User:Leifern/Adminwatch idea

Does Wikipedia need an independent "adminwatch?"

On a more or less regular basis, there are protests against perceived inequities, overreaching, and even abuse of power among admins. And while most admins are conscientious, self-sacrificing, and scrupulously honest participants in the Wiki enterprise, it certainly appears that enough editors are unconvinced about the admin process to make for quite a bit of noise and dissent.

The noise and dissent is a distraction for everyone, and certainly the admins, who take on their roles in their spare time. It is also very difficult to assess whether there is any merit to the individual protests, since we always deal with editors who happen to be pissed-off about a particular issue.

The thought behind this userspace article is to set up an independent admin watch community within Wikipedia that takes responsibility for monitoring the performance of the admins, specifically with respect to the policies and guidelines they are expect to uphold and comply with - see Wikipedia:Administrators' reading list for a good overview.

The community would have no special powers beyond editor privileges - its goal would be to improve the quality of admin activities, both by defending sound admin practices and documenting admin misbehavior. Since Wikipedia has no formalized grievance procedures against admins, this community would act as an ombudsman to facilitate more informed decision-making on promoting, disciplining, and in extreme cases banning or de-admining admins.

A few points are worth emphasizing:

This has to be fact-based - anyone who wants to get attention from adminwatch better have their facts straight and their narrative clear.
This is not about content disputes - it's about improving the consistency and reliability of admin decisions in light of Wikipedia standards and common sense
It is a primarily a service to admins - this may seem counterintuitive, but let's face it: admins are too busy doing their work to worry about policing themselves in general, and even less getting each other into trouble.
It is not a substitute for other formalized processes, for several reasons: 1) the community has no ability to act on anything, aside from providing information; 2) there already are good processes - the issue is that decision-making is often inadequately informed and burdened by strong emotional exchanges

Some things to consider:

How do we organize information? There are a couple of things I would like us to track:
- Emerging de facto policy and practice, and variations - the extent to which admins react differently to the same events
- Admin production - some are busier than others, and they probably specialize in different things
- Types of complaints against admins - what are the categories, what does it take for them to be legitimate, actionable, etc.
- Admin success stories/accolades - admins sometimes put in heroic efforts to resolve really tough issues, and often it's thankless, and especially when the issues are contentious.
How do we organize ourselves? In particular, it would be great if we could provide meaningful statistics on admin activity, but for that we need developers to participate
How do we interact with others? Should we have a businesslike, cordial, adversarial tone?
And, perhaps most importantly: how do we police ourselves? There are so many nasty scenarios for this group - it could make itself an adversary rather than an enabler for admins, it could become a forum for endless petty complaints, or a pulpit for nutty editors, etc.

--Leifern 16:32, 3 March 2006 (UTC)