User:Finalnight/RfA review

Welcome to the Question phase of RfA Review. We hope you'll take the time to respond to your questions in order to give us further understanding of what you think of the RfA process. Remember, there are no right or wrong answers here. Also, feel free to answer as many questions as you like. Don't feel you have to tackle everything if you don't want to.

In a departure from the normal support and oppose responses, this review will focus on your thoughts, opinions and concerns. Where possible, you are encouraged to provide examples, references, diffs and so on in order to support your viewpoint. Please note that at this point we are not asking you to recommend possible remedies or solutions for any problems you describe, as that will come later in the review.

If you prefer, you can submit your responses anonymously by emailing them to gazimoff (at) o2.co.uk. Anonymous responses will be posted as subpages and linked to from the responses section, but will have the contributor's details removed. If you have any questions, please use the talk page.

Once you've provided your responses, please encourage other editors to take part in the review. More responses will improve the quality of research, as well as increasing the likelihood of producing meaningful results.

Once again, thank you for taking part!

Questions

When thinking about the adminship process, what are your thoughts and opinions about the following areas:

Candidate selection (inviting someone to stand as a candidate)
I feel that there is often too much focus on edit count, policy participation, and length of service when selection potential syops. This reminds me about how local political parties operate and often smacks of cronyism. If you don't know the "right" people and work on the "right" projects, your chances of being "selected" are usually fairly slim.
Administrator coaching (either formally or informally)
I only discovered the official admin coaching area today, but I wonder if it is really open to all who want to be admins or really only those who have been selected.
Nomination, co-nomination and self-nomination (introducing the candidate)
Nominations by others usually are done well, though I sometimes witness candidates taking fire due to grievances against the nominators themselves. Also, the amount of backlash towards self-nominators is ridculous, especially the commentary regarding it being the sign of power hunger.
Advertising and canvassing
Never seen or noticed this.
Debate (Presenting questions to the candidate)
This is the most amusing part of the RfA process, though it has calmed down in recent weeks. I oftentimes don't know whether we are selecting 1 of 1000 syops or vetting a vice-presidential candidate or selecting a new pope. The expectations implied by some of the questions are borderline insane. Also, the tone of the questioning is often rude and derogatory. Get over yourselves people, its just a nomination for a administrative position on an online community. Also, I find the discrimination against specialist candidates to be unrealistic as well. (This has discouraged me from pursuing any path to adminship to fight vandals).
Election (including providing reasons for support/oppose)
I notice that once a pattern forms in the voting, later voters just seem to follow the existing trend. Read the reasons to support/oppose from later voters and they often look like they have been copy/pasted from the earlier voters. I almost wish it was blind voting, similar to how election results are not released till all the polls have closed.
Withdrawal (the candidate withdrawing from the process)
Haven't seen it happen too often, though I think candidates should do it more once things look like they are not going to work out.
Declaration (the bureaucrat closing the application. Also includes WP:NOTNOW closes)
I think there should be a posting in a highly visible spot on wikipedia showing who the new admin appointments are for the week.
Training (use of New Admin School, other post-election training)
No experience with it myself though I have looked through it and it looks more than adequate.
Recall (the Administrators Open to Recall process)
This process seems to be something that is only for show as incumbency rules the day on wikipedia like most bodies. Maybe term limits would be in order? Or elections for a set time period. This would make it easier to become an admin due to less concern from voters because if the admin didn't work out, they would just not be reelected.

When thinking about adminship in general, what are your thoughts and opinions about the following areas:

How do you view the role of an administrator?
Take care of any tasks that require admin privledges to accomplish on wikipedia.
What attributes do you feel an administrator should possess?
Steady but decisive hand. Good "bedside" manner. Patience, helpfulness.

Finally, when thinking about Requests for Adminship:

Have you ever voted in a request for Adminship? If so what was your experience?
Yes, it was fine.
Have you ever stood as a candidate under the Request for Adminship process? If so what was your experience?
Hell no.
Do you have any further thoughts or opinions on the Request for Adminship process?
I think I gave everyone enough to chew on.

UPDATE: After reading other reviews and doing some reflection on other internet systems where I have held moderator/admin privileges, I think it would be very smart for us to create gradients in admin capabilities and dramatically increase the number of admins. Honestly, the statement "It's no big deal" regarding syops is schizophrenic at best and disingenous at worst. My above comments point to the fact that for it not being a big deal, the community sure makes a big deal out of becoming an admin. I think having different and escalating user levels would be very helpful . For instance (using myself as an example). I really enjoy and am good at vandal fighting, I have only had 1 report on AIV ever not result in an immediate block. I would like to simply have better tools so I can block IP/newuser vandals (99.9% of vandalism) and protect vandalized pages without having to ask a syop everytime. But, in order for me to do so, I have to dedicate enormous effort (and prayer) to learning all aspects of wikipedia, then convince the community that I know all of that so they can give me a ton of extra tools I may not want or need, when I really want to specialize in vandal fighting/etc.

Oh, and also, I have started doing a lot of WP:ACC work, but cannot replace existing user accounts from years back that have never been used. I keep having to waste time escalating to a syop, its frustrating to say the least. If we follow WP:AGF and WP:NBD. then if a user has shown compentacy and stability in a part of wikipedia, he should be given all the tools to make him more efficient and better at his tasks until he shows that he cannot handle the responsiblity. I think "roll-backer" and "account creator" are positive steps towards this, but more can be done.

Once you're finished...

Thank you again for taking part in this review of the Request for Adminship process. Now that you've completed the questionnaire, don't forget to add the following line of code to the bottom of the Response page by clicking this link and copying the following to the BOTTOM of the list.

* [[User:Finalnight/RfA review]] added by ~~~ at ~~~~~

Again, on behalf of the project, thank you for your participation.

This question page was generated by {{RFAReview}} at 23:18 on 20 June 2008.