Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-02-18/Editorial

Editorial

Recent retirements typify problem of admin attrition

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Like you say, it's not just an admin problem; it's Wikipedia-wide. Not dealing with in-person communication makes it easy to allow emotions to escalate to the point where words become abusive. I'm not sure what is the solution. kosboot (talk) 03:33, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I daresay it goes even deeper than that. There's a growing trend (more pronounced across the project this last year than I've ever seen it), for users (admins or otherwise) who contribute widely in conflict resolution or other procedural areas to be broadly decried as "not really contributing to the encyclopedia". Lately I've seen a sharp uptake in comments during contentious discussions and in user spaces of implying such contributors are here merely for "social" purposes. It's ugly and a part of a larger (and cyclical) problem that results from the feedback of admin/experienced editor attrition and a break-down in general civility. Of course, mind you, one or two severely bad apples amongst the admins (amongst the numerous admirable and indispensable volunteers) can do more damage than any three dozen non-priveleged editors, no matter how uncivil the latter.

But the problem is not just that administrators leave, it's also that many of those who remain seem to feel intimidated by the scope of the problems they have to wrangle, with often ambivalent support from the community as a whole, and so avoid the more contentious issues or users like the plague. The result is a disheartening dichotomy wherein certain "veteran" users (including an admin here and there) are allowed to trample all over our behavioural policies with impunity, while newer users sometimes find themselves on the receiving end of sanctions which are disproportionate to violations which are not long-term and which might have been rectified by more moderate means. And because the backlog for other necessary work is so massive, admins (understandably) just seem to be telling themselves "Well, why get involved in that hornet's nest of unending nastiness, when I could just spend some time on the technical backlogs?" Maybe the solution is to try to isolate the roles played by admins in some fashion, so we always have a diverse selection of active admins, and baseline number active in each critical area.

As regards those areas that seem to be agreed to be particularly taxing on admin stamina, I really do believe there's a type of personality out there who have just seem to have unending reserves of that kind of forebearance -- the type of people who have just learned to "bend like a reed in the wind", to get poetical. We need to find them, vet them thoroughly and get them familiar with privileges. I'd say there should be new accountability standards for admins too, but hopefully just having more robust numbers will keep things more uniformly on the up and up.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'm as proud of this community for the way it has developed a means of getting on with one-another and getting things done as I am with the encyclopedia or any of the other projects. I think the open-collaborative method is the way of the future in general, if we're lucky. If we're even luckier, we might continue to be a relevant force in that trend. If we don't first just become another example of nothing good ever lasts. I've never really before been concerned by that, but lately it just feels like it's not just that we're losing good people, but that we're losing them in an escalating fashion because everyone agrees there's just so much work to go around. Talk space in particular just feels desolate to me, and sense of community running right alongside the work is key to keeping morale up and conflicts down, in my opinion. Snow talk 12:33, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

See User talk:Jimbo Wales/Archive 167#Entertainment industry versus Wikipedia (July 2014).
—Wavelength (talk) 03:38, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

"Recognize administrators for doing unpleasant work … a simple "thanks" or just hitting the thank button often will do the job." Good point. I try to remember to thank admins when they help with something, though I must admit sometimes it slips my mind.

"my RfA was not bad at all, although others obviously have different experiences." That's the main problem, IMHO. Many people turn RfAs into a horrifying, degrading process for editors willing to spend their free time helping the encyclopedia. Who wants to go through that? APK whisper in my ear 03:42, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Masochists? :) But seriously, it is a crap shit over there, and frankly at this point no amount of talk is going to solve the problem. TomStar81 (Talk) 10:01, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@AgnosticPreachersKid: From my anecdotal observation admins get many more thanks than they dish out. As far as pleasant/unpleasant work, (un?)fortunately the thanks logs don’t tell us which edits editors are thanked for. Ottawahitech (talk) 17:02, 21 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Aww geez. Dennis retired? I liked his advice he gave me after my RfA. It's revelations like this editorial that show how much of a problem it is for admins or people wanting to become an admin themselves. GamerPro64 03:43, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I suggest, for those wanting a larger sense of the issue, looking at Wikipedia:List of administrators/stat table. 2014 was the seventh straight year in which the number of active administrators declined. In December 2007 there were 993 active administrators. In December 2014 there were 583, a decrease of more than 40%. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 04:40, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Part of the problem is that the era where adminship is "no big deal" is long over. It was already over when I passed my own RFA six years ago. The community at some point decided it actually is a big deal and that standards should be almost absurdly high. That and many RFA regulars seem to enjoy coming up with ridiculous criteria all their own, many of which have nothing whatsover to do with being an effective administrator, and opposing anyone who doen't meet them or doesn't give the absolutely correct answer to some "magic bullet" question they've come up with. Some people say that making adminship easier to remove would alleviate this problem, but in my experience the truly terrible admins do end up being removed, either by being convinced to retire or the other way.

In other words, it's not entirely that the RFA process itself that is broken, it's the people who participate in it that often make it look that way. The solution is a cultural change, but how to bring that about, I don't know.

As to admin retention, it is really just a normal part of any job, especially one you don't get paid for, that some people burn out and don't want to do it anymore. Their reasons are varied because they are a varied group. I don't think focussing on admin retention is the answer, replacing admins as they retire from the job is a more achievable goal, although likely to still be quite difficult. Beeblebrox (talk) 05:02, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

+1 APK whisper in my ear 05:08, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Precisely. It's quite difficult to become an admin -- and to some extent you have to allow for people to voice their concerns in that process, but people need to be mindful that no one starts out a perfect editor -- but it's even more difficult to lose adminship or even face censure in general once you get it. Those standards ought to be flipped. Neither should be exactly easy, but those who show potential and (crucially) have the right disposition, should be given a shot, and also encouraged towards the position more. Wheras (in addition to blatant cases of abuse of privileges), those admins who can't keep a baseline respect for behavioural standards should also be asked to hand in their mop. Snow talk 13:46, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Points for originality and food for thought, etc., but y'know what? I still see examples of menacing behavior by administrators, the locking down of "bad" contentious versions of pages with full protection because they can, absolutely inexcusable biting of newcomers with "bad" usernames without explaining how to make things right, speedy blocks that are showing a sort of inflation in severity, abuse of revision deletion, and a sort of clique arrogance among those who have The Sacred Tools vs. those who do not. So no tears shed here. We have broken processes, yes — Articles For Creation should be shut down immediately as absolutely detrimental to The Project. But what does that have to do with the hard life of administrators? The queue at New Articles seems to be lengthening? Again, what has that to do with the count of administrators? It's a matter of better coordinating the volunteers we have... (I don't think Dennis' departure has much of anything to do with the climate here, for what it's worth... Nor can BoingSaidZebedee be blindly racked up as one who turned in his gear because of the unwashed masses allegedly picking on him...) Carrite (talk) 07:41, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Blade is not a former admin. Boing's reasons for departure had far more to do with experienced contributors gunning after a specific colleague than any general feeling of malaise. Although he did think that aspect typified what was going wrong in a more general sense. - Sitush (talk) 09:19, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

This problem has been around for YEARS. Why are you just now noticing it? 68.10.122.226 (talk) 10:14, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I'm sure the author noticed the problem long ago. We shouldn't quit talking about this just because it is a long-standing issue. Mellowed Fillmore (talk) 16:05, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Silly idea perhaps: creating a place where admins can complain about abuse so that uninvolved third parties can take appropriate action? The Banner talk 11:21, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Might one step be to document the kinds of language that denotes unhealthy expressions of dominance? This is what is done (for example) in bullying, or recognizing abuse in general: recognizing words or actions that can lead to unhealthy relationships and feelings. Just a suggestion for one path to halting problematic behavior. kosboot (talk) 12:40, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for writing this, GP, it does provide some food for thought. I do agree with Beeblebrox to some extent, that it's a fact of life that people come and go as they lose interest; it's sad, but it's life. But we desperately need more active admins. There are hundreds of admins who probably don't log 100 actions a year, but barely a handful of us who log 100 a day—there's a very small number of people doing a disproportionate amount of the work, and when one of them leaves, it's noticeable. A couple of dozen extra admins logging a few actions most days, or a handful doing 100 actions a day would really make a significant difference. WP:ADMINSTATS might help to illustrate the amount of work being done and those doing it. Those are all-time stats (I don't know of any by-week/month/year stats), but they're still illustrative. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 13:19, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Then, with respect, admins should get nominating! A couple of weeks vetting a candidate before nominating (perhaps less for one you already know decently well) potentially repays massive relative dividends in terms of administrative work hours. Snow talk 13:31, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Admin stats for February: here. -- Diannaa (talk) 19:08, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

We need a new class of editor: the paid editor who does "janitorial" work that volunteers don't want to do. That is, pay editors to do the work that no one else likes to do. WMF has lots of money and funds all sorts of experimental projects. Why not fund the upkeep of its core project. -- GreenC 13:41, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
- I think you'll find it's more complicated than that. When you pay people to do "janitorial" work, then the volunteers stop doing it. "Why should I keep doing this? Paid Guy will get to it tomorrow." That sets up a vicious cycle that continues until all of the volunteers have moved on. Other communities have tried it (e.g., for moderating posts), and it is usually a short step from this to total collapse of the community. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:30, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  - Quite. The web is cluttered with examples of failed communities that thought they could replace volunteers with paid staff. It almost never works. In almost every case - going back to AOL (COI alert: I was previously on staff in the community action team there and attended the "wake" for their community leader functions) - this fails, and sometimes spectacularly. We aren't just giving platitudes when we say that the community is irreplaceable - those functions simply can't be performed by paid staff. It's a terrible idea. Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 12:21, 21 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    - "When you pay people to do "janitorial" work, then the volunteers stop doing it." No, no, no. If you pay the volunteers, they will not stop, but rather do more of it. Drop the mindset of paid staff being employees with supervisors looking over their shoulders and being evaluated on how well they performed top-down assigned tasks determined by management or the board. Give the volunteers a bucket of money to be awarded by transmission to Paypal accounts of editors who sign into the system. Editors will decide how to distribute the money based on the most important backlogs. On at least an annual basis (perhaps quarterly or monthly) the pot is split amongst the editors who worked on these targeted backlogs, proportionate to the amount of work each volunteer did. Volunteers are paid as independent contractors. Watch out for http://newslines.org/ ''Newslines'', which operates under a model of this sort. Imagine how quickly the Articles for Creation backlog will clear if you start paying people to clear it. I have a limited appetite for helping to Wikify the vanity articles created by editors who have no interest in helping Wikipedia beyond writing their vanity articles. Offer money though, and my appetite might grow. Wbm1058 (talk) 16:22, 22 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
      - Wbm1058, I had not heard of http://newslines.org/ ''Newslines'' before but I just checked it out and looked at some of their "articles" which are more like blurbs. Boy, they do dispise Wikipedia and they aren't shy about talking about it in their editor information and their blog. Their goal is to take over Wikipedia's place in the Top 10 visited news sites but looking at the quality there, I don't think WP has to worry. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 17:41, 22 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
        I don't view them as a direct competitor for most of Wikipedia's content, but perhaps a subset of it focused on pop-culture BLPs. Content that Wikipedia would never need to pay for. Evidently it's viewed as a more female-friendly site. Their reasons for paying editors (as a way to entice help in catching up to the market leader) differ from reasons Wikipedia should pay volunteers. Another fledgling news aggregation site is Larry Sanger's Infobitt – I think these sites have a tough road competing with professional news sites that we use as reliable sources. Wbm1058 (talk) 18:04, 22 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
For those who think that we can't remove admins or that its very difficult to do so, that's actually incorrect. After petitioning for a desysopping procedure for a few months, I learned that it's possible to ban an admin from using the tools (such as at ANI) if the community has consensus to do so. If the admin violates the ban, they're simply blocked, and if they use the tools to unblock, they're uncontroversially desysopped. How simple is that? Also, it allows an admin banned from using to the tools to appeal just like any other ban. --Biblioworm 15:14, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
- I should also note that while good-faith admins who make significant contributions to this project genuinely deserve our respect, that doesn't mean that we should stay quiet when an abusive, uncivil, or otherwise policy violating admin comes along, right? For example, an isolated case or two of incivility is understandable, but when it becomes a pattern, you start having a problem... --Biblioworm 15:22, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Abuse-of-powers situations are fairly straight-forward. Making a case for censure on other behavioural grounds is a whole other animal. Snow -I take all complaints in the form of rap battles- 16:03, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Admin attrition is just the natural outcome of its cultural model: very hard process to gain the status, which provides a sense of membership in a select elite. Administrators behavior is scrutinized because they *do* pertain to a group of users with power above that of regular editors.

The obvious solution would be to turn it around and make adminship work like autoconfirmed status, granting permissions to all users who pass the first trial edits and show interest, yet removing it at the first sign of being problematic. This would put all regular users on equal grounds again, just as it was intended at the beginning of the project; thus providing us with the amount of users required to work on the current backlogs that needs admin privileges, by removing the adminship request bottleneck.

Surely this solution would be squarely rejected by the existing user base as it might make the project less stable, but that isn't necessarily the bad thing most editors think it is. It would allow the project to grow on areas affected by WP:BIAS, such as cultural and local content from emergent regions, which are currently shunned by the current policies of what is or isn't encyclopedic. These policies were shaped by the western-centric original editors and doesn't necessarily serve best other demographics. Allowing relatively new editors to become guardians of subprojects with their own quality standards, and out of reach from the old-school gatekeepers, would allow the project to grow again in these seleted areas and editors to form their own sub-cultures adapted to their own needs. This is the only way to revitalize the project - by building new specific projects outside the area of influence of the current, rather dysfunctional culture that takes care of the fossilized 1.0 version. Diego (talk) 16:00, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Ehhhh, maybe for certain content permissions you could do this, but can you imagine how much pandemonium would ensue once trolls/sockmasters realize all they need to do is create an account, wait a certain amount of time, make a certain amount of edits, stay under the radar and then they'll eventually have ban tools? That sounds utterly untenable to me. Even allowing permissions to reinstate deleted pages via this method would lead to so much mayhem we could never keep it straight. Likewise I question how the project would be improved by letting it fragment into little content fiefdoms where everyone creates their own idiosyncratic rules and no standards are ever established because everyone has tools and anyone can buck consensus. The reason we have admins is that we understand not everyone internalizes the priorities and best interests of the community and the project at the same rate, such that we can say any one person is a safe bet with those abilities to manipulate the content of the project (including meta content and user rights). Snow -I take all complaints in the form of rap battles- 16:17, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The reason we have admins is that we understand not everyone internalizes the priorities and best interests of the community and the project at the same rate And that's what I see as a problem. Why should there be a single set of rules in a wikipedia? I see those as benefitial to a stablepedia, which is largely what we have now, to shape a subset of pages to showcase to the world as the crown jewels of the project, the crème de la crème of what we can achieve. But those standards also have a detrimental effect, to get rid of the quick and dirty "let anyone add anything, we'll care about quality later" spirit that got us where we are now, and which is essential to keep the project growing and generating new content. The "best interests" you mention is the layer of unending policies that killed this culture of joyful contribution and got us the hostile atmosphere of entrenched battlegrounds that we enjoy today.

A unified set of standards would be a great thing to have if we had separate "official" and "dirty" spaces; all those quality rules could be applied to the visible side of the project, and content that doesn't abide by them could be kept and continue evolving in the background, constantly giving us new potentially useful content instead of being summarily deleted. The Draft space had a small window of opportunity to become that backroom dirty area, but it was killed by adopting the Incubator rules that remove old content merely for being old, without a chance to be rediscovered in a distant future by someone interested. If the Wikimedia Foundation wants to create a healthy environment that revitalizes the project, their best bet is to create separate spaces for independent user populations that can't be dragged down by the current user base.

Even allowing permissions to reinstate deleted pages via this method would lead to so much mayhem we could never keep it straight. Why so? If admin permissions are removed after only three strikes, just like we block vandals now, only good faith editors who understand collaboration would keep them. If admin permissions were removed by making a controversial block, admins would think twice about abusing blocks. People would refrain from making trouble for fear of getting the privileges removed and having to do a formal RfA to regain them; and vandalism from "autoconfirmed administrators" would be kept in check by the same process we remove content common vandalism from autoconfirmed users now, by the power of revert tools. Only those really destructive actions that can't be easily reverted should be kept away from this general pool and given to a small group of highly trusted users - but wait, isn't that what we do already with oversight permissions and the like?

letting it fragment into little content fiefdoms where everyone creates their own idiosyncratic rules Excuse-me, but isn't that what we have today? You've just described every WP:OWNed page where changes are reverted within the first ten minutes; and if you think we don't have people creating their own idiosyncratic rules, you haven't visited the policies and guidelines talk pages much.

For a start, this "easy come, easy go" model of adminship I described (i.e., exactly the opposite of what we have now) would get us rid of the eternal laments of overwhelmed, declining admin caste. Isn't that an improvement? Diego (talk) 17:25, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

this would be more than compensated for by the amount of bad admin work that had to be detected and done over. It is much easier to properly look at ten articles and decide on deleting them, than to try to deal with one improperly deleted article. Almost all new users whose first article is deleted never return. We need a continuing flow of incoming users musuch more than we need administrators. DGG ( talk ) 04:02, 25 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

It seems to me that the main problem with new page patrol is that 90% of new pages proposed by newbies are crap. Why not just have a rule that editors cannot start a new page until they have at least 100 main space edits on at least 10 different articles (or some other reasonable threshold that will ensure some likely level of competence), and then they can start new pages? The encyclopedia has enough pages; it needs to improve (or delete) the ones it has – and I'm mostly an inclusionist! -- Ssilvers (talk) 16:25, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Ssilvers: because if the WMF refuses to try requiring users to be autoconfirmed to create articles, there is very little chance they would agree to a more stringent requirement. Nikkimaria (talk) 16:37, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Nikki beat me to it, but: Because of this, Ssilvers. The community voted quite strongly to bar extremely new users from creating new articles a few years back; that consensus was vetoed by the WMF, which refused to implement (or allow to be implemented) any such restriction. Unless/until the WMF indicate a change in their position, the community could vote for it until the cows come home and it wouldn't make any difference. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 16:40, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I remember that. But now that we can show WMF that allowing it is causing this problem, perhaps they would be willing to reconsider. Or, in the alternative, maybe having the huge backlog at article creation is not really a problem. Maybe some text could be added at the top of the article creation page that says something like, "if we don't get to your proposed article by the time you are [autoconfirmed], then you can, at that time, brush it up and post it yourself." Then, concentrate on other things. -- Ssilvers (talk) 16:45, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I've tried and failed to understand what you are supposed to do as a AFC reviewer. If the instructions were clearer, you might find more people doing it. I have to say the quality of the reviewing I see is often pretty poor. Johnbod (talk) 17:23, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

What you have to do a tAFC is 3 things only: 1/if the article would probably pass AfD, accept it. 2/ If the article would not, advise the contributor in specific terms what might make it so. 3/if the material is a copyvio or impossibly promotion or otherwise hopeless, list it for deletion. All the rest of the system and all the templates and formalities are irrelevant; there is no need to even use them. DGG ( talk ) 04:09, 25 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I feel bad that administrators are being treated badly. People should remember that, like the rest of us, they too are but volunteers that are (very much for the most part) trying to improve and aid Wikipedia. God bless the admins. Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 18:22, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

If the community consensus is to disallow page creation by new users, but WMF won't implement it, then perhaps the solution is an addition to the CSD combined with an adminbot. DPRoberts534 (talk) 02:26, 21 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Ssilvers, I don't ever recall seeing an admin leave because of spam or the need to delete garage-band articles from newbies. People complain, but nobody resigns over it. Departures are precipitated by experienced editors (including other admins), not by newbies. Think about it: if some newbie leaves a rant on your talk page that says you're a horrible person after you deleted an article, then you might remove the rant or ignore it, but it's just some unknown, probably clueless person who doesn't understand the difference between an encyclopedia and an advertising page. Who cares what that newbie thinks You know you're right and you know the rest of the core community will back up your action. But if your wiki-friends say the same thing, then it hurts a lot more. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:30, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Actual New Page Patroller here; most articles created by newbs are not that crappy. Ironholds (talk) 03:35, 21 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

historically and up to the present, about 1/2 of all articles submitted are immediately or eventually deleted. DGG ( talk ) 03:58, 25 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thinking about your overall argument, it might be more important for potential admins to have experience in the dispute resolution area than in having 5+ GA/FAs. From what I see at ANI, many disputes are related to personal conflicts and not about content creation. I think it's important to have experience creating and expanding articles if one is going to be busy in closing AfDs but what if a potential admin wants to focus on fighting vandalism and SPIS? I think one negative element of RfAs is not that the standards are too high it's that there is the expectation that potential admins have a great deal of experience in so many different areas, so much so that an editor would have to be heavily involved for many years to accumulate it all. Also, areas like working at the Teahouse, Help Desk, Reference Desk or Dispute Resolution don't seem to be valued at all when they clearly are the areas of WP that most involves working with new editors and readers. Since the bulk (67%?) of WP edits are done by casual editors, shouldn't it be important to have admins that understand the confusion that newbies have navigating WP, particularly noticeboards? Just a thought, amid many others on this page. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 21:00, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Pointing out that Blade and Writ Keeper both still have mops in their cupboards according to their user rights listings. Peridon (talk) 22:47, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
What I think matters most is the entrenched fallacy that admins are somehow "different" from the rest of the community. We don't need admins who swagger about - never have done - but those of us who have been admins for a decade have seen this meme (that's just what it is) promoted as deflection, quite consciously, by a few. It should be recognised as divisive site politics: always has been, always will be. Charles Matthews (talk) 07:49, 21 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I'm of two minds on this too. I don't disagree that a certain decent threshold of complaint can be easily discounted as sour grapes and hyper-sensitivity, maybe stemming from a personal run-in or watching someone else be censured (some people just have blind spots for those they have collaborated with, and can't see the disruption in them). At the same time, most of those few of the more appalling abuses of our general conduct principles that I've seen from admins have occurred fairly recently -- and my observation of those contexts has me suspecting that this is partly explained by the decreased self-policing amongst admins as they dwindle in number and become busier with routine disruption. To some of those who have accused recent ArbCom rulings of being heavy-handed, I'd say the bigger problem is that sometimes very contentious issues or problematic editors aren't handled very well in the space that takes place between an issue requiring an ANI or two and one necessitating an ArbCom case; I won't speculate on how common this scenario is in general, but I can say I've observed more than once that it can be very hard right now to get an admin willing to take on another problematic one, in particular. Snow -I take all complaints in the form of rap battles- 10:02, 22 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

(Not sure how this never came to my attention) I can confirm that I'm still an admin and have no intentions of resigning. Haven't used my admin functions a whole lot in the last couple years, but that has nothing to do with any feelings of disillusionment with Wikipedia; if you don't already know where I've been during that time, it should be fairly obvious. Nonetheless, it seems like there's more of a need than I realized for admins to take these issues on, and to the extent that I can I'm willing to throw myself back into the fray. I can't say that I've ever found it stressful to manage Wikipedia disputes (the ACTRIAL mess aside, I'm still sore about that and probably will be for as long as I edit), and as an autistic with no intentions of getting involved with things like having a girlfriend or kids I have no problem creating time in my life to handle Wikipedia issues. The goal of providing easily accessible and accurate information to everyone remains important to me, and if doing it means I have to take a more active administrative role I'm willing to do it. I find it helpful to remember that Wikipedia exists in the world and, to quote a great guy, in the whole wide world there's no magical place, so you might as well rise and put on your bravest face. If you can stomach my writing, I also briefly summarize my thoughts here. And finally, one of the very few memorable comments I ever made seems somewhat applicable, instead of trying to recreate it just readthe original. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 04:27, 24 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I've long favored a privilege level below full admin (assistant admin, apprentice admin, ...) that could be awarded more freely and would serve as a training ground and evaluation period for prospective admins. A smaller broom could still clean up most of the backlog and dispute resolution situations often do not need the bit. I know this is on the list of perennial suggestions, but the problem is perennial as well.--agr (talk) 17:56, 25 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
- @ArnoldReinhold: It's going to have to happen eventually. It's the only way out of this downward spiral. We need to move to a competence-based system. The creation of the templateeditor bit was the second major step in this direction (after the initiation of non-admin closures). It has been a massive boon to productivity in technical development, and a significant reducer of admin backlog (other than for full-protected templates, no more editprotected requests are necessary from competent editors of templates, and any such editor can fulfill such a request from a non-geeky editor on a template that's protected only to templateeditor level). There's really no reason that other editors who know what they are doing shouldn't be able to help out with other processes that are restricted technically to admins, or limited to them by tradition. Admin closure of WP:RMs, WP:RFCs, etc., generally really do not need an admin to reach a decision other than that consensus hasn't changed or wasn't reached (the only thing non-admins can close with, last I looked); it only needs an experienced editor who can objectively view the discussion, properly analyze the policy, sourcing, and common-sense arguments presented (on their merits, not as a vote-count), and not inject their own views to misinterpret consensus (a description that not all admins fulfill, alas). Hardly any process on WP actually requires a great deal of trust. These clearly include WP:BLOCK, WP:CHECKUSER, and imposition of editing restrictions like topic bans and interaction bans, either as the result of a consensus at WP:ANI or another noticeboard, or pursuant to WP:AE/WP:ARBCOM discretionary sanctions. An argument can be made that speedy deletion and closure of non-WP:SNOWBALL WP:XFDs as "delete" should qualify, too, but I'm seriously beginning to doubt that; anyone with a couple of years of experience can probably handle that properly, and many of our admin have far less experience than that.
  A lot of the anti-admin sentiment could be rectified by doing away with discretionary sanctions, and no longer permitting blocks and other editing restrictions without a community consensus for it in that particular case, except in unambiguous cases of recalcitrant, repeat editwarring or other policy violations. We probably lose more non-anon editors over short-duration blocks (which are virtually impossible to appeal before they expire, even when glaringly wrongheaded) than for any other reason, besides the general attrition factor of editorial burnout, which is mostly self-inflicted by seeking disputes to obsess over (there's not much we can do about that one).
  We don't really need more admins. If anything, we need fewer of them, with a much higher trust level, but for their special roles as admins to be limited to things that actually require that level of trust, and everything else farmed out to a much larger pool of competent editors given bits they have demonstrated they can use properly. WP has long been a meritocracy in almost every way other than adminship, which has devolved (quite a long time ago, like the late 2000s) into a weird popularity contest, which amounts to "have you ever pissed anyone off on WP? No? Then you are now an admin, even if you are a questionably competent semi-noob. Yes? Then you will never be an admin, even after many years of productivity, because some grudgeholder will canvass against you via e-mail". It's a totally unworkable system, as our plummeting RFA and active existing admin numbers demonstrate.
  We need to model our system more closely on that of free software development: If you are competent to do the work, you are permitted to do the work, and how well you kiss a[ss|rse] is largely irrelevant. Such project still have their gatekeepers, but they do not micromanage the way WP admins are tasked to do, and they thus do not suffer the kind of procedural, administrative, bureaucratic backlog that WP has. Their backlog is the same backlog our content editors have: that of writing and assessment (we call it writing articles and assessing for GA/FA, for them it's coding and QA testing). That's a backlog should really be working on.
  PS: To respond to a comment by Snow Rise, up top, 'I daresay it goes even deeper than that. There's a growing trend ... for users ... who contribute widely in ... procedural areas to be broadly decried as "not really contributing to the encyclopedia".' – It goes deeper even than that. There's a re-factionalization going on, a semi-organized attempt by wikiprojects to seize control over content editing, such that editors who are not part of the proper scope-claiming WP:FACTION can blockaded from any editorial "rights" to change anything at an article unless they're part of the special little inner circle that WP:OWNs that article. This is where the "you're not really contributing to the encyclopedia" crap is coming from. What it really means is "you edit a lot an a policy or guideline I don't like, or deleted an article I wanted to keep, or blocked one of my buddies, or reverted me making inimical changes to a guideline I thought no one was watching very closely, so I'm going to denigrate your contributions, no matter what your actual content-editing ratio is". You're right that this is a growing problem, it's just nastier than you've realized. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 16:19, 12 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  - @SMcCandlish:. Actually (and unfortunately) this is another issue that I've also been encountering frequently over the last few years. So much so, in fact, that I've for some time been planning to make a proposal that WP:Advice pages be promoted to a full and independent guideline with its own namespace. (Unfortunately, like most all other notions of projects of significant scale that I've wanted to proceed on this last year, its been repeatedly shunted to the side in favour of smaller efforts as my time for editing has become sporadic). But in any event, I wholeheartedly agree that this is a major issue which -- and I think I can say this without being too hyperbolic -- significantly threatens the continuity of policy and the collegial atmosphere across significantly-sized areas of the project. This cliquish attitude, predicated as you say on collective WP:OWN perspectives but also, I would add, a deep disregard for the principles of both broad community consensus and WP:LOCALCONSENSUS. These kinds of behaviours received a warranted and necessary check in the (well-considered) Arbitration Committee ruling on the WikiProject Composters/Infobox case. This cooled the heels of some of the worst offenders in that case and helped clarify that administrators/admins were going to get serious about sanctions for groups of editors creating cabals within WikiProjects that formulated their own idiosyncratic rules for any article which they deemed to be within the scope of their project and then tried to enforce them by fiat and canvassing through the wikiproject. And that ruling did cool the heels of some of those editors who were engaging in this kind of (clearly inappropriate) behaviour, but after two years the effect is starting to wear off. Go to to the talk page for the article of most any composer today and you'll find that the ownership attitudes are alive and well. Now they've morphed into a new attitude that articles can have "main editors" who have special privileges to determine the outcome of content disputes (!?), in blatant defiance of all policy and community consensus on such matters (and indeed the most basic principles of Wikipedia ideology).

But even if we managed to stamp out the existing hotspots for this kind of ownership behaviour, I fear we will always be dealing with more unless we establish very explicit top-down rules. Because this is an emergent property amongst some editors of a certain level of basic experience and a particular mindset who fail to understand how broad community consensus integrates with local consensus. They figure that if there is consensus on these two levels that they are entitled to create another tier of idiosyncratic rules in-between, at the Wikiproject level. You can see here how this attitude will begin to seep into projects even when there isn't an explicit and conscious effort to form a clique to enforce these rules (though, surely this happens as well). I think a good starting place on creating a bulwark against these kinds of attitudes and behaviours -- and one which would hopefully save admins a great deal of time in setting editors with a middling level of experience straight on these matters -- would be to augment WP:Advice pages into a stand-alone guideline that makes it clear that WikiProjects and similar spaces are for organizing editorial work in a given thematic space, not for making "junior policy" to be forced upon any article that the project's members decide is withing their domain. Snow ^{let's rap} 23:43, 12 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

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