User:Fordmadoxfraud/RfA review Recommend Phase

Welcome to the Recommendation phase of RfA Review. In this phase, you will be asked to offer suggestions and proposals to address specific concerns and problems with the current Requests for Adminship process.

The questions below are taken directly from the 209 responses from the Question phase, each of which offered editors' thoughts and concerns about RfA. Based on those concerns, we identified the most frequently mentioned problems and included them here. These are the elements of RfA that are currently under review.

Please take your time and read through the concerns below. For each item, you are invited to offer a proposal that addresses the concern. Where possible, you are encouraged to provide examples, references, diffs and so on in order to support your viewpoint. There isn't a limit on the scope of your proposals; the sky is the limit, here. The intent of this phase is to get ideas, not necessarily to write policy - recommendations that gain traction and community support will be refined during later phases.

Most importantly, Answer as few or as many questions as you wish. All responses are evaluated, so any information you provide is helpful.

If you prefer, you can submit your responses anonymously by emailing them to User:Ultraexactzz. Anonymous responses will be posted as subpages with the contributor's details removed. If you have any questions, please use the project talk page at Wikipedia talk:RfA Review.

Once you've provided your responses, please encourage other editors to take part in the review. We stress that editors who didn't participate in the question phase are encouraged to participate now - 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

Selection and Nomination

A1. Editors note that the RfA process can be daunting to prospective administrators, and that the process itself may discourage otherwise qualified candidates from seeking adminship. How can this "Selection Bias" be countered?

• Response: ...

A2. Editors expressed concern over unprepared or unqualified candidates at RfA, noting that their candidacies result in NOTNOW and SNOW closures that can be discouraging. In lieu of minimum requirements for adminship, how can prospective candidates be educated about RfA and the community's expectations of its administrators?

• Response: Perhaps a clearer route to a page discussing things self-noms should be aware of (as in, what kind of people typically pass and typically fail RfA). However I would also note that we should take care not to ruffle ourselves too much about candidates' "discouragement". Disappointment is a part of life, and if adminship is no big deal, than failing an RfA should be no big deal too. I myself failed an RfA, largely on what I believe were political grounds (i.e. me mentioning inclusionism vs deletionism in my opening statement), but also because of my own rash impulse to hang my suitability as an admin on my own philosophical leanings, rather than my simple Wiki qualifications. Easy come, easy go.

A3. 44 editors expressed concern over excessive co-nominations. Some of these editors advocated a limit on co-nominations, perhaps capping them at one or two per candidate; others recommended asking prospective co-nominators to post a Strong Support in lieu of an actual nomination statement. How can the concern over Co-nominations be addressed?

• Response: I'm not sure what the point of co-nominations even is. Why should we have them at all? Anything additional to the initial nomination should just go in the "Support" section.

The RfA Debate (Questions, Election, Canvassing)

B1. 60 editors expressed concern over the number of questions asked of candidates, and indicated that questions should be limited in number. How can this be accomplished? What limits could be fairly imposed? Are there alternative means for the candidate to provide information about themselves without the prompting of questions?

• Response: I've never found the questions excessive in the least. Setting a bar for adminship at people who can speak intelligibly about the tasks they are proposing to do is not an onerous requirement.

B2. Editors expressed concern over the content of questions, with 43 editors disapproving of "Trick questions", 8 disapproving of questions that require only a quotation from policy to answer, and 54 favoring questions that relate directly to the candidate and their experiences, contributions, conflicts, etc. How should the scope of possible questions be determined? Conversely, how would the decision to remove bad-faith or problematic questions be made, and by whom? What subjects should be specifically off-limits, and why?

• Response: Again, I can't think of any instances where questions ventured into territory inappropriate to the occasion. Trick questions are indeed a dick move, but I think people recognize them as such, and don't hold their failure against candidates so much.

B3. Editors note that RfA is seen as a negative process, with issues such as badgering of opposes, personal attacks, and a general lack of civility being prominent concerns. How can the RfA process be changed to address these concerns?

• Response: Lack of civility is a concern in any internet endeavor. I've never personally witnessed any truly rancorous RfA debates, but I have no doubt that they exist in abundance. Perhaps a more prominent reminder to all those who choose to vote in such debates that it is a positive process to promote qualified candidates and offer instruction to the unqualified, but that's about it. How can you pass a law asking people to stop being jerks?

B4. The very nature of the RfA process was disputed. Some editors desire rationales with every vote, and favor a more discussion and consensus-based process similar to other processes on the English wikipedia. Other editors desire a more vote-based election, where the raw numbers of supports and opposes are the critical factor. Is there one of these methods that would provide a clearer consensus on the community's view of a candidate? Or, alternatively, is a hybrid of the two preferable, and how should that be structured?

• Response: I've found the rationales to be no more or less discussion based than any other process here. Sure you get a lot of empty "support" or "oppose" votes, but sometimes, particularly when lots of people have spoken before you, there is simply no need to reiterate your reasons again and again in every debate. Making these things a chore for its participants is not really a great answer to anything.

B5. The amount of discretion held by Bureaucrats to remove or discount problem votes was also discussed, with some editors favoring increased discretion for Bureaucrats. 25 editors also favored a detailed closing rationale from Bureaucrats, detailing the specific factors that resulted in the candidate being successful (or not successful). What changes to the RfA process or format could clarify community consensus on this issue? Should Bureaucrats take a more active role in managing (or clerking) ongoing RfAs?

• Response: A detailed closing rationale, however, is a perfectly reasonable thing to wish for.

B6. 68 editors noted that a limited form of Canvassing or advertising would be acceptable, if such canvassing was done on-site and in a neutral fashion. How could a candidate advertise the fact that he or she is a candidate for adminship, while being completely neutral in the audience to which he or she advertises?

• Response: Perhaps a box at the top of your watchlist that you could turn on and off in your preferences that would list the current candidates for adminship? Otherwise, any deliberate choosing of your audience would violate neutrality. Advertising is by definition not neutral, regardless of its content, and candidates (and their opponents) should not be free to choose who gets to see their canvassing.

Training and Education

C1. Though 73 editors responded favorably to the Admin Coaching programme, 39 were critical of the process for "Teaching for the test", or for being an RfA preparation programme rather than an Adminship preparation programme. In what ways could Admin Coaching be improved to focus more on adminship itself?

• Response: I wholeheartedly agree that "teaching for the test" is a big concern. A cookie-cutter program for instilling what we want in admins is a bad idea, I think, since there are many areas to which an admin can contribute, and people should be free to find their own level, their own interests. "Admin school" is too meta for my taste...if people have all this energy to spare, I think they should be putting it into the encyclopedia, and most of the skills they will need to become an admin will naturally emerge. The very idea of admin school speaks to people who are too impatient to do the work necessary to develop the right kind of knowledge and experience, and most of the people I've seen with "coaches" are comparatively new and inexperienced, or inconstant in their attention to Wikipedia, and generally people you don't want to be an admin anyway. Being given the answers to a few common questions is not enough.

C2. In evaluating New Admin School, some editors noted that a Mentorship element would be of great benefit to newly minted administrators - something that Admin Coaching provides in a direct one-on-one coach-coachee team. Similarly, 15 editors characterized Admin Coaching, a primarily pre-adminship process, as being invaluable after the RfA, which is traditionally when New Admin School is used for training. Are there areas where the two processes overlap, and can be made more complementary? Are there common themes or elements that could be shared between the two processes, in order to improve the effectiveness of both?

• Response: Post-RfA mentorship is not in any way a bad idea, though. Certain tasks a new admin might be QUALIFIED to do, but perhaps, on a practical, technical level, uncertain how they are actually accomplished.

Adminship (Removal of)

D1. Editors noted that the current voluntary Admins open to Recall process is redundant to Dispute Resolution process such as Requests for Comment and Arbitration. In the absence of Recall (i.e. if it were removed altogether), how could existing processes be adapted to more effectively deal with issues of administrator abuse?

• Response: I've never understood "Admins open to recall". It's idiotic. All admins, as far as I am concerned, are open to recall. If someone uses the tools poorly, of course they should lose the tools. It's no different from any other editor, e.g. people with rollback privileges.

D2. Editors cited the voluntary nature of the Admins open to Recall process as problematic, and 40 went as far as to recommend a mandatory process for all administrators, either as a mandatory form of Admins open to Recall, or a more formal version of the process administered by Bureaucrats. As a separate process from WP:DR, how could the current recall process be standardized for use as a mandatory process? Who would be responsible for such a process?

• Response: Again, all admins should be open to recall, and it should be handled by other admins. If they truly want us to believe that adminship is no big deal, than losing one's adminship should, correspondingly, be no big deal either.

D3. 44 editors criticized the recall process for being too open to abuse, both through spurious or bad-faith calls for an admin to be recalled, or through administrators who fail to follow through on a commitment to stand for recall. How can the recall process be amended to address these concerns?

• Response: Recalling would be no more open to abuse than any other Wiki process. Probably the way to handle this would be to segment the process: a RfR (request for recall), run by admins, would result only in the issue of a "formal censure", like our current user warnings ({{subst:uw-vand1}}), and if an admin has accrued three or more formal censures perhaps there should be a next-level RfR heard by a bureaucrat, rather than other admins, which could potentially result in the admin being desysoped. After a waiting period they could then re-apply at RfA like everyone else.

D4. Some editors recommended that administrators be required to stand for some form of reconfirmation after a given period of time. How would such reconfirmation be structured? How long would an admin have before such reconfirmation would be required? Could such reconfirmation be triggered by an effort to recall an admin, and how would that be handled? What form would such reconfirmation take (RfA, Straw Poll, etc)?

• Response: If editors have given no reason to be taken to recall or formal dispute resolution, I see no reason to add to our workloads by instituting regular reconfirmation processes for people already confirmed.

Overall Process

E1. The earliest version of the RfA policy states that adminship is granted to "anyone who has been an active Wikipedia contributor for a while and is generally a known and trusted member of the community." Current policy leaves the definition of a "trusted editor" to the community. Editors offered a wide range of basic characteristics desirable of administrators, including Trustworthiness, competence, and communication skills. How could the RfA process be amended to either A) more fully ensure that editors selected as admins do indeed have the full trust of the community, or B) more fully fit the community's expectations for administrators?

• Response: ...

E2. Editors expressed concern over the format of the Requests for Adminship process. Some suggested that RfA has become a form of high-impact editor review, while others expressed concern over the view of Adminship itself as a goal or "trophy" that all editors should attain after a certain period of time. In taking the RfA process as a whole, what elements work well? What elements should be removed or amended?

• Response: The view of adminship as a brass ring is a difficult one to dispell. It is a level of user that is not open to everyone (therefore exclusive) and, to some, a challenge to attain. Frankly, I think it's one that is here to stay.

Once you're finished...

Thank you again for taking part in this review of the Request for Adminship process.

Your responses will be added to Category:Wikipedian Recommendations to RfA Review, which will be used to review the responses after this phase is concluded.

Footnote

This question page was generated by {{RFAReview}} at 15:48 on 26 September 2008.