User:Gosgood/RfA review

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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:

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

   I think, so long as the nominator does not make it a wiki-career, that nominating another editor as a candidate is a significant part of the selection process. The nomination ensures that at least two editors, the candidate and the nominator, believe in the candidate's competence. I would consider that at least one nomination is mandatory; a self-nominator lacks independent verification.

   That noted, I dislike editors who make a career of sponsoring candidates. I'm concerned that (yet another) Wikipedia subculture is flowering around RfA, more concerned with its own workflow of minting administrators than developing encyclopedic content. Administrative coaching seems to be an institution of that subculture. See the last remark that I've written for this questionnaire.

2. Administrator coaching (either formally or informally)

   I don't think that coaching helps in any fundamental way; it may help the candidate in their day-to-day discharge of responsibilities. Honest coaches might help a candidate understand the nature of the role: it is not the next level of the Wikipedia MMORPG, it is not the ultimate barnstar for being a good editor; it is a project maintenance role involving mundane process flow. Nomination means that at least one other editor thinks you are dutiful enough to perform routine tasks reliably. But then, practically any editor can make such a determination about a candidate; they don't need the title of 'coach.'

   • I dislike the form of administrative coaching that encourages candidates to build up their 'wikipedia resumes' — reaching edit minimum levels, rapid-fire GA nominations or reviews, superficial FA nominations, light-weight peer review commentary, and the like. The practice turns the exercise into a numbers game and some candidates attempt to build numbers through superficial participation. This can be disruptive. For example, participants in the Good Article project regularly need to review the reviews because evidence indicates that articles are being superficially reviewed and passed by admin wannabees paticipating in resume building projects. The project is not so well-staffed that they can double-check every reviewer's effort.
   • I like the form of administrative coaching which concentrate on the technical aspects of doing the job. It is inefficient for a candidate to figure out that facet of practice on his or her own, when there are experienced (and presumably willing) administrators who can teach those things. I like the idea of Admin School I think turning would-be administrators on a test-bed MediaWiki based site has merit; It may be interesting to allow graduation only after students have seriously broken something, yet figured out how to fix it.

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

   Every candidate should have at least one nominator. There seems to be a marked tendency for self-nominators to fail; I take this to mean that editors feel more comfortable with candidates that have been nominated by other editors; I certainly feel that way myself. I don't think there should be multiple co-nominations for sake of having numbers; this smacks of confusing Wikipedia with a social network and regarding an administrative commission as just a social award. Additional co-nominators are worthwhile if they bring new observations about candidates to the discussion.

4. Advertising and canvassing

   I think a certain amount of canvassing is necessary to help bring the RfA balloting into a wider view. I believe that the RfA process is suffering from a lack of part-time participatants; carefully targetted messages sent to editors who have had working relationships with the candidate, but who do not typically participate in RfA debates will bring fresh information to the debates. Too much canvassing can be disruptive, however.

5. Debate (Presenting questions to the candidate)

   I believe the debate process is fundamentally sound; the questions, particularly original questions concerning current Wikipedia operations, are one of the stongest aspects of the nomination process. I dislike questions that simply open old edit war or policy debates that an RfA voter may have had with the candidate at some point.

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

   If anything, the election suffers from trivial votes: (support per nom), a misdemeanor which I have committed myself. I believe voters should furnish reasoned explanations on why they voted the way they do, even for support votes. This tends to be the case only with Oppose or Neutral votes, probably because many editors feel that they cannot write 'Oppose' — a hard word — without some kind of mitigating explanation. I think, during voting, participants often loose track of what an election is for: does a candidate exhibit evidence of being a diplomatic, thoughtful, cool, and technically competent administrator? Too often, I think, elections snowball or pile-on because of a small transgression, which becomes magnified out of promotion. To combat this, I think votes ought to be cast with a great deal more thought and care. I think it would be useful to make votes rare, and therefore valuable -- too valuable to throw away trivially (see last remark).

7. Withdrawal (the candidate withdrawing from the process)

   Candidates should be allowed to withdraw anytime; a withdrawal should never be regarded pejorativly. I do not want to have an administrator with any sense of doubt on whether they can do the job on the job. A candidate should not have to defend his or her withdrawing during a subsequent nomination debate.

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

   Unless the bureaucrat has an epiphany, he or she need not give detailed explanations concerning the closing decision. I do not care for snowball closes because it short-circuits debate.

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

   Always useful.

10. Recall (the Administrators Open to Recall process)

    Indeed, I think administrators ought to be limited to a specific term (see last remark) and, in the interim, ought to be subject to recall based on a minimum set of standards. Further remarks are in the last remark.

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?

   An administrator facilitates established processes. The responsibility is distinct from that of an editor, who develops cotent. The two functions are coeval; an administrator inclined to think in ranking terms, with administrators above editors, have an immature view of the role. I agree with Gmaxwell that we ought to entitle the role "Janitor.'; it is more apt and dispels the notion that process management entails extra authority.

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

   In order of importance

   1. Diplomatic: In particular, inducing editors to return to editing, instead of politicking, fighting, or conspiring against other editors. Getting editors to return to contributing to the project takes priority over removing editors from the project; a good administrator should not take too much pleasure from removing a difficult user from the project, though clearly there are cases when the administrator has no alternative.
   2. Cool, mature, and emotionally stable Administrators represent Wikipedia. They cannot permit themselves to lose their temper.
   3. Technical acumen The extra tools can damage the project, at least temporarily. They should be able to grasp the gist of the WikiMedia platform.
   4. Completely familiar with policy They need to know when the WP:IAR policy is appropriate.
   5. Plenty of time to work Administrators are on call. Minding the store is a 24x7 operation. Administrators who need an extended Wikibreak should step down from the role.

Finally, when thinking about Requests for Adminship:

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

   Yes. I get nice 'thank you' notes from the candidates. ;)

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

   No.

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

   I am concerned about the somewhat narrow base of participants in RfA ballots. Roughly, there seems about 150,000 regularly contributing editors out of seven million registered, committing about 200,000 edits daily. There are about 1,500 adminstrators who strive to maintain an environment conducive to editing. Since an RfA is the admission portal to this group. How many editors man this gate?

   I employed tangotango's RfA reporting tool, to get a rough idea. I reviewed the six active applications for June 29 at around 19:00 UTC. At this time, there were 369 votes (support, oppose, neutral) cast by 179 editors, or, on the average, two votes per editor. The average is somewhat misleading; some editors' participation rate far exceeds this average. Of the 179 editors, 9 participated in every ballot, 7 participated in 5 ballots, 14 participated in 4 ballots, and 18 participated in three ballots. Of the 179 participants, 48 editors (9 + 7 + 14 + 18) accounted for a little more than half the votes cast ( 54% or 199/369). Now, there is nothing exhaustive about this survey, but it does illustrate the discomfort I have about the narrow base of participation. There seems to be a core voter group of about 100 to 150 to which a candidate needs to 'sell' his RfA.

   I would prefer wider participation in RfAs. To that end, I'd like to offer the following proposals. Since it is too early for serious proocess re-engineering, I've written the proposals to be more thought provoking than practical. These center on the notion that votes ought to be in limited quantity. Editors can participate too frequently in RfAs and expend their quotas. Candidates wishing to establish broad support among editors would generally need to reach out to those who do not regularly participate in RfA; they are not 'depleted' editors. Particulars follow:

   1. Vote limits An editor can ask any number of questions at any number of Rfa's. However, he or she may only vote in -- for sake of discussion — a maximum of six Rfa's a year.
   2. Accrual To limit the effects of meat puppetry, new accounts would not accrue any voting rights for the first six months of their existence, though new account holders are welcome to comment. After six months, rights to vote accrue at the rate of one every other month, until an editor reaches a maximum of six ballots. As editors accrue voting rights, they may participate in RfA's, expending a right each time they vote in a ballot. Frequent participants would tend to have few rights to vote in reserve, while editors who rarely participate in RfA's will likely have the right to participate in as many as six upcoming ballots.
   3. Frequency: A candidate who does not secure a commission cannot stand again for one year. This arises from the notion that the nomination queue ought to be cleared for people who aren't nominated very frequently, who bring fresh and interesting perspectives to the process.
   4. Participation:Administrators whose participation slips below a certain minimum for a certain period of time -- precise values elude me, but, roughly, less than three days a week on average, as observed over a six month period — revert back to being editors. This stems from the notion that administration requires some level of ongoing committement.
   5. Term limits Five years on, an administrator should stand for another nomination; he or she may continue administering until (and unless) a lack of supporting votes indicates an absence of broad support. This stems from the notion that an administrator embodies governance. While content development is mainly not a democratic process, I argue that the governance of the encyclopedia is; in that the authority of an administration stems from the consent of the governed.

   This scheme promotes three effects which I favor.

   1. An editor who votes too frequently, and, perhaps, too superficially, can expend his or her vote supply and must hold off for awhile. So a regularly participating editor is encouraged to vote prudently, and perhaps wisely, reserving his or her vote for candidates that are really good or really bad.
   2. To establish support, a candidate would tend to canvas editors who do not regularly participate in RfAs; likewise, editors who feel strongly against a candidate would need to reach beyond the usual participants. Both efforts would tend to spread awareness of RfA proceedings to a wider range of editors. An increase in canvassing may very well be problematical. Candidates or opponents should carefully gauge if their activities are becoming disruptive.
   3. Finally, administrators would not hold the office for an indefinite term. Inactivity is a reason to cull an administrator; administrators need to be re-elected at the end of their terms. This would promote some turn-over among administrators, fresh points of view would come with new administrators.

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

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

This question page was generated by {{RFAReview}} at 15:45 on 29 June 2008.