User:Gmaxwell/RfA review

Questions

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

1. Candidate selection (inviting someone to stand as a candidate)

   This is pretty reasonable as is... although some of the negative aspects of the RFA process probably discourage many good users from accepting candidacy.

1. Administrator coaching (either formally or informally)

   I do not think highly of this. It's good for people to learn from others, but formalizing it does not seem to be too useful.

1. Nomination, co-nomination and self-nomination (introducing the candidate)

   Too much emphasis on nomination is given: Some other projects like commons require all RFAs be self-nom. The whole nomination process makes RFA more political and probably promotes cliques in Wikipedia. The occasional oppositions against self noms are absolutely poisonous.

1. Advertising and canvassing

   RFA is heavily slanted by a selection bias even in the absence of canvassing. There are a number of RFA regulars with non-majority views who manage to exert significant unjustified influence on our adminship process simply by being diligent. Personal advertising/canvassing by candidates probably serves to make RFA more neutral and fair vs the inherit bias in the current system. Oppositional canvassing is very bad, .. considering how few opposition it takes to kill an RFA today, someone who has done indisputably good work will often have a hard time passing if that good work happened to make them a couple of enemies.

1. Debate (Presenting questions to the candidate)

   I think questions are useful, but their usefulness is diminished by being used in such an inconsistent manner. Often questions are used to push a particular project-political agenda. Sometimes a question will be posed to determine "is this user a deletionist or not?" and the result of the question is that the deletionists vote one way, the inclusionists vote the other. A candidate's passage or failure shouldn't depend on their ability to spin half answers to satisfy fundamentalists in those perpetual debates. I've also seen a number of questions about decision making in difficult corner cases... But hard cases make bad rules. These types of questions do not produce results which are representative of the users normal behavior and should be avoided.

1. Election (including providing reasons for support/oppose)

   Providing reasons is critical since it's the only way we can tell people supporting/opposing over valid causes from the multitude of people who will oppose because they are sore from a perfectly valid action, or whom are opposing all who don't share particular political alignments which are not relevant for adminship.

1. Withdrawal (the candidate withdrawing from the process)

   It's unfortunate that sometimes RFA becomes so hostile that the candidate must withdraw. We shouldn't pile on RFAs which are obviously going to fail, but we do. Otherwise, there is nothing wrong with withdrawal.

1. Declaration (the bureaucrat closing the application. Also includes WP:NOTNOW closes)

   Bureaucrats should be given wide discretion in their closures. Sometimes it will be appropriate to ignore a large number of comments because they related to irrelevant activities or by obviously biased speakers. In the interest of cooperation and friendship the 'crat shouldn't need to disclose the details of his/her decision since no one wants to be told they were not counted. The biased commenter mean well and we should treat them with kindness and respect, but if someone has a wrongheaded idea we shouldn't allow it to determine the outcome.

1. Training (use of New Admin School, other post-election training)

   Training materials are good, and we should have robust tutorials for use of the tools. It would also be handy if we liberally granted adminship on various test wikis like en.labs.wikimedia.org.

1. Recall (the Administrators Open to Recall process)

   All the current 'open to recall' proposals suck. Users who advertise themselves as open to recall select widely varying criteria. Recall is generally hard because we, as a community, can't tell the difference between sour grapes, genuine differences of opinion, and harmful administrators. These same problems also exist for initial adminships, but newer users have less chances of gaining 'sworn enemies' through no fault of their own.

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

1. How do you view the role of an administrator?

   The word "administrator" implies a lot of things to people which are clearly not true of Wikipedia administrators. Wikipedia administrators are regular users who have demonstrated enough sanity and stability to be trusted with a few more disruptive buttons. We should change the name of administrators to something more accurate like "Janitor"

1. What attributes do you feel an administrator should possess?

   Above all administrators should have a basic level of introspection: They should be able to recognize their own biases and emotions and avoid using their administrative tools in areas that touch them. Administrators should have the ability to laugh (privately) at people who are trying to make them mad, instead of letting themselves get caught up in drama. Administrators should be resistant to hysteria and panic and should act in a calm, considered, and deliberate matter. Administrators should understand that while some views expressed are batshit-insane it's also true many people have reasonable views even when we do not agree with them. Administrators should give me a pony.

Finally, when thinking about Requests for Adminship:

1. Have you ever voted in a request for Adminship? If so what was your experience?

   I think RFA votes are frequently hostile and frustrating as a voter. I think the process is only marginally more likely to make good selections than a purely random process. I am disinclined to participate except occasionally.

1. Have you ever stood as a candidate under the Request for Adminship process? If so what was your experience?

   I've been/are admin on several other WMF wikis. Oh, you mean ENwp? No. I think the scars might give me nightmares for life!

1. Do you have any further thoughts or opinions on the Request for Adminship process?

   I think it should be scrapped and replaced with something substantially different. There are many possibilities and I'd support trying out virtually any one of them.

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:Gmaxwell/RfA review]] added by ~~~ at ~~~~~

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

This question page was generated by {{RFAReview}} at 22:44 on 22 June 2008.