User talk:QEDK/ACE2020

Semantics

If it is your "opinion" of the race, it is your subjective opinion, not your objective opinion.

Pedantically yours,

tim ///// Carrite (talk) 04:36, 15 November 2020 (UTC)

@Carrite: That's a good point - it is my subjective opinion but I am trying to take an objective view so to say. I'll reword it or you can suggest! --qedk (t 愛 c) 16:58, 15 November 2020 (UTC)

Subjectively, I must object. What object is the subject you will subject to your objective, of subjectively stating that which is objective?  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:27, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

Re. Scottywong

Re. Scottywong: "One of our old-era admins with a reputation to precede them (in a good way)" - You know you're aging in Wiki-years when you see Scottywong referred to as belonging to an "old-era" and your initial reaction is, "Scottywong? But he's a newer administrator!" Because yeah, he's only had the sysop flag for eight years now. Crazy. Kurtis ^(talk) 18:09, 29 November 2020 (UTC)

The time around which I joined was probably the golden-era of new administrators and Scottywong was probably one of the last few to get through. Now that I've been here over a decade, it doesn't feel like that much time at all. But yeah, it is crazy. --qedk (t 愛 c) 21:52, 30 November 2020 (UTC)

Not-an-admin

I'm curious what your not-an-admin general disqualification view is. I've see three variants of this: "doesn't have community trust", "needs the tools to do the work", and "doesn't understand what it's like to be an admin". On the first, I've wondered why there seems to be only one sense of what community trust is and what route is required to ascertain it, when both RfA and ACE are essentially elections with detailed community assessment (unless a candidate refuses to meaningfully answer questions). Plus the skill-sets for the "jobs" are different, and so on.

On the second, it turns out that OS/CU, available to all Arbs, provide ability to see deleted revisions, which is apparently the only admin/sysop tool of regular use to Arbs (they don't need to be able to delete pages, issue blocks, etc.)

On the third, that's harder to address. I have, and probably most non-admin ACE candidates will have, other advanced permissions that were once admin-only, like TemplateEditor and FileMover, to which INVOLVED, ADMINACCT, etc., also apply (and then some – misuse of them can result in their removal simply by a perfunctory AN discussion, no RFARB necessary). That, and the argument may go both ways: admins are, on average, further removed from day-to-day encyclopedia building the more mired they get in administrivia; so there could be a "no longer understands what it's like to be a regular editor" issue. :-) ArbCom has been accused of this frequently, and of being "stacked" in favor of admins against "peons". (In fairness, what is clearly really happening is that ArbCom is reticient to issue a restriction rather than a non-actionable warning because an admin with an active restriction is often seen as having lost their RfA trust and thus deserving of desyopping anyway; there's not much of a middle ground between "wrist-slap" and "decapitation". This is why I've argued for a "two simultaneous restrictions" standard. It'd be a non-exclusive one; if someone pooed the screwch bad enough to need an immediate desysop, it would not be necessary, of course, that they already be subject to one restriction.)

[Edit: I've since noticed a fourth admins-only rationale for ArbCom, in various versions which can be combined as: "only admins have sufficient dispute-resolution, consensus-assessment, and policy-crafting experience". This doesn't hold water, since many admins do none of that at all and focus on rote, techncial stuff, while and many editors do a lot of [[WP:NAC|NAC}], etc., and most of our WP:P&G material is written, and interpretation of it shaped, by the vast non-admin majority. Many non-admins also have real-world professional experience in these things, and it is unlikely that the average admin has more of them (there's certainly no evidence suggesting this, though it may well be true of people who volunteer for ArbCom, who seem more likely to be attorneys, academic/project managerial people, etc., judging from what they disclose about themselves).]

Anyway, most people have already voted, and this isn't meant as an "argument" to begin with. I'm just curious what people's not-an-admin rationales really boil down to, whether I've missed any, and whether observations like I made above might have any impact on them for future ACEs.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:27, 3 December 2020 (UTC); 4th rationale type added, 19:56, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish: I don't have such a view at all. I never hated being a non-admin and I never saw non-admins as being "lesser" for any purpose, which is also why I didn't like how some places which had no reasons to be closed off for non-admins were written in a manner which made it so (WP:MR), eventually making progress with "liberalising" the process so to say. That is also why I was a non-administrator for 10 years before eventually running for adminship. But that's precursory to your main question - why do I view non-adminship as a disqualification - which I don't but I will explain in the manner of someone who does. The primary reasoning is that I feel the community has elevated adminship to the status of a "power" rather than a technical ability to assist the community - that is also why the people who wield the tools are required to walk through, what I can only describe as a trial of fire, while your detractors are free to take their potshots at you. I also feel that the "political" nature of being an admin is becoming more necessary - where there is more oversight on what any administrator does (which is good) and anyone who steps out of line (subjective line, so to say) gets accosted (which is bad), this means that the role becomes undesirable and puts off people further, essentially making admins a scarce(r) commodity, furthering this idea that they have "power". While none of that is a disqualification per se, but the more and more ingrained idea that adminship is the least level of community trust required for "positions of power" is becoming apparent. In the end, I believe that a guide has to reflect the views of the community and even other that that, there were just too many other reasons to not support the particular non-admin candidates for this election (which I'm free to discuss privately). --qedk (t 愛 c) 09:28, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the interesting response! I must have misunderstood your voter guide; it seemed skeptical of me and one other candidate simply for being non-admins. :-) To wax a bit essayish in response to some of what you said:

'I feel the community has elevated adminship to the status of a "power" rather than a technical ability' – Yes, though I think this is unfortunate, "a wrong" in a sense, though perhaps inevitable due to the creation of the discretionary sanctions regime, which actually handed admins a great deal of difficult-to-appeal power over other editors where it did not previously exist. I also agree with your assessment of the trial-of-fire nature of RfA. That is primarily the result of DS, which has made "adminship is not a big deal" no longer really true, a hollow mantra.

'admins ... accosted' – Yes. We've ended up with this problem where it's remarkably difficult to address actual admin misbehavior (of a genuinely corrosive or grossly incompetent sort), because of a perception that an admin with any active restriction has lost their RfA trust and should be desyopped, thus no admin should be given a sanction unless the misconduct rises to desysop level. A slap on the wrist, or a beheading; no middle ground. A cascading effect of this is a community feeling of admins becoming mostly unaccountable, and a related rise in people wanting to raise holy hell about even minor admin missteps (to build a larger dirt-pile of claims, to finally force action with regard to earlier, more serious problems that were not addressed), plus a sense of ArbCom as an "admin protection board". Countervailingly, after this year's triple back-to-back desysoppings for things many did not consider that serious, now there seems to be an admin-corps perception of ArbCom as swinging to an "admin execution board" stance. I'm reminded a lot of the slide into polarization and dysfunction in US and to an extent UK politics over the last decade. :-/

I and at least one sitting Arb have argued for a middle ground to be created, a "multple restrictions = desysop" position (though of course a really bad uck fup could still just go straight to desysop; it wouldn't be a get-out-of-jail-free card). Aside from this and reform of DS to be less capricious, I've also argued for an ArbCom information page (along WP:ASPERSIONS lines), making it clearer that two-way interaction bans are not to be interpreted as sanctions at all but simple personality-conflict peacekeeping (if the behavior needs sanctions, then real sanctions should also be issued, like a topic ban for a while, a short block, or whatever). ArbCom's been clear in buried case statements that 2-way ibans are not sanctions for misdeeds, but the community is not noticing, and treats them like "scarlet letters" anyway. This ends up making it easier for admins and non-admins alike to be treated punitively (often for issues that resolved themselves between two individuals several years ago). That is, it's one of those "accosted" things – something people add to their dirt-list against someone, whether it has any pertinence at all to any ongoing issue/dispute.

I think the synergistic, vicious-cycle nature of some of this relates strongly to 'this means that the role becomes undesirable and puts off people further, essentially making admins a scarce(r) commodity, furthering this idea that they have "power"'. I've seen some credible analysis of modern RfA as essentially power gatekeeping, a class struggle. It's no accident that vociferous, knife-twisting opposes at RfA (besides "candidate blocked me once and my butt still hurts" noise), tend mostly to come from admins, often including current or former Arbs. DS and related issues have actually created a class conflict (in clear effect if not in every fact), where none really existed in the old, pre-DS days of "adminship is no big deal".

'the more and more ingrained idea that adminship is the least level of community trust required for "positions of power" is becoming apparent' – It's quite unfortunate, since it just helps perpetuate the cycle. If all Arbs are admins, then the community is always going to think ArbCom is unduly siding with admins. If some admins do feel they actually are a power-wielding class, then they have a vested interest in protecting that power, stacking ArbCom with admins who actually will try to avoid taking admin-related cases or issuing anything but wrist-slaps in response to those that are accepted. (This year's triple-blip notwithstanding; it was clearly a negative reaction to FRAMGATE: "WMF stepped in because they think ArbCom won't restrain en.wiki admins, so we'd better prove otherwise by overreacting, to throw a few people under the bus.") I don't really see a way around this problem other than breaking the "only admins in ArbCom" glass ceiling, reforming DS, and providing some middle-ground way addressing admin-conduct cases, while also more explicitly reducing the "dirt" that's considered admissible. One often looks for a one-shot "break the back of the problem!" solution, but the RfA–adminship–ArbCom–DS–community interrelation is so complex, so organically evolved over time, that it's going to be a matter of peeling away layers of the problem, improving it almost as incrementally as it originally worsened.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:47, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

That is a very nuanced understanding of the complexities involved but I think the problem is something much more fundamental - this is not to say that the DS system does not need more tweaks - but that I think it's more ingrained than a fix-DS-fix-mentality situation (I am aware that you don't think that's how it is, but just to consider the point). I suspect that we have reached a point of sufficient complexity and overall relevance that people think Wikipedia is serious business (contrary to what it should be). I totally get everyone's point - hey, you're part of one of the largest volunteer missions in the world, to promote and spread free knowledge - but it's very easy to lose that in context to reality, it's just another online community. Every time I see a new editor, I can only hope that they don't fall into this rabbit hole of "everything needs work" and Wikipedia being the most important thing in their life (which is OK, but yeah...) - this furthers the idea that everything here needs to be as "perfect" as possible - which draws into the idea that RfA candidates have to be virtually spotless, on-wiki and off-wiki. Most of the candidates which fail now (barring self-noms) would easily pass in a pre-2012 RfA era. I do agree that having a non-admin on the committee would allay some of the "community trust" idea but I don't think that's what voters are looking for at all, I think it's the same that is expected of an RfA candidate nowadays - solid endorsements, unblemished record and a given history of commitment. --qedk (t 愛 c) 18:16, 4 December 2020 (UTC)