well the presumption is that people should be admins as long as there isn't a substantial opposition, ie no consensus. Also supports are more or less agreeing with the nominator, so they don't need as much expanded reasoning. Opposes are disagreeing with the nominator and supporters, so they require better reasoning to establish why, and that's ok. But of course you're more than welcome to politely ask a supporter for clarification too. - Taxman 02:29, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

The RFA in my opinion is not the place to discuss issues. As the comments are about the vote it self not what you voted. RFA are vote counts. If the user in question wants to know why they could contact the voters after the election. I'm particullarly annoyed when users asks for an explaintion during a vote. As it simply makes the page very messy, when a link to the users own talkpage will do. While it's conviable to convince a person to change their votes during an election. Such conversations should be on the talkpage. Personally once I vote, I prefer not to change my vote once my vote is cast. --Masssiveego 08:10, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Masssive: first, the votes on RfAs are an attempt to establish community consensus, seeing them as an absolute "vote" is unproductive. Second, not changing one's vote after one has made it runs afoul (at least in my mind) of the entire principle of a Wiki- there is nothing wrong with editing it if one's opinion changes and it should. Third, while everyone says that adminship should be no big deal the notion that we discuss things less or in an out of the way location because doing otherwise "simply makes the page very messy" seems to be a complete misunderstanding of what priorities should be. JoshuaZ 13:11, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

I second that comment by JoshuaZ. Tyrenius 13:46, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. RfA is not a vote.--Stephan Schulz 14:28, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

It's not the place to discuss general issues, but it very much is the place to discuss whether the candidate is suitable for adminship. Thus polite requests for clarification are very suitable to developing the best consensus. You may be annoyed at someone asking for clarification, but better would be to change your expectations to this being a consensus gathering exercise. Again, if you don't wan't to respond to polite good faith requests for clarification you can't expect your opinion to have as much weight in the consensus. - Taxman 14:54, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree with JoshuaZ and Taxman. On my RFA, several people opposing changed their opinion after I responded to their concerns. IMO, people opposing are doing so to help the community. Often the person opposing is a stranger to you and makes a judgment based on limited information. I respect the opinion people opposing even if I do not agree.

JoshuaZ's response (several other people chimed in as well) to another oppose on my RFA was helpful. It was worded politely but still forcefully countered the opinion. There was some back and forth discussion. I do not know what JoshuaZ thought because we did not discuss it but I did not think the particular person opposing would change their opinion. The point was more to clarify the situation for other people that did not know me as well as JoshuaZ did. FloNight 16:04, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Noticing how many paragraphs a single RFA produces with Alphachimp response. It adds to the difficulty of finding where to place the votes, and more scrolling. After a point the discussion becomes a full page article in itself about the RFA in question, and interferes with the vote after a certain point.

My refusing to vote change is mostly so I do not find myself being forced to accept another persons opinion which if find very faulty. I prefer length explainations and arguements after the RFA upon the user in questions request. --Masssiveego 05:20, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Alternate users

How has having an alternate user account historically affected RfA's? The User:Jtkiefer - Pegasus affair is certainly an interesting episode. The reason I ask is I have an alternate user, User:Mikereichold. I established this account because my other one is in my real name. I felt vulnerable after dealing with vandals that lived in a nearby city. My name is unique enough that I would not be hard to find if a kook wanted to look.

I acknowledge the alternate users on each page and give the identity of this alternate user on the other one. I make the recommended affirmations of innocence and benignity on each. I mention it now out of curiosity and to have some discourse now before I even consider submitting an RfA. I would appreciate reading what others think on the subject. Cheers, :) Dlohcierekim 14:36, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

The rules are laid out in WP:SOCK as long as you follow them and don't try to vote stack, then there are no issues. What Jtkiefer - Pegasus affair are you referring to? - Taxman 14:58, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Taxman, take a look at Misplaced Pages:Requests_for_adminship/Jtkiefer_3, which might warrant an early closure. I don't see there's much chance of this request reaching consensus unless some extraordinary evidence is forthcoming soon. Gwernol 15:36, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

This affair is frightening. The notion that we made this person an admin previously is disturbing. I personally supported the Pegasus incarnation in some of his previous RfAs, and gave him off-Wiki advice about how to be diplomatic in RfAs. This almost makes me think that RfA standards are not strict enough. JoshuaZ 16:42, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

This is just too strange. Is there any confirmation that the two accounts are really the same person? (Liberatore, 2006). 16:55, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

See Kelly Martin's recent comments in the RfA. JoshuaZ 16:59, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

The current situation is a rather extraordinary one. It's probably not a helpful example to use. Jkelly 16:53, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

- Like Taxman says, WP:SOCK is pretty clear. Anyone using an alternate user is supposed to be open about it and not abuse it. The idea of dual adminship is pretty staggering except for the one limited exception I know of. This is reminiscent of the JoshuaZ et al question about admin’s with sock puppets. I don’t know that more stringent requirements are in order. The question of how to assess an RfA candidate is where it was when my alternate user started taking part in RfA’s How did they do it in the old days-- look at each edit? The last 500?? All in all, how do you assess for character? :) Dlohcierekim 17:20, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
  - It's too bad about Jtkiefer, certainly abused our trust. I even tried to convince Pegasus to come back when he said he was leaving. I don't know what happened here, but it happens with far greater frequency than we'd like to admit. I've seen in various places anonymous folks saying that they're building up admin accounts, but I guess this is one case where the admin-sockpuppeteer has been caught red-handed. --Deathphoenix ʕ 17:33, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

I have a related idea which I suspect will be shot down (I'm not even sure it is a good idea myself but I think it may be worth thinking about). Why not have any individual who accepts a request for adminship submit to a checkuser request. After the checkuser request, the person who performed the checkuser will talk to the candidate about any observed anomalies and will then make a report to the RfA about whether there appear to be any serious violations of WP:SOCK. JoshuaZ 18:46, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

At this moment I don't think a checkuser function will help out much. I've personally seen the process in action and it is a *huge* drain on the wikipedia servers. Plans are on to improve it's functioning. =Nichalp «Talk»= 19:13, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

I think it would be easier to just add a new question to RFAs: "Please list all accounts and IP numbers under which you have edited." If someone knowingly withheld information that would be relevant to the adminship request, it would be grounds for desyssopping, which could be handled through arbitration. --Tony Sidaway 19:01, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Sounds good. But we could have someone who has engaged in silliness and vandalism. Thought better of it - created a new accounnt and edited harmoniously for 8 months. Do we realy need them to declare that they were a 'penis vandal' for two days, three years ago? Perhaps better just asking 'have you even submitted an RfA under a different nick?'. --Doc 19:06, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Per WP:SOCK#Legitimate uses of multiple accounts (mostly the security aspects), I feel it is too extreme to force an adminship candidate to publicly identify alternative accounts. And demanding IP numbers should be way out of bounds from the view of personal privacy. Dragons flight 19:09, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Can't see this as that practical, it would just mean being careful to avoid the checkuser showing anything up. Checkuser isn't and never will be the be all and end all of sockpuppet detection. --pgk 20:15, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

accepting and listing

I think we need more coherent rules for accepting and listing RfAs. If it's done in a manner such that some people know about the nomination and not others (i.e. it's not listed on the main rfa page), and worse yet, people are allowed to vote during this time... it's really going to leave the people who didn't happen to know about the RfA feeling disenfranchised and the RfA will never seem totally legitimate to everyone.

So, how do we do this without instruction creep?

Votes are only valid after a candidate has accepted and the nomination is listed on the RfA page by the candidate or nominator
Early votes (votes before the both parts of step 1 were completed) can be crossed out and need to be re-affirmed by the voter

I don't think that's too much to ask, and it would really stop all of the various problems that crop up from time to time. --W.marsh 02:12, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

The "how to" says the editor accepting the RfA must list the RfA - I think this makes good sense. Any votes prior to them listing it should be minimal. Thanks/wangi 02:18, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Usualy the prior votes are minimal, it's when they aren't that problems emerge... the goal here is to make the process uniform so there isn't "that one RfA..." every few weeks where irregular process leads to a bunch of annoyed people. --W.marsh 02:23, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Cool, understand that. Perhaps just an addition to the guidelines saying another editor/admin shouldn't post the RfA if the editor themself has forgotten to - instead they should post a pointer on their talk page? Thanks/wangi 02:28, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Yeah. That sounds good. I'd like to hear from a b'crat before adding any of this though. But I do think having it written down somewhere formal will be great just for avoiding this periodic confusion and frustration. --W.marsh 02:34, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

That has always been my understanding of how it worked. That gives the nominee time to write answers to the questions. I am quite frankly appalled that someone—I won't mention any names—transcluded an RfA so that they could register the first !vote on it as an oppose. I think that it would be wise for a 'crat to strike all the !votes registered before it is added to the RfA main page by either the nominee (per the instructions) or the nominator. People should then come back and reaffirm what they said earlier if it is still applicable after the questions have been answered.—WAvegetarian•(talk) 02:27, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

What folks have done is made up new rules for RFA (with several people saying maybe it wasn't such a good idea), painted themselves into a corner this way, and now they'd like to make even more rules to try to paint their way out of the corner again.

Rules are like drugs, you habituate and need more and more of them to get the same high... errr... level of organisation.

Perhaps we could back to immediately transcluding the RFA the moment you create it? Some of the old problems would come back, but the new problems will go away again.

Since the old problems were mere inconvenience, and the new problems are disenfranchisement, I suggest we go for the old problems ;-)

Kim Bruning 03:11, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

It just seems like the old way presents a lot of problems we could easilly avoid with a simple, clear rule being written. It's only instruction creep if it makes things more confusing, and I think this makes it less confusing.

I know people are rule-phobic around here, but this "rule" would only kick in when a problem emerges. I.e. in most RfAs, where the candidate just quietly accepts after they see the nomination then lists it before any votes appear, nothing new needs to happen at all... we just would now clearly have a process so occasional hiccups don't cause drama every time they occur. Yeah it's a rule... but at this point on Misplaced Pages I think having a clear process is much preferable to a system of vague unwritten rules and learned behavior dictating how things operate.--W.marsh 03:23, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Young administrator candidates

Do we ever take notice of the fact that the nom is obviously a kid, or do we just keep going like he was an adult? :) Dlohcierekim 03:13, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

I don't think we should discriminate against candidates or nominees based on age (or any other inherent characteristic). Hold all candidates to the same standards regardless of age. We have some great editors under the age of 16 and I see no reason why one of them couldn't become an admin if they met the usual standards expected of candidates. Best, Gwernol 03:17, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

We have a 14-year-old bureaucrat, for what it's worth :-) Kirill Lokshin 03:19, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Indeed! That is amazing. I just feel sorry for the poor kid out there with his string of teenager mistakes and with 18 opposes. So much for my opinion that we should block all school accounts on sight. :) Dlohcierekim 03:25, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

This was actually a hotly debated issue on Fetofs's RfA a couple months back. I personally think age discrimination in RfAs is ridiculous. --Mr. Lefty _{Talk to me!} 03:51, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages

talk:Requests for adminship: Difference between revisions - Misplaced Pages