User:Linuxbeak/RFA Reform/Analysis

This is an analysis of the current comments/complaints/etc. that have been cited. I will modify it as necessary. Linuxbeak (drop me a line) 22:34, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

The current RFA system

Right now, we have an RFA system that relies heavily on people voting for a candidate. Generally speaking, if the candidate receives at least 80% votes in support of his or her candidacy, then he/she will be promoted without question. 75-80% support rates are up to a bureaucrat to decide whether to promote or not.

There are three sections for voters: support, oppose and neutral. Neutral votes are not counted in the final tally. Because of the 80% guideline for bureaucrats, one oppose vote will nullify five support votes.

Reasoning behind a vote, especially oppose votes, are strongly encouraged. However, votes are not discounted if they lack a reason.

A request for adminship is run for exactly one week. At the end of the time period, the candidate is either promoted or is notified of his or her unsuccessful bid.

There is no current concrete way to de-admin an administrator who acts against the wishes and interests of the Wikipedia community, short of an arbitration case. Previously, bureaucrats had the ability to de-sysop abusive users, but that power was revoked after a former bureaucrat abused said ability.

As of this analysis, there were 797 administrators and 22 bureaucrats.

What has been praised

The process itself is relatively simple (for the voters). All a voter needs to do is provide his or her vote and sign it. The concept of voting itself is familiar to otherwise shy editors. The entire concept of an 80% support ratio needed for promotion makes the bureaucrat's job simple in terms of whether to promote or not.

What has been complained about

From what I've gathered, there is not so much a problem with the RFA system as there is with the voters. Quoting User:Radiant!, "It has been said that long-time users that aren't admins yet, have accumulated too many enemies to ever have a chance at adminship, despite the fact that their behavior is not better or worse than that of existing admins." User:Ghirlandajo has noted: "The current procedure is tuned so as to make it easier for users with 2,000 edits to get promoted than users with, say, 20,000 edits. That's why unexperienced and clueless admins seem to predominate in the community."

Voters being the problem has been cited in other cases, such as with bad-faith votes and voting to prove a point. This goes against WP:NOT (Wikipedia is not a soapbox) and WP:POINT. The fact that most votes are ultimately counted gives this complaint sufficient merit to be acknowledged as important. The herd-mindset arguement is also valid, as after a certain amount of votes new voters will stop providing reasons behind their vote. As such, there is no way for a bureaucrat to distinguish between a well thought-out vote and a figurative flip of a coin.

User:SchmuckyTheCat states: "The current process favors editors who stay out of edit/revert wars or any contentious issue. Then they are expected to uphold bans, decide on vandal bans, 3rr bans, use discretion after arbcom decisions etc. RfA candidates shouldn't be expected to get involved in wiki fights, but they should show some familiarity and interest in dispute resolution when that is their most discretionary decision involving real people." This echos several concerns raised to me (both publically and privately) about what voters are looking for. I forget who said it, but someone summed up RFA nicely: "If you keep out of trouble and out of sight, you will be given support for being uncontroversial and 'unlikely to abuse the tools'. If you get your hands dirty with trying to solve a POV war or even being marginally involved in some sort of dispute (however minor), the likelyhood of you receiving oppose votes for being likely to abuse admin tools or likely to get involved in another edit war is expotentially higher than you receiving support votes for being able to handle disputes."

User:Ghirlandajo says: "I recall an admin who wrote excellent articles but eschewed editing controversial topics. Several weeks after promotion, he was dragged into a dispute, started frantic revert warring, got blocked and then was astonished to learn that Wikipedia had some sort of dispute resolution procedures at all. In other words, we don't have a method to decide whether a candidate has admin skills and really knows how Wikipedia works. Three questions practiced today are not exams if you know what I mean."

Even furthermore is that three bureaucrats (User:Cecropia, User:Ilyanep, and myself) have specifically cited the voters to be a problem. 16 "faults" were named which covers WP:POINT, voters who don't know anything about the candidate they're voting for or against, voters who vote based upon reasons irrelevant to the candidate's suitibility, etc.

Analysis

Some people have raised the question: "what about RFA is broken?" Well, it looks like we've got a pretty solid answer here. It's not the process, but the voters themselves. I believe it is safe to say that there is solid agreement that most, if not all, of RFA's problems stem from the voters. Now, the challenge is to fix that. If there is a problem with the voters, then the something needs to be done to address the concerns of the community. As of right now, I am uncertain of how to do this. Linuxbeak (drop me a line) 22:34, 25 January 2006 (UTC)