Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship/Archive 66

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Requirements for RfA

I know this has been discussed 1000 times before, but I want to know right now when the new requirements that a user has to have been here for 6+ months and have accured 2000 edits was put into effect?

It took me over 3 years to achieve 6000 edits, did that make me a bad admin? — Ilyanep (Talk) 16:55, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Just before someone discovered how to enforce them. It's a full time job to keep up with the new rules. Edit: average failed nom has over 3,000 edits. Stephen B Streater 17:10, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Not everyone requires that. It is usually a good amount of time and enough edits to judge. Other than your lengthly signature, there should be no complains about you :) -- ReyBrujo 17:14, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Looking at the average edit counts of failed noms is not a good way of measuring changes in standards. If you remove failed self noms from that equation, it comes out to an average edit count of 4,742 edits per failed RfA nominee since 1 January 2006. I think a better way of measuring this is where the failure rate stablizes, i.e. the point past which the number of edits does not seem to influence the outcome of an RfA. This point seems to be around 2,000 edits (see above chart). --Durin 17:36, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
I too am disheartened at the standards being put into place at RfA. I see people with over 10,000 edits being opposed because they don't have enough talk page eidts. When I ran for adminship, I too was criticized for not having enough talk page edits. When I pointed out the the vast majority (60 - 70%) of the articles I worked on had talk pages with five of fewer comments on them, and that no less than one-third of the articles on my watchlist has no talk page at all, people suggested I put more active pages on my watchlist so that I can take place in debate! I worked as a German translator prior to my adminship. Most of the articles on my watchlist were articles I had written from scratch, and also were articles where I was the sole major contributor. People were literally telling me to put pages on my watchlist that I wasn't interested in so I could argue with people on those articles' talk pages! It was one of the most ridiculous things I have ever encountered in my time at Wikipedia. RyanGerbil10(The people rejoice!) 18:10, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
  • RfA is becoming the laughingstock of the Wikipedia community. My friends mock some of the opposes and now think their edits will be reverted because they do "not having enough portal talk edits" (taken out of context, but that's what people do). Something needs to be done; otherwise, Wikipedia is going implode because of a massive backlog of upkeep work. What we're doing here on RfA is similar to Wal-Mart hiring only people with X number of dollars in the bank. I propose another ammendment to WP:NOT — Wikipedia is not a place to put people on "statistical trials". — Deckiller 18:16, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
I agree with Ryan's statements above. And now it appears we will have a failed RfA for a user with 13,000 edits, who has a featured article, who works on many WikiProjects, who uses vandal-wacking tools already, and who has no civility issues within the last eight months... because of "not enough talk page edits". There is such a thing as standards, and then there's such a thing as going overboard with requirements. :( --Firsfron of Ronchester 18:25, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
Who are you referring to as the failed candidate? JoshuaZ 18:28, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
Agentsoo's, whose current RfA hovers at 69%. Although the RfA still has several days left, the first 48 hours are usually pretty indicative of how an RfA will turn out.--Firsfron of Ronchester 18:36, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
Ok, I was aware of how that RfA was going but was confused because it hadn't been closed yet. I agree that the way it is going is a bit odd (although one of the opposes is Masssiveego and that hardly counts). JoshuaZ 18:38, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
I can only vote my opinion. I fully encourage Wikipedians to excerise their option to vote. Any vote I place will absolutely count, and any new voters should know their votes will also equally count. --Masssiveego 05:06, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
In response to the above (and its accompannying editing summary of "response to belittling personal attack") I believe you have misinterpted what I said. My point was that since you generally vote oppose, your vote could plausibly be removed if one was trying to treat the first few days of an RfA as a sample of how things will proceed. This particularly makes sense when (as the case was when I had written the above comment) only a small number of people had voted in the RfA. JoshuaZ 05:10, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
Agentsoo's is the second-most-recent RfA to be added, and with only 17 voters so far, it's a little premature to be casting doom and gloom on it (also, he's now up to 76% as of this writing ;) -- nae'blis 20:21, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
Jumping in, perhaps it would be a good idea to come up with something like what's used for featured articles whereby we have a set of community standards (like Wikipedia:What is a featured article?) and that any objection should seek to relate to one of those standards. That might help eliminate some of the oppose votes that don't really relate to Wikipedia:What is good administrator?, like some of the things mentioned above. It also wouldn't mean automatic promotions once someone reaches a certain edit count, contribution time, etc. Just a thought. -- tariqabjotu (joturner) 18:45, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Interesting thought, and I like it! Problem though is that what makes a good administrator is very subjective. If we can get around that... --Durin 19:17, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
  • No more subjective than what makes a good FA. FAC is not much less contentious than RFA though, and there are plenty of bad faith/useless objections at FAC from people that don't understand the FAC criteria. But who knows, maybe having a community criteria would be a good thing. It may help make bad faith votes harder to make and or easier to see/ignore. In FAC Raul654 can just ignore the bad faith opposes or those that make it clear they don't know the criteria. It's worth a shot. - Taxman Talk 20:15, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
  • I don't think Wikipedia is about to implode because RfA is not promoting enough people to handle backlogs. If we look at Category:Administrative backlog, the list isn't all that long. Also keep in mind that two different studies have shown that approximately 50% of the administrator work is done by the top 20 most active administrators. Even if we doubled our promotion rates, having a better chance of finding a "top 20" administrator is not necessarily a definite conclusion. --Durin 18:47, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
    • True, I was purposely going a little overboard. I still think RfA is becoming ridiculous to a degree (and my friends have laughed about it :) ). I agree with Tari's idea, except for the fact that some questionable users may still get promoted using that system. — Deckiller 18:50, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
  • I don't doubt that there are votes that are absurd. I know there are. I do doubt that such votes are predominant or indicative in any respect of the general nature of RfA. --Durin 19:17, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
  • I think they are though. The general nature of RfA is that people can oppose for whatever reason they want to even if it doesn't help the project. There are large numbers of uninformed votes that make no attempt to truly identify if the candidate would make a good admin. - Taxman Talk 20:15, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Sure. But, I don't think we can conclude a particular case of vote as being indicative. The core problem here is that we passed a scalability threshold of the system a LONG time ago. People don't "know" each other on RfA anymore for the most part. The project is huge now, and virtually ever candidate that comes up is going to be one that we don't know from first hand experience. To review each candidate in detail, to come up with an informed vote....that's very hard. I conduct reviews of candidates against a set of standards I have for people whom I intend to nominate. It takes hours to complete the review. It's only after such an extensive review that I feel comfortable nominating someone. To be honest, I don't feel 100% confident in people that I haven't nominated, but voted support because I can't see spending hours doing a thorough review to come up with an informed vote. It's very hard. Very few people (if any?) are conducting thorough reviews of people prior to voting. Nominating, there's a few of us that do in-depth reviews. But voting? Probably less than 1%. --Durin 20:28, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Hours long completely thorough review is not needed every time, but a complete lack of an effort to review a candidate at all beyond, "no portal talk edits" is a problem, and it seems to be a systematic one. I don't think it has anything to do with the RfA process other than the fact that we prominently paste in edit count summaries that are completely irrelevant to determining if an editor would make a good admin. - Taxman Talk 20:38, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
  • (Excuse me for barging in) I completely agree and I'm glad people like Taxman feel this way too. I have been rudely shocked by some of the most useless and irrelevant objections. "Too few edits given the time he/she has spent here"; "not enough talk page edits"; "speaks too few languages"; "hasn't made any edits in the last 5 minutes" - too name a few. And what's worse, some of these are from admins. Can we please de-admin such people? :-) - Cribananda 20:47, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Over at Wiktionary (disclaimer: which has a small community where everyone knows each other), it is more or less up to the Bureaucrats to recognize absurd "no portal talk page edits" oppose votes, and to ignore them. I understand that it may not be that obvious here on Pedia, so adopting community-wide standards may be a better idea. But then, doesn't it become very obvious when someone will fail or will succeed? Are there any votes still needed then? I have never voted on RFAs for people that I'd never heard about, but that's an equally bad stance if everyone were to adopt that. — Wildrick 21:06, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
I believe any vote from Wikipedian that qualifies to vote is counted regardless of the reason. --Masssiveego 06:56, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
The one that shocked me, on my RfA, was the person who opposed due to not having 7/24th in WP space. Although the opinion was stuck out, that level of scrutiny makes no sense to me. Portal and help space edit requirements also make no sense whatsoever.--Firsfron of Ronchester 21:12, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

This is one way to look at controversial RFA that are not passing.

Controversial RFAs can be broken down into at least three types. Some RFA's do not offer a view of nom that reassures people unfamiliar with them that the nom is trustworthy and capable. These should be the easiest to fix. A few tweaks to either the nom record or RFA can make a stronger impression. Other times the RFA may provide a good view of the nom, but the particular people viewing the RFA have rigid standards that sink the nom. Still other RFA's have noms that some reasonable people think are prepared to be admins and other reasonable people disagree. The situation is worse when all three problems co-exist. --FloNight talk 22:31, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, there are silly votes on RfA sometimes. But that's why there is a 75% threshold, you can't fail unless at least a quarter of voting people believe you are unfit to be an administrator. I would like to see an example where a candidate failed primarily because of frivolous votes. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 23:49, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

My Rfa was going down before Taxman came in and called my detractors "unreasonable". RyanGerbil10(The people rejoice!) 23:59, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
And for that matter, I consider this to be pretty frivolous. RyanGerbil10(The people rejoice!) 00:02, 8 August 2006 (UTC)


"We have enough admins" ... and yet there's practically fights breaking out between the different wikipedia "departments" over each single qualified admin (we basically just see one or two pop up every month). See also below. Kim Bruning 04:38, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Either the situation has gotten more dire over the past few months while i've been inactive or there are more alarmists. I think a combination of both. Anyways, g'day and I'll try to do a couple more promotions in the future — Ilyanep (Talk) 04:51, 8 August 2006 (UTC)


Let me explain it this way. The shield from lawsuits for Wikipedia is the Admin who must select which information must be censored from the public. Too much censorship, and somebody who is doing a research paper will not get the information they need. Too little and we invite legal problems. I obviously do not want a vandal slipping through and misusing admin options to severely damage Wikipedia, or it's reputation. Given the long and difficult process of removing Admin, the only quality control toward preventing a system wide shut down by a renegade admin is to screen them before they can do damage. Remember people are donating their money, time and their effort. I rather not see such gifts go to waste because a few bad admin. It only takes a few rotten apples to spoil the barrel. Quoting one actor. "...choose wisely..." --Masssiveego 05:39, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

  • Reminds me of another line, "He chose....poorly". Too many RfA voters are looking for the holy grail. --Durin 12:57, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
    Yes, and it's ridiculous because if an admin did do something to "severely damage Wikipedia" it could be no worse than many trolls do, and that admin would almost immediately have their admin tools removed via WP:OFFICE.--MONGO 13:19, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
Agentsoo now stands at (31/5/2). See discussion at Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship/Agentsoo2 :) Dlohcierekim 02:15, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Edit count tables - hide/show

Is there any reason we couldn't wrap the edit count tables in Hide/Show boxes, such as demonstrated at: User:Kylu. I feel like the edit counts add clutter and forcing everyone to look at them as they scroll past is not really the attitude we want to promote. Dragons flight 00:23, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

The problem with that is that show/hide labels only work with the Monobook skin, with the other skins you don't see the [show] box and therefore cannot see the contents. —Mets501 (talk) 02:01, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
It's still better than nothing. Especially considering most people use Monobook.--W.marsh 02:40, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
That sounds like a good idea to me. To ensure graceful fallback, we'd need to set the default CSS state of the div to display:none display:block, so it'll incur a brief change in the perceived length of the page at every page load for Javascript browsers, but that seems like a small loss for something that could streamline the page. (Perhaps this fallback hack will fix the problem for non-monobook users?) - Tangotango 02:08, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
Sorry, I made a typo there. The template has to be set to display by default for browser compatibility. But this has nothing to do with Tyrenius' comment (different matter). - Tangotango 10:02, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
I think "forcing everyone to look at them" is exactly what we want. The record of an editor's contributions in this way is one of the fundamentals of judging their suitability (note "one" of). Tyrenius 08:28, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
However, you should look at the contributions, not at edit count stats. Hiding the stats and reminding people to look at the actual edits is a good idea. Kusma (討論) 08:36, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
The reports are interesting, though the length of them does possibly give undue weight to the quantity of edits. We could have a summary at the top (eg total; article/talk; WP/talk; edit summaries major/minor) on four lines with the full amount underneath. Stephen B Streater 08:52, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Admins coming off this page are useless, promote different admins.

I knew you'd look at such a provocative title! ;-) Actually, it's not quite true, the vandalbuster and volume editor admins coming off this page *ARE* useful, and you're doing a great job! It's just that we are running very very very short on admins in all the other categories of admins we can have. (personally I'm running really short on mediators, but I know other people are complaining too)

A couple of people who really need that admin flag are folks like:

  • Featured article writers
  • (potential) mediators
  • Policy experts

Are all not getting the admin flag.

The properties of these people are:

  • Low numbers of high quality edits in the relevant parts of wikipedia.
  • Reluctance to become an admin.
  • the ability to stand their ground when they have to.

These criteria are selected *AGAINST* by the current rfa process.

  • RFA selects for high number edits per-se. Many people currently don't even look at quality of edits, and looking at quality is strongly discouraged due to the high number of edits required by edit-count criteria in the first place. Please look at things like featured articles most carefully.
  • RFA selects against people who don't want to be an admin. if you say "I don't wanna" , nowadays people on rfa will just say "ok"... while they should be going the extra mile to drag this person across the line, kicking and screaming if nescesary ;-)
  • RFA selects against people who stand their ground in a conflict, even when prudent. This is because it's like "ooooohhh.... there WAS a conflict...Oppose". You can't be a good admin if you deal with conflict by simply running away all the time. You have to stand up for yourself and wikipedia, but do so in a calm, polite, friendly and professional way. If you demonstrate that, Great!

Each group needs the admin flag for different reasons:

  • Featured article writers need the flag to help maintain featured article pages themselves. This is very very important, as the goal of wikipedia is ultimately to create as many featured articles as possible. They will hopefully not need to use their flag often, but when they need it they *really* need it.
  • Mediators need to flag mostly to protect pages and read deletion histories. Also: "sit down, shut up, and LISTEN to each other, or I'm banning BOTH your asses for a week" , can be effective in a pinch ;-)
  • Policy experts need the admin tools to be able to continue to work on and build their understanding and experience with policy. Some policy only works for admins, and it gets rather hard to test at times, if you can't use it, as you might imagine ;-)

So could everyone look at their criteria and see if you're not selecting against these categories of people? Please ask your friends to look too! Kim Bruning 04:21, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

The process is also failing to identify people who understand copyright issues.--Peta 04:23, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
Maybe an admin test is in order? —this is messedrocker (talk) 04:30, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
I honestly hope we have not reached that point. -- tariqabjotu (joturner) 04:33, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
I personally don't think featured article writers need to be admins unless they need to be admins. Adminship is the set of tools any given article writer doesn't need. Admins do more of the cleaning so the content creators can create. It's a burden to try to do both. Or something. --Keitei (talk) 04:39, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
I totally disagree. Those tools are helpful for article writers. Also though, it doesn't help that when we get excellent FA admins that we run them off by letting editors insinuate they are neo-nazis when they just try to improve articles. pschemp | talk 04:41, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
Or worse, when they come in to an ongoing disagreement, edit war, or even worse, breeching experiment, and try to do the job we asked them to do by restoring order and then get labed with a POV label and their block is dragged through (tens of) thousands of words of analysis. ++Lar: t/c 07:04, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
Here's a statement that proves true for administrators, regardless of which project: once they get administrator status, they focus much more on things like the Wikipedia namespace. —this is messedrocker (talk) 04:45, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
I'm not useless (I'm not saying anyone is saying that I am), but I agree we do need more varied admins. One of the things I laid out in my candidacy was that I wanted to work behind the scenes. I didn't want to go for the (relatively) glorious job of being a troll fighter and a vandal blocker. I earned several support votes for this position, but also several opposes ("I don't see why he needs the tools...") Troll fighting and vandal blocking are both admirable, but what we need to do is promote people who will work. Everyone likes to block trolls, but who is going to close TfD, RfD, SfD, etc.? All are less glorious than AfD and many have admin backlog. We need to promote the type of people who work quietly, behind the scenes. We need more people who will recognize that the symbol of the admin is the mop, not the broadsword (and yes, I got an oppose vote for having that comparison in my RFA candidacy text.) RyanGerbil10(The people rejoice!) 04:43, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
That's fine, we need those too. I just really really REALLY need people who can learn to be mediators, policy makers, and general organiser types coming out of RFA too, and I've seen them being opposed several times now. Kim Bruning 05:24, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
I think your ladder is on the wrong wall. We need the minimum overhead possible to produce the final product: an encyclopedia. Diverting resources to the social problems probably gets us farther from that, not closer. And by the way, it's generally better to assume whatever roles you believe are important and do the work until people recognize you as a leader, rather than continually reminding us that you believe you are one. - Taxman Talk 15:16, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
I really didn't deserve that.  :-( Stupid social issues and stupid overcomplex rules are draining an overlarge part of wikipedias resources, and more every day. I've been doing so much of the work on solving these issues all along, especially since many of my old friends have moved on to other things. I can't do it on my own, the wiki is too big. Can you help me? Can you find people who will help me? Kim Bruning 15:25, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
I wish they'd actually go through with their CSD promises. They forget about CAT:NR, Category:Images with no copyright tag, CAT:NS, CAT:NL, and CAT:ORFU. Speedies, but with time delays to fix the issues. Few admins ever touch them, and they build up until some poor sap has to spend their entire day deleting or cleaning tags off of hundreds upon hundreds of images off of the CATs. I'm not quite sure who those admins are(and if you're reading this, good job), but this is just another backlog that sits and languishes. Kevin_b_er 05:57, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
As an aside, I have been working on a new tracking bot to help identify backlogs like this and call more attention to them. See User:Dragons flight/Category tracker and User:Dragons flight/Category tracker/Summary. Dragons flight 07:26, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
Excellent! It's a great thing to have on my watchlist to remind me of which categories need work. Kusma (討論) 07:41, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
As long as you stop calling for featured article writers/wikipedia ambassadors to edit fully protected pages like MediaWiki:Common.css and {{cite web}}, I'm fine with sysopping the FA writers. Adminship should be no big deal. The only question should be: "Do we trust this person not to abuse the tools?". Anything else is ridiculous admin-cult (as we have it at the moment). Maybe an inverse-blocking feature could also be helpful: admin A gives user U the right to edit fully protected page P — an "ambassador" delegates his trust to a specialist maintenance staff member for a specific job and surveys how that job is done. It's like giving the key of your appartment to the plumber. If the plumber does a bad job (site looks like shit after user U edited MediaWiki:Common.css and U has no striking explanation for the botch) then you'll never call this plumber again (A disables U from editing protected page P). --Ligulem 08:06, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

A couple of people who really need that admin flag are folks like:

  • Featured article writers
  • mediators
  • Policy experts
These are all important jobs, but they can be done without the admin flag. Using 'admin' as a marker for 'respected knowledgable person' isn't really appropriate. The later is a precondition for the former, but not (yet) vice-versa. I'd like to keep it that way for a bit longer yet. Regards, Ben Aveling 08:15, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
There's another job which we can't have too many Admins for: educating new users. The more education that goes on, the smoother everything runs later. Stephen B Streater 09:00, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
 :-) Kim Bruning
These jobs used to be doable without the admin flag, as you'd just call on a clueful admin to help out. Nowadays it can take over an hour to find said clueful admin. So no dice. We need admins on hand to make sure people do not disrupt these activities. Also, I believe I already pointed out which admin abilities are important to each group? Even if I hadn't, it is so that typically more and better tools are always a good thing.Kim Bruning 15:25, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

To Kim's original point: If the regulars of the FA, mediation and policy areas are not participating in the voting at RfA, you should encourage them to come over here regularly and tell them why they are needed here. As long as it is not linked to a particular candidacy, I don't consider that vote stacking. The ultimate purpose of RfA is to produce good admins for the benefit of all of Wikipedia. The regular voters at RfA are not representative of the whole community, but don't blame them, at least they are participating in the process. Instead bring over here the people that are not participating and they will bring with them their perception of what types of admins we need to serve the areas of the project they participate in. NoSeptember 09:15, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

I was going to say it, but NoSeptember beat me to it. This appeal to RFAers is good and all, but getting a wider range of the Wiki community to participate in RFA and the shaping of its standards should be the goal - rather than trying to change the standards of those already participating. Themindset 19:05, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
Just a note to say that I have only recently started to vote in RfAs, and I found this discussion extremely enlightening; it's given me quite a bit to think about. My own standards do include edit counts, because I am judging by my own familiarity with policies -- at 1300 edits or so I feel there are plenty of policies I haven't even read yet, much less understand. Hence I feel that someone with 1500 or 1800 edits is also likely to have gaps. But what I found most useful in this discussion is the list of areas where more admins are needed. I'll be thinking about revising my standards and taking a more careful look at edit histories. Thanks. Mike Christie 19:31, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
I agree with NoSeptember. The admins are there to facilitate the environment for productive writing of articles, creating diagrams, audio recordings etc. Unfortunately I see that there aren't enough article writers who actually want to have a say in who becomes an administrator, because this is what the administrators are there for. As for the policy, edit count doesn't really tell you whethere the person is well versed in how to do things unless they demonstrate it by doing it, or by reading the policy. Some guys with 15000 edits don't know the 3RR policy because they simply edit quietly in a corner without ever edit-warring. Also, because OrphanBot does most of the image tagging, most people don't learn about how all the image categories like unsourced, unknown copyright, unused fair use, etc, work, because the bot processes them, but only a few read the CSD for images and participate in deleteing them. I'd guess it would be maybe 10 admins doing 90% of the image deletions or something like that, a greater imbalance than the usual admins tasks and the pictures are oftern backlogged 5-6 days. as far as the coaching at WP:ESP, I don't think anybody does image policy tutorials, and that really needs to change, because what we need is people to delete images and also check them, as there are surely many pictures out there with bogus {{GFDL-self}} and fairuse tags. I'd simply say there are not enough people training themselves with the skills required to be an admin; not enough people do NP patrol or cateogry cleaning and doing notability analysis, and likely there are gigabytes of cruft festering around the place, etc. I get the impression that there are a lot of people simply piling on at AfDs to get name-recognition for RfAs "per nom", rather than researching on dubious articles and AfDing them or making comments which add to the debate knowledge. Blnguyen | rant-line 00:45, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
Mike Christie, joining the discussions on this page counts double for Wikipedia talk page edits. ; - ) --FloNight talk 00:12, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
LOL Tyrenius 09:38, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Strange situation on rmrfstar rfa

Several people have stated (paraphrased):

  • Oppose Great user, made 2 FAs, and I'm sure this user will never abuse the admin tools, but I'm not letting him have them anyway. -- john doe.

There's also several neutrals in the same vein.

Kelly Martin has been marking some of those edits, I think.

Poor bureaucrat who gets to close that particular case!

See also my rant above. I suppose rmrfstar is a fair example of that situation. I took the time to really rake him over the coals in person while at wikimania, and he did pretty well. And then he went to a birds of the feather talk, and showed enormous insight in his questions and comments there.

You can imagine I was pretty surprised when I came home(-ish) today, connected to the internet, and discovered he was doing badly at RFA! ^^;;

Why is his RFA doing so differently from my perception?

Did I miss something in my observations? If so, what did I miss, do you think?

Kim Bruning 07:26, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

  • I think it's the RfA which misses something, namely the essential character of the candidate. Too preoccupied with exam questions and statistics.Tyrenius
  • Part of the problem is that people who are focused not on the statistics but on the character of the person and whether he will misuse the tools etc. have a hard time coming to the same conclusion about every candidate of this sort. So those who have interacted with the candidate (at Wiki or in this case in person) perceive things that someone who is merely digging into the person's contributions may miss. So there are not enough support votes because not enough of us have that personal involvement with the candidate. Perhaps we should rely on the judgement of voters we respect, so when Kim says "I know this guy and I trust him", we should give that a good deal of weight even if we didn't perceive that when we dug through the contributions. NoSeptember 10:40, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
God, I wish Kelly hadn't done that. I firmly believe rmrfstar should have the tools, and voiced my opinion. But copying and pasting notices for the closing 'crat to ignore votes like that just doesn't seem right, and I bet several (or many) people will be upset, with good reason. This, coming on the heels of the user lists thing, I think was a bad idea. :( --Firsfron of Ronchester 08:26, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
It's Kim Bruning's fault for starting it previously. However, I'm now coming round to thinking it's not such a bad thing. It makes it a bit more rowdy, but it does mean opposers can't be complacent. Tyrenius 09:24, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
 :-) Kim Bruning 09:34, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
Well, opposers can do what they often do: don't respond on the RfA page. In which case, it's not really opening up further dialogue, especially when this RfA is so far along. Had there been some grandstanding like this when the RfA was first opened, it might have convinced some people to change their opinions. But this far along, all it's doing is telling the closing 'crat to ignore many !votes, which I don't believe will happen. I feel it's just going to open yet another can of worms. Pity, too, because he should have been promoted, IMO.--Firsfron of Ronchester 09:41, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

My biggest concern about this RfA is the sudden liberal use of the extension of the discussion period beyond 7 days. That's fine on a close RfA, but this one was not even close to being close. Even with all the extra votes added, it remains far from being close precisely because it had so far to go. Having a failed RfA is not the end of the world, you can come back in a month or two and pass. We have a candidate who made some mistakes on this RfA that cost him, doing a bad job with the questions right off the bat, having an RfA when he was busy, etc. Live and learn, this is a good candidate, but the mistakes were his own. Next time, he should get a nominator who will deliver a rousing nomination statement, he should work out well thought out answers before the RfA gets submitted. This is all quite doable, just not on the current RfA. But extending an RfA that would require either 33 more support votes or the retraction of 11 oppose votes just to reach the 75% level (which is where it stood at the scheduled close) is not the right thing to do IMO. We should not start creating special rules for specially deserving candidates, especially when he should be able to sail through next time if he gets it done properly. We are setting a precedent where any candidate with as low as 60% approval can request extension, and that is a big ongoing mess just waiting to happen. NoSeptember 10:17, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Peoples' voting criteria worry me

So, I just made my opinion known at The Thadman's RfA, but I wanted to expand upon it a little here. In cases such as these, I'm pretty worried by the large number of users that mark their opinion as (something like)...

  • Oppose, not enough article contributions. We're building an encyclopedia, here.

... without even bothering to check whether article contributions would be at all relevant to their intended administrator activities. In the case of User:The Thadman, I'm disappointed that so many people have opposed his RfA on the basis of his low article contributions, despite his extensive experience (and proposed future involvement) in mediation. I guess this is an extension of my dislike for some peoples' FA requirements, applied to users' contributions to writing articles.

Am I alone in thinking that a user's ability to write fluent prose is totally disconnected from their ability to maintain the encyclopedia that hosts it? This is really quite frustrating, at times. RandyWang (chat me up/fix me up) 11:07, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

They don't have to be able to write great prose, but many of us do believe that in order to understand the various policies that affect the most important thing we do here, someone needs significant experience in actually working on what we are here to do: write an encyclopedia. Prose mistakes are not a problem, but someone that has no experience writing articles also doesn't know how to negotiate sources, break deadlocks and move an article forward. We are here to write an encyclopedia, not to mediate. - Taxman Talk 15:19, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
Then again, if all we were here to do was write an encyclopedia, we wouldn't need admin rights. --Kbdank71 15:33, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
Except that ignores the fact that there are people whose efforts are not helping to build an encyclopedia. Many of us believe article writing skills and experience are important to knowing how best to do that, and build the encyclopedia. - Taxman Talk 16:20, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
Does this really make sense? How do you react to an individual with enormous experience voting in AfDs, noting 3RR violations and the like - but has a tiny number of article space edits? A user's suitability for adminship isn't utterly dependent on their ability to write articles: it's dependent on their experience in activities specific to adminship tasks. Why else do we consistently vote against users whose sole need for admin powers are "wikification" or the like? RandyWang (chat me up/fix me up) 12:57, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
Maybe you're assuming I think it's the most important or the only thing. I don't, but it is an important part. A person not participating in creating articles is missing what we do here. If they have exceptional other characteristics I will support them and so will many other people. It happens quite often that people get promoted without much article contributions, but they have to have something else that more than compensates for that. Also note I don't look at number of article edits. If someone has 100 article edits but they are very high quality, then that covers that fully for me. Others unfortunately focus on edit count and that's part of the problem. - Taxman Talk 14:48, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
Hmmm, I'm not sure I understand how The Thadman's mediation efforts require admin powers like block, unblock, delete and undelete. It seems to me that if comes to blocking users and protecting articles that mediation has failed. His answer to question 1 did no mention those needs. And I'm not sure how his mediation work prepares him for the top admin needs like *fD-DRV, vandalism fighting, and copyright issues. Cheers. :) Dlohcierekim 16:43, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
I think that experience in article creation should be paramount when considering a potential admin. Would you hire an umpire who had no experience with baseball? Or a traffic cop with no experience with driving? The most common RFA standard is 1000 article edits (which happens to be my standard as well) which is in fact not that difficult to achieve. With even just 5 article edits a day one would achieve that in just over 6 months... to me this is a rather low bar, one that simply ensures that the potential admin has the basic amount of experience in the primary activity on Wikipedia. Themindset 18:37, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

""I agree. Article creation/improvement is most important. :) Dlohcierekim 20:52, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

I suppose I'm in the minority here. I had almost no experience in the primary activity on Wikipedia when I became an admin, nor do I today. My day-to-day activities have zero to do with article creation/improvement. So I understand where Randy is coming from, and that's why I don't have a RFA standard that is based on editcount. On the other hand, I definitely understand the need for experience, and with everyone else editcounting as a standard, it's not that hard to hit. --Kbdank71 21:10, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
The main issue I see with the logic that people only base their criteria off of the main namespace is that there are many _many_ other areas needing administrator attention - it does not require sysop tools to make a featured article, either. By restricting administrators to only those who focus on the main article namespace, then we'd have none who focus on backlogs and the Wikipedia namespace. The notion that it's an automatic oppose unless a cadidate has a certain amount of contributions is simply editcountitis. What if a user actually heavily contributed to policy in the wikipedia namespace instead of creating articles? Now, I'm not saying making a featured article is a bad thing. That of course is very helpful and does show that the user is likely familiar with key policy such as verifiability. However, it is not the only way to determine whether a user is worthy of being an administrator. If anything, sysops deal a lot more with deleting articles than with creating them. Sysops are the framework that keeps the encyclopedia together behind the scenes, blocking users harmful to the encyclopedia, protecting pages from edit wars, closing deletion discussions and managing backlogs. The single most important factor in a candidate for adminship is 'Can they be trusted with the tools?'. I'm very curious to go deeper into the reasoning as to why people have such strict criteria involving main article contributions and featured articles. Is it the fear that users will make mistakes early on due to a lack of experience? Well, administrators are meant to make mistakes. They're supposed to - I would be surprised if an administrator made no mistakes. And, just like anyone else, they're meant to learn from them. Cowman109Talk 21:25, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
Well, I would have to say I completely agree with your last point... And yet I feel it actually supports a certain degree of edit counting. Yes, the new admin will make mistakes, but wouldn't it be better to make sure less new admins make less mistakes? And if that can be done by setting a minimum amount of participation in the encyclopedia, isn't that a positive thing? Like I've stated earlier, these edit count minimums that most of us set are not difficult to achieve - and if someone finds that hitting those numbers is an unnecessary burden, they are probably not going to contribute very much as an admin anyways. I don't believe in 1FA, but I respect those who do... and who knows? Maybe there is more than one user who was so intent on becoming an admin that he/she made sure to achieve 1FA before nominating themselves. If that's the case, then the 1FA criteria has helped the encyclopedia. And surely, the experience of 1FA was invaluable to the user themselves. So I believe there is room for understanding, if not agreement, with the variety of different RFA standards set by different users. Themindset 22:17, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
I think that some problems stem from the fact that people usually leave no room outside of 1FA for supporting an adminship candidate. There _are_ other ways to determine whether people are ready. We have plenty of admins who have never and probably have no intention of ever writing featured articles who do plenty of work, so I feel that at least people should be aware that there are other ways of determining whether candidates are beneficial to the encyclopedia. Cowman109Talk 22:28, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
Ultimately, I do agree with you - that is why I don't use 1FA as a criteria. I simply respect the choice to use it. Themindset 22:50, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
Themindset, to my mind the 1FA is actually harmful to the project. Can you imagine what would happen if every RFA nom-to-be was pimping articles at FAC. FA is not meant to be a stepping stone to sysop. FloNight talk 22:58, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
I definitely understand that feeling. Have you tried expressing your feelings directly on the talk pages of those who vote with the 1FA criteria? (Like I said, I agree and do not use 1FA as a criteria.) Themindset 23:26, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
I see 1FA as a big plus for a candidate, but not a requirement and also not enough to get my support all by itself. I do see some level serious article contributions as a near-absolute requirement. If someone only participates in policy pages or AfD's or something like that, besides the issue of "traffic cop who doesn't drive", I worry that they might be here primarily for bureaucratic reasons, and are missing out on what the project is about. Phr (talk) 03:32, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

As I already said somewhere around here, 1FA is nonsense. People who had never improved a Featured Article but had reviewed contributions at the Requests for Featured Articles should be as capable as anyone who had followed his advice. I agree, it is important to have a determined knowledge about editing, but 1FA is just too much. My personal (volatile) opinion is 1GA, which is much easier to achieve, demonstrates some knowledge at editing, and interest in expanding articles.

However, I don't really care with the "mails my criteria" motto. Like the story about the man, his son and the donkey travelling through towns, you will never make everyone happy. And luckily, most criterias found at Standards are relatively easy to achieve. -- ReyBrujo 03:46, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

I wonder if perhaps we should just add "1. Oppose Fails my criteria. (Masssiveego's signature)" to the RfA template. It would save the poor lad some typing.
More seriously (as serious as I get), it's nice to have criteria to work with, but the fact is that, as above, a lot of the criteria people talk about are nearly unreachable. While I'm a long way from taking a shot at adminship myself, I've considered how to fulfil the various criteria; my edit summaries are near spotless, I'm trying to do work in as many aspects of the place as I can, I warn vandals, and so on, but working on a featured article candidate? That's tough. Most of the articles being considered for FA have a clique of editors working on them already, and with my skills being mostly targeted towards editing and polishing writing, around here I tend to fall into the dime a dozen category. I'll probably work it out at some point, but it's still a bit of a challenge.
As for my standards? If I've seen an editor around the project and they've impressed me in some way, then chances are if I see them here, I'll look at their background and comments and likely side with them (admittedly, I haven't participated in a huge number of RfAs at this point, but I'm getting there). Or the other way round. Certainly not complicated - and a lot easier than a spreadsheet for every candidate. Tony Fox (arf!) 15:43, 18 August 2006 (UTC)
I like the massiveego idea! But, more seriously, i do agree with his criteria and i have seen him write weak oppose. He is not the only one with high standards but he is probably the only one with such high standards that bothers to research and vote on many candidates. With regard to the 1FA criteria, I think its impact varies greatly depending on the editor. For one with low article edits it would be very meaningful but for one with many article copy edits then it is less important. Flexability is the key since every editor is different. David D. (Talk) 16:12, 18 August 2006 (UTC)
The issue with his criteria, I think, is that it's hard to see anyone who would actually *pass* it. I don't think God (alternately Allah, Yahweh, Zeus, etc.) is going to be requesting adminship anytime soon. (I think they'd pass anyhow.) Them's some tough criteria to meet. Tony Fox (arf!) 20:33, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

Comments from the peanut gallery

Hi! I've been following the discussions on this talk page for some time. As a frequent participator in RfA's, I enjoy seeing others opinions on the RfA process. As such, I'd like weigh in. In terms of the RfA process, I don't really think it's broken at all;

  • The RfA process is dictated by the community, and as such, if the community thought/thinks there is/was a better format, it would be discussed and consensus would be reached.
  • Candidates only become administrators once the community reaches a consensus that both the candidate and Wikipedia would do well to give the user administrator status.

I mention these two points to show that all of RfA is community-based, and I have faith that the community is making the right decisions.

Furthermore, in terms of how people "vote" and the reasons given, I believe that each and every participant should be treated with respect and be appreciated for volunteering their valuable time to participate in the process. I don't feel that standards should be called into question or chastised if they are reasonably explained. If a Wikipedian has RfA standards that include a minimum number of edits or length volunteered to the project, it should be respected. Also, specific standards such as those that include featured articles, AfD participation, vandal fighting, user/article talk participation, etc. should also be given due respect. While we might not agree with certain standards, we should recognize one's right to participate in the RfA process as one sees fit.

If a user participates in an RfA with anything but the best of faith, our community-elected 'crats will see the input for what it is and discount it when making the decision as to whether or not consensus has been reached.

Furthermore, as very few administrators have been desysopped, it's reasonable to say that almost all administrators have helped Wikipedia become a better place, and the right people are having successful RfA's.

Also, as adminship is really not that big a deal (and a double-edged sword, at that), I hate to see users become disappointed in themselves and/or the community and leave the project or become jaded on the process because of their or another's RfA. As such, perhaps the WikiProject (which I, personally, am still on the fence about as to it's appropriateness) could actively seek out recent unsuccessful candidates and help them address some of the advice left to them.

Anyways, I just wanted to throw in my two cents. I think the discussions here are productive and enjoyable to watch unfold, and I wanted to comment on what I've seen so far. Cheers hoopydinkConas tá tú? 18:08, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Hear, hear! It's like you read my mind :-) After reading the discussions on the rest of this page, I thought I was alone. Nice to know someone shares the same views as me! —Mets501 (talk) 23:40, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
It's funny, I missed this little statement, but I've been saying the same things on this very talk page... Hear, hear, indeed! Themindset 23:47, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
To a point I agree with you that the current system isn't terrible, but one thing that I think is really a shame is people failing because of their inadequacy in something they don't intend to deal with, like a vandal-fighter who could really use the tools failing because of lack of experience in other areas. I've written up my (ever-revolutionary) thoughts on this at Wikipedia:WikiProject on Adminship/a la carte. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 01:55, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Hoopydink is making a somewhat circular argument, which can be refuted by simply having one or more community members say they want to change RFA.

/me raises hand.

Hi, I'm me, and I'd like to change it ;-)

Here's the thing though. I think the current RFA format can be made to work, but it does need a lot more commitment than that people are currently showing. I'm thinking on changing that.

Kim Bruning 19:20, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Per my 10:40, 9 August 2006 edit of this page, we need an RfA cabal of like-minded editors ;). NoSeptember 19:24, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
I smell irony... We have been talking about changing RfA for what seems like forever, and yet RfA has remained largely the same for years. If you're looking for a process that's inefficient and broken, this is it – not the RfA process, but the process to change RfA. -- tariqabjotu (joturner) 19:40, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
Kim Bruning, I would suggest going to the Village Pump or forming an official policy proposal to set the wheels in motion. If the community decides that RfA needs to be changed and your proposal is the way to go, then it will be so. I'm certainly open to changes, so if you do decide do follow through, I'll be very eager to see the developments. Cheers and good luck! hoopydinkConas tá tú? 00:33, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
RFA has remained largely the same for "years"? Hmm. Let's try two and a half years ago. Timwi's self-nom read,

Hi. I've been around since June, and I've been a well-behaved user all the way through. :) I don't make ground-breaking new contributions very often, but I make a lot of minor corrections and I revert vandalism. I would like to be able to help with this better, and thus, I am requesting adminship. Thank you for your attention.

and he passed unanimously. Fuzheado's vote on Pakaran's nomination read

Defer. Pakaran is a good contributor, but he's been here for just two months with 270 edits of article pages. Perhaps a *bit* more time only because we should be consistent. WP has rejected other folks for too little experience.

and Pakaran seemingly passed. In fact, there were three opposes in the entire timespan, for 38 admin candidates, as opposed to 317 supports, meaning the support ratio was 99.1%. Some of the nominees got in with fewer than 400 edits. Wik, opposing Pakaran, wryly noted: "Actually I'm helping you, as my opposition will move ten other people to support you!"

RFA hasn't changed for years? —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 05:25, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

There was no AWB or scripts back then. 400 edits meant something, especially when you had to press the warm up button to notify the servers that you were about to submit an edit. NoSeptember 08:57, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
I wasn't referring to the standards; those obviously have changed. I was referring to this process / format. This nomination from July 2004 looks quite similar to a July 2006 nomination. -- tariqabjotu (joturner) 12:59, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

A horrible realization!

Essjay has no category talk and no portal or portal talk editsHe needs to be immediately recalled! [1]! And yet he is not only a sysop but a crat with checkuser as well. What was anyone thinking? JoshuaZ 20:03, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

I know. And not enough user edits either. This is a disgrace. -- tariqabjotu (joturner) 20:05, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
Funny how you point this out at a time when Essjay hasn't edited for 2 days ;). NoSeptember 20:08, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
And did anyone see his SIGNATURE?!?! The horror, the agony! -- Avi 20:09, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
  • And he only had less than 500 main namespace article edits at the time of his RfA! What insanity! Clearly RfA is broken if it let him through! Time to raise the standards. --Durin 21:09, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
This joke appears so many times in so many variations. Just to add fuel to the fire: Jimbo Wales probably wouldn't qualify for most people's RFA standards right now. Themindset 21:24, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
Including yours. -- tariqabjotu (joturner) 21:50, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
Yup. And I believe it's perfectly reasonable. Themindset 21:55, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
So you support the fact that you are blatantly hypocritical (no personal attack meant) in your standards towards adminship? Thygard - Talk - Contribs - Email ---- 00:29, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
It's not hypocrisy when you consider if that Jimbo was a normal editor, he'd probably have a lot more edits than he currently does, since he wouldn't have to worry about PR and fund-raising. Johnleemk | Talk 17:28, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
But have you ever seen the go it alone, self-important attitude that Jimbo has. Half the time it's like he has no respect for normal policy or process at all, and just does whatever he wants. Why would anyone think it was a good idea to give him admin powers? Dragons flight 22:29, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
  • I've chastized Jimbo once in the past. He makes mistakes like all of us in fact, it got me on the cabal's black list...Go me! :). At the core should be the question, does Jimbo have the best interests of the project at heart and will he not abuse the tools? Of course he does and of course he won't. --Durin 22:41, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
I don't know whether you're being sarcastic or not... but Jimbo-bashing is at best an unhealthy pastime on Wikipedia. From the one incident where I've had to deal with him I found him heavy handed, but also acting in good faith. If I had issue with his status/behaviour I would simply leave the project. Themindset 22:44, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
  • I'm serious. I took issue with him and told him as much. Told him his behavior was akin to the CEO of a large company coming down to the loading docks and telling the guys in shipping how to do their jobs. --Durin 22:53, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
Although I'm not sure where this is going, I would say that your example is not particularly convincing. If I was a CEO and saw the guys on the loading docks screwing around I would probably do something about it. Themindset 23:35, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
Yes, everyone makes mistakes but I think every mistake Jimbo has made has been in a good faith effort, that being said he has to be careful, even more careful possibly, about throwing around his power because if done too often it'll either a) lose all meaning, or b) entirely skew the structure of Wikipedia to the point where he ends up being an active dictator of everything rather than a passive dictator who lets the community makes decisions semi-independently. Thygard - Talk - Contribs - Email ---- 00:32, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
  • de-indent The point is that a CEO showing up at a loading dock might take action, but being that his job isn't shipping, there's a pretty decent job he's going to screw it up. The problem is, when the CEO does something, nobody is going to disagree with him...even if he's wrong. Speaking more abstractly, all of us are human, and all of us make mistakes. There isn't any reason that Jimbo should be treated any better than the brand new editor here who has made one edit. --Durin 01:37, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
    • One of the core principles of top management is that you have to choose the areas of involvment where you can have the greatest impact. CEOs who understand operations may well visit the dock if there are problems with shipping and receiving (a far more common scenario that we might like to believe). On the other hand, if the dock is working fine, or if operations is outside the CEO's area of expertise, such a visit would be unwise. I think that Jimbo chooses his battles well; as a rule, if he shows up and edits something, it's because there's a broader point that he's trying to make about the way things ought to be. The Uninvited Co., Inc. 03:39, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
    • My comment above is only half-sarcastic. I agree with you that there are examples where, in my opinion, Jimbo has misused his power by asserting his authority over situations he didn't really understand (e.g. Radiant!). I know he means well (hence "misuse" not "abuse"), but he isn't involved in the day to day operations of this wiki and that lack of experience, when coupled with absolute power, can and does occasionally lead to serious mistakes. If you have had a good experience "chastizing" Jimbo, then I congratulate you. The last time I was upset by Jimbo's behavior, his response to my concerns pushed me close to leaving the project. Dragons flight 15:08, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
      • I don't think Jimbo has made any serious fuck ups yet (besides the somewhat depressing case of Radiant!), but I know he has made fuck ups. The problem I see with Jimbo is that he has good theories and principles that we should be applying, but when he butts in and tries to get us to apply them, he fails quite frequently. I'm not arguing against intervention from some higher and supreme authority, but in a company, the CEO (as UninvitedCompany says) ought to pick his battles. There's always some other executive he can have doing his dirty work, which is why I've previously advocated devolving some of Jimbo's authority to a group of people more familiar with the English Wikipedia, e.g. the arbcom. Anyhow, I'm quite over these pointless meta-issues now. I'm far more concerned with our article-writing process, which I think more often than not involves well-meaning snot-nosed newbies and equally well-meaning but overly defensive professional academics/people with such experience. (The breaking point for my first and only wikibreak ever was when I was basically told to fuck off when I advocated the removal of trivia sections from an article.) We don't have more than a handful of experienced WPians involved in the policy issues of content, and those who are involved can be overwhelmed by said snot-nosed newbies often enough. (Case in point: Worldtraveller's GA project careening off course into being a less-than-FA-but-still-a-star-for-my-homework process for articles which could become an FA; in the first place, GA was meant to fill a niche for articles which could never be FAs.) Now this would be somewhere worthy of Jimbo-scale involvement (aside from the issue of BLPs, which everyone has been devoting an exceedingly large amount of attention to). Johnleemk | Talk 17:28, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

People not discussing their positions when challenged.

I just checked back on rmrfstars rfa again, and to my dismay, many people didn't answer my questions to them. I don't have much to do with what kelly martin was trying by the way, although she did have some point. I was asking people for their opinions and standards and why they hold them, and how they reached their conclusions.

The failure to answer questions is not a good sign. If you're going to state an opinion, please show some commitment to it and defend your position when someone asks you about it. Holding your position against all logic does not seem very conducive to consensus to me (be it support or oppose). The point is to come to a consensus, and to do that, you do have to respond to other peoples concerns, of course.

Is that logical, or am I going crazy here? :-)

Kim Bruning 19:28, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

One hundred percent reasonable. I also don't like when people say that asking questions or responding to oppose voters makes one confrontational. If this is really not a !vote, that kind of thing ought to be acceptable, and to some degree, encouraged (as long as it doesn't become excessive). -- tariqabjotu (joturner) 19:31, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
There's nothing wrong with asking a question if you're actually seeking an answer. If an oppose comment says "Does not meet my standards", it's reasonable to ask him what his standards are. However, if someone is asking a question in order to discredit an opposer's opinion, that's inappropriate. For example, Kelly Martin's comments on Rmrfstar's RfA were quite obviously not meant to solicit an answer. Aren't I Obscure? 19:41, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
As you say, confrontation of a voter in a challenging matter is highly offensive. Sometimes these border on a personal attack when challenging the value of the oppose reason. Sometimes they read as though they are trying to change a vote. Voters are not obligated to change a vote just because someone else dislikes the reason. Oppose voters are not obligated to to justify their rationale. They do, however, need to make it clear.
One purpose of the RfA is too advise the candidate on how to improve. Clarifying or explaning, or even just stating a rationale is needed for the candidate to understand how to improve. I try to leave a link to my standards if I don't leave a more instructive note with the vote. They are on my userpage for all to read. They are also on the RfA standards page. I think the people who just write, "per my standards," expect people to dig them out of the Standards page. I don't know how long it was before I figured out where it is. It is not very easy to read or make sense of.
To make a long story short, seeking understanding is great. Seeking to brow beat a vote change, or unleashing one's anger because the RfA is going badly , is not. Hope that helps. :) Dlohcierekim 23:24, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
Agreed, Kim. If you leave a sincere message in an effort to help improve consensus and the project and the person is not willing to respond to back their opinion, then they can't count on their opinion carrying quite the same weight in the consensus, assuming there is enough time left to respond to the inquiry. Now we do have to be very careful with that because browbeating and pestering a voter to change their opinion is not acceptable. I'm not saying you did that, but others efforts may end up closer to the unacceptable that others have pointed out above. But lets all remember we're here at RfA to build consensus on who should have admin tools, so discussions approach that while drive by votes are not as helpful. - Taxman Talk 23:34, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
Indeed there are limits. Browbeating and being exceptionally repetitive is exactly the kind of excessive I was talking about. And that's just not from the candidate, but !voters as well. They need to make sure they're not browbeating or being exceptionally repetitive with their discussion either. -- tariqabjotu (joturner) 23:50, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
I agree that there are reasonable limits but challenging votes and not counting those from people who do not even bother to read that challenge would go a long way to get rid of the disturbing and blatantly harmful trend of drive by voting. Thygard - Talk - Contribs - Email ---- 01:20, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
I think it's generally agreed that "drive-by" voting isn't especially useful to RfA. However, things get rather complicated when we actually attempt to define what a drive-by vote is and what should be done about them. For starters, what about support votes? The focus of criticism is usually on oppose votes, but opposers usually provide more of a reason than supporters. If the supporter provides no rationale (only a signature), is that a drive-by vote? What if the reason is something vague such as "good user"? Should we discount support votes that don't provide enough reasons for supporting? If we're going to talk about ignoring or giving less weight to certain opinions, we need to look on both sides of the fence. Aren't I Obscure? 02:06, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
Well the presumption is that people should be admins as long as there isn't a substantial opposition, ie no consensus. Also supports are more or less agreeing with the nominator, so they don't need as much expanded reasoning. Opposes are disagreeing with the nominator and supporters, so they require better reasoning to establish why, and that's ok. But of course you're more than welcome to politely ask a supporter for clarification too. - Taxman Talk 02:29, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
The RFA in my opinion is not the place to discuss issues. As the comments are about the vote it self not what you voted. RFA are vote counts. If the user in question wants to know why they could contact the voters after the election. I'm particullarly annoyed when users asks for an explaintion during a vote. As it simply makes the page very messy, when a link to the users own talkpage will do. While it's conviable to convince a person to change their votes during an election. Such conversations should be on the talkpage. Personally once I vote, I prefer not to change my vote once my vote is cast. --Masssiveego 08:10, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
Masssive: first, the votes on RfAs are an attempt to establish community consensus, seeing them as an absolute "vote" is unproductive. Second, not changing one's vote after one has made it runs afoul (at least in my mind) of the entire principle of a Wiki- there is nothing wrong with editing it if one's opinion changes and it should. Third, while everyone says that adminship should be no big deal the notion that we discuss things less or in an out of the way location because doing otherwise "simply makes the page very messy" seems to be a complete misunderstanding of what priorities should be. JoshuaZ 13:11, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
I second that comment by JoshuaZ. Tyrenius 13:46, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
Agreed. RfA is not a vote.--Stephan Schulz 14:28, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
It's not the place to discuss general issues, but it very much is the place to discuss whether the candidate is suitable for adminship. Thus polite requests for clarification are very suitable to developing the best consensus. You may be annoyed at someone asking for clarification, but better would be to change your expectations to this being a consensus gathering exercise. Again, if you don't wan't to respond to polite good faith requests for clarification you can't expect your opinion to have as much weight in the consensus. - Taxman Talk 14:54, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
I agree with JoshuaZ and Taxman. On my RFA, several people opposing changed their opinion after I responded to their concerns. IMO, people opposing are doing so to help the community. Often the person opposing is a stranger to you and makes a judgment based on limited information. I respect the opinion people opposing even if I do not agree.
JoshuaZ's response (several other people chimed in as well) to another oppose on my RFA was helpful. It was worded politely but still forcefully countered the opinion. There was some back and forth discussion. I do not know what JoshuaZ thought because we did not discuss it but I did not think the particular person opposing would change their opinion. The point was more to clarify the situation for other people that did not know me as well as JoshuaZ did. FloNight talk 16:04, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
Noticing how many paragraphs a single RFA produces with Alphachimp response. It adds to the difficulty of finding where to place the votes, and more scrolling. After a point the discussion becomes a full page article in itself about the RFA in question, and interferes with the vote after a certain point.

My refusing to vote change is mostly so I do not find myself being forced to accept another persons opinion which if find very faulty. I prefer length explainations and arguements after the RFA upon the user in questions request. --Masssiveego 05:20, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

To Kim Bruning's original comment: If you believe that someone has misapplied their rationale/criteria to the specific user, it is appropriate to address that with a comment on the RFA itself. But if you are objecting to the rationale/criteria in and of itself I find it highly inappropriate (and rather rude). In those cases, take it to the talk pages - a user should not gunk up some random person's RFA because they have a philosophical disagreement with someone's decision making process. We should always try to remember that by participating in WP:RFA a user is sacrificing their time and energy to try to improve the project, I find far too many users get into snits over opinions that don't match theirs, and this may be something we should try to guard against. Themindset 06:10, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia is a project that is run by consensus. Your explanation seems rational, until you realise that the objective is to reach consensus, rather than to avoid conflict altogether. Conflicts occur naturally, and you need to resolve them as amicably as possible, true. However, this should not go so far as to avoid conflict altogether to the detriment of consensus-finding. Hiding from problems won't make them go away. If there's some conflict, you need to discuss it, else you'll never reach consensus. Kim Bruning 06:47, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
There is discussion and feeding the trolls. Too much conflict in my opinion is disruptive, and counterproductive. --Masssiveego 05:49, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
Consensus is great, Kim. But there's a line between searching for consensus and badgering. And, especially in RfAs, it's probably better to tread softly and keep the challenging rhetoric to the talk pages. Themindset 16:17, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
Can you explain the reasoning behind that? Kim Bruning 19:45, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
The reasoning? That an RFA is about the nominee, not about the fact that you don't agree with someone else about 1FA, or some such. I believe that this should be rather self-evident. Themindset 18:33, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
You both seem to be talking to different points. Kim is right and you are right. "The objective is to reach consensus, rather than to avoid conflict altogether." and "there's a line between searching for consensus and badgering." It is possible to ask for expanded reasoning and or clarification about someone's reasoning without badgering. It is not ok to badger them repeatedly and rudely. Polite requests for clarification deserve an answer and while you can choose not to, if you do, you can't expect your position to carry as much weight in the consensus. It should then end there. No major conflict, but we still get what we need to help develop consensus. - Taxman Talk 18:55, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
I think see Themindset's point here. To ask about someone's reasonings for an oppose is fine, but to ask about their criteria should be taken to a talk page. That about it? --Kbdank71 19:10, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
That is exactly it. One is relevant to the specific RFA in progress, and the other is not. Point finale. Themindset 21:59, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
I think everything to do with the candidate and your opinion of them has to do with the RFA in progress. I don't accept excuses of "because it's policy" anywhere, as you're personally responsible for your actions. Why should I accept "because it happens to be my criterion" ? Kim Bruning 22:23, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
Did I just read "point finale"? This is the RfA talk page. The day a large issue reaches point finale here I'll eat my keyboard. Marskell 22:43, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
Not that I think we'll need it, but as a point of curiosity, would you prefer the peppermint sauce, the mushroom sauce, or the hot and spicy sauce to go with that? O:-) Kim Bruning 08:51, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

Alternate users

How has having an alternate user account historically affected RfA's? The User:Jtkiefer - Pegasus affair is certainly an interesting episode. The reason I ask is I have an alternate user, User:Mikereichold. I established this account because my other one is in my real name. I felt vulnerable after dealing with vandals that lived in a nearby city. My name is unique enough that I would not be hard to find if a kook wanted to look.

I acknowledge the alternate users on each page and give the identity of this alternate user on the other one. I make the recommended affirmations of innocence and benignity on each. I mention it now out of curiosity and to have some discourse now before I even consider submitting an RfA. I would appreciate reading what others think on the subject. Cheers, :) Dlohcierekim 14:36, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

The rules are laid out in WP:SOCK as long as you follow them and don't try to vote stack, then there are no issues. What Jtkiefer - Pegasus affair are you referring to? - Taxman Talk 14:58, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
Taxman, take a look at Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/Jtkiefer_3, which might warrant an early closure. I don't see there's much chance of this request reaching consensus unless some extraordinary evidence is forthcoming soon. Gwernol 15:36, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
This affair is frightening. The notion that we made this person an admin previously is disturbing. I personally supported the Pegasus incarnation in some of his previous RfAs, and gave him off-Wiki advice about how to be diplomatic in RfAs. This almost makes me think that RfA standards are not strict enough. JoshuaZ 16:42, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
This is just too strange. Is there any confirmation that the two accounts are really the same person? (Liberatore, 2006). 16:55, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
See Kelly Martin's recent comments in the RfA. JoshuaZ 16:59, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
The current situation is a rather extraordinary one. It's probably not a helpful example to use. Jkelly 16:53, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
    • Like Taxman says, WP:SOCK is pretty clear. Anyone using an alternate user is supposed to be open about it and not abuse it. The idea of dual adminship is pretty staggering except for the one limited exception I know of. This is reminiscent of the JoshuaZ et al question about admin’s with sock puppets. I don’t know that more stringent requirements are in order. The question of how to assess an RfA candidate is where it was when my alternate user started taking part in RfA’s How did they do it in the old days-- look at each edit? The last 500?? All in all, how do you assess for character? :) Dlohcierekim 17:20, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
      • It's too bad about Jtkiefer, certainly abused our trust. I even tried to convince Pegasus to come back when he said he was leaving. I don't know what happened here, but it happens with far greater frequency than we'd like to admit. I've seen in various places anonymous folks saying that they're building up admin accounts, but I guess this is one case where the admin-sockpuppeteer has been caught red-handed. --Deathphoenix ʕ 17:33, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

I have a related idea which I suspect will be shot down (I'm not even sure it is a good idea myself but I think it may be worth thinking about). Why not have any individual who accepts a request for adminship submit to a checkuser request. After the checkuser request, the person who performed the checkuser will talk to the candidate about any observed anomalies and will then make a report to the RfA about whether there appear to be any serious violations of WP:SOCK. JoshuaZ 18:46, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

At this moment I don't think a checkuser function will help out much. I've personally seen the process in action and it is a *huge* drain on the wikipedia servers. Plans are on to improve it's functioning. =Nichalp «Talk»= 19:13, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
I think it would be easier to just add a new question to RFAs: "Please list all accounts and IP numbers under which you have edited." If someone knowingly withheld information that would be relevant to the adminship request, it would be grounds for desyssopping, which could be handled through arbitration. --Tony Sidaway 19:01, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
Sounds good. But we could have someone who has engaged in silliness and vandalism. Thought better of it - created a new accounnt and edited harmoniously for 8 months. Do we realy need them to declare that they were a 'penis vandal' for two days, three years ago? Perhaps better just asking 'have you even submitted an RfA under a different nick?'. --Doc 19:06, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
It's not like we could even run a checkuser that far. At most, we get information about the last four weeks of edits. It seems unnecesary, at least to me: we can't legislate every single thing that could happen, and this case falls under this. So, I can't use EvilCat to test a new monobook.css layout? Titoxd(?!?) 08:15, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
Per WP:SOCK#Legitimate uses of multiple accounts (mostly the security aspects), I feel it is too extreme to force an adminship candidate to publicly identify alternative accounts. And demanding IP numbers should be way out of bounds from the view of personal privacy. Dragons flight 19:09, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
Can't see this as that practical, it would just mean being careful to avoid the checkuser showing anything up. Checkuser isn't and never will be the be all and end all of sockpuppet detection. --pgk(talk) 20:15, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

accepting and listing

I think we need more coherent rules for accepting and listing RfAs. If it's done in a manner such that some people know about the nomination and not others (i.e. it's not listed on the main rfa page), and worse yet, people are allowed to vote during this time... it's really going to leave the people who didn't happen to know about the RfA feeling disenfranchised and the RfA will never seem totally legitimate to everyone.

So, how do we do this without instruction creep?

  1. Votes are only valid after a candidate has accepted and the nomination is listed on the RfA page by the candidate or nominator
  2. Early votes (votes before the both parts of step 1 were completed) can be crossed out and need to be re-affirmed by the voter

I don't think that's too much to ask, and it would really stop all of the various problems that crop up from time to time. --W.marsh 02:12, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

The "how to" says the editor accepting the RfA must list the RfA - I think this makes good sense. Any votes prior to them listing it should be minimal. Thanks/wangi 02:18, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
Usualy the prior votes are minimal, it's when they aren't that problems emerge... the goal here is to make the process uniform so there isn't "that one RfA..." every few weeks where irregular process leads to a bunch of annoyed people. --W.marsh 02:23, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
Cool, understand that. Perhaps just an addition to the guidelines saying another editor/admin shouldn't post the RfA if the editor themself has forgotten to - instead they should post a pointer on their talk page? Thanks/wangi 02:28, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
Yeah. That sounds good. I'd like to hear from a b'crat before adding any of this though. But I do think having it written down somewhere formal will be great just for avoiding this periodic confusion and frustration. --W.marsh 02:34, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
That has always been my understanding of how it worked. That gives the nominee time to write answers to the questions. I am quite frankly appalled that someone—I won't mention any names—transcluded an RfA so that they could register the first !vote on it as an oppose. I think that it would be wise for a 'crat to strike all the !votes registered before it is added to the RfA main page by either the nominee (per the instructions) or the nominator. People should then come back and reaffirm what they said earlier if it is still applicable after the questions have been answered.—WAvegetarian•(talk) 02:27, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

What folks have done is made up new rules for RFA (with several people saying maybe it wasn't such a good idea), painted themselves into a corner this way, and now they'd like to make even more rules to try to paint their way out of the corner again.

Rules are like drugs, you habituate and need more and more of them to get the same high... errr... level of organisation.

Perhaps we could back to immediately transcluding the RFA the moment you create it? Some of the old problems would come back, but the new problems will go away again.

Since the old problems were mere inconvenience, and the new problems are disenfranchisement, I suggest we go for the old problems ;-)

Kim Bruning 03:11, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

It just seems like the old way presents a lot of problems we could easilly avoid with a simple, clear rule being written. It's only instruction creep if it makes things more confusing, and I think this makes it less confusing.
I know people are rule-phobic around here, but this "rule" would only kick in when a problem emerges. I.e. in most RfAs, where the candidate just quietly accepts after they see the nomination then lists it before any votes appear, nothing new needs to happen at all... we just would now clearly have a process so occasional hiccups don't cause drama every time they occur. Yeah it's a rule... but at this point on Wikipedia I think having a clear process is much preferable to a system of vague unwritten rules and learned behavior dictating how things operate.--W.marsh 03:23, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
  • The "older way" is a simple, clear rule. Make the nomination and transclude it immediately. There's some minor niggles about it not looking all pretty and perfect from the get go, but so be it.
  • The "newer way" involves several rules as well as a number of penalties for getting it wrong.
The latter is a larger burden on users than the former. Therefore, we probably want the former, for some strange reason ;-) . (unless you happen to like nomic ;-) )Kim Bruning 06:33, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
The "older way" leads to confusion, as does the current way, as far as I can tell. What happens when someone doesn't accept quickly enough in the older way? Are early votes valid? Do we cross them out? It seems like we have to have the same drama every time it happens, which is pretty common. Rules are not automatically bad just because they're rules... my proposal would give us a process so we don't have confusion and hurt feelings every time something irregular happens. If that process does cause more problems than it fixes we can forget it, but I think it would be painless and not even encountered by 95% of RfAs. --W.marsh 15:48, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
The main problem I had with the older way is that people, very inconsiderately, nominated others without getting their okay first. Social decency wasn't enough to prevent this from happening, so I'm hesitant to endorse going back to that system, especially given that in the current atmosphere of RFA such incidents would be more harmful. Christopher Parham (talk) 18:00, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
I loved the way you could nominate people without getting their ok first. The people most suited to adminship are often those who least want it. Why the heck did we remove the ability to drag them to RFA kicking and screaming? Kim Bruning 10:39, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
Maybe if people weren't in such a bloody hurry to vote get consensus things would go more smoothly. The nomination lasts a whole week! There will be enough time to make your voice heard! So just let the nominator and the nominee finish their pre-nom business in peace. RfA worked fine the "old way" for years and there was no need to go all instruction creepy on it. -- Rune Welsh | ταλκ 14:52, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
I think that's the case. People often seem too frantic when dealing with this. Michael 03:51, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Young administrator candidates

Do we ever take notice of the fact that the nom is obviously a kid, or do we just keep going like he was an adult? :) Dlohcierekim 03:13, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

I don't think we should discriminate against candidates or nominees based on age (or any other inherent characteristic). Hold all candidates to the same standards regardless of age. We have some great editors under the age of 16 and I see no reason why one of them couldn't become an admin if they met the usual standards expected of candidates. Best, Gwernol 03:17, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
We have a 14-year-old bureaucrat, for what it's worth :-) Kirill Lokshin 03:19, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
Indeed! That is amazing. I just feel sorry for the poor kid out there with his string of teenager mistakes and with 18 opposes. So much for my opinion that we should block all school accounts on sight. :) Dlohcierekim 03:25, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
Kirill, do we? I thought he had grown up. (Not that it matters anyway, age discrimination in RfA is senseless. There's "mature" contributors who I would like to be as far away as possible from the mop.) Titoxd(?!?) 08:01, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
Well, his userpage still says 14; I have no idea if that's still the case, or if he's merely neglected to update it. Kirill Lokshin 14:09, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

This was actually a hotly debated issue on Fetofs's RfA a couple months back. I personally think age discrimination in RfAs is ridiculous. --Mr. Lefty Talk to me! 03:51, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Evaluate candidates on maturity, not age. (Disclaimer: I am a 16-year-old admin.) Johnleemk | Talk 07:51, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
I concur. =Nichalp «Talk»= 09:47, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
If we knew everyone's age, then we might want to discourage those under 14 from standing. But we don't - and even where it is declared, we can't verify it. So judge maturity by actions. (Disclaimer: I sometimes act like a pre-teen) --Doc 10:10, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
Yah, I know plenty of adults who are less mature than most children. --Kbdank71 11:08, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
As my name was mentioned, I thought I might give my opinion: I think that, being part of the net, Wikipedia has no means to know my age if I don't tell it voluntarily. You have to think what you would have not knowing of the age (and probably you would have considered maturity). Also, it's wiki experience that counts most; when editing here you have to deal with conflicts. But then, I guess I'm a bit biased :) fetofs Hello! 00:23, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
I agree, age has no part in adminship (I'm 15). —Mets501 (talk) 14:03, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
I also agree with this. Age has no part in who should be an admin. However, maturity does: if you have a 13 or a 30 year old who acts like a "typical" 10 year old, neither should get the tools. One thing I am concerned about though is that it is probably more likely that a young candidate take a failed RFA badly.--Nilfanion (talk) 14:15, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

On the other hand, if you get into a serious problem on Wikipedia, "Hey, I'm just 15!" really can't be an excuse if you've chosen to go through RfA and say that age doesn't matter. You've chosen to be treated as an adult for better or worse. --W.marsh 15:51, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes indeed. Age doesn't matter as much as maturity. I've seen admins as young as 12 kicking and screaming (in a positive manner, of course). --Pilotguy (roger that) 16:10, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

I too agree with this. Age is actually not a concern. The level of maturity is. --Siva1979Talk to me 18:46, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Age absolutely is a valid part of a larger look at a candidate for adminship. There are some cases where im immensely surprised to find some current admins who were young when promoted, but for the most part, it's along the lines of 'I could tell'. It's not a litmus test, I wont make up my mind solely on the issue of age, but I find it much harder to support someone under 18. Not impossibly hard mind you, and I end up swayed as often as not, but it is just more reassuring to know someone has reached at least adulthood, seems to temper them and add a bit of maturity from what I see. We dont live for the exceptions. There are mature teenagers, and immature 30-somethings, and thats what the discussion part of RfA is for, to sway those who see that. But for the majority of cases, if you're in highschool, you've got some growing to do. Get over it, do that growing, its not like im saying you suck as a person because you're young. -Mask 21:15, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

  • For legal issues, I can understand why someone would want aged 18+ admins. But, then again, how can one prove age on the internet? Moreover, wouldn't that compromise "No big deal" even more than it already has been? I agree with the above user; age is another statistic, like edit count — stats serve as half of the equation in RFA, and the other half is the discussion aspect. — Deckiller 21:28, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
I strongly disagree with AKMask on this. Deckiller raises the obvious practical question: how do we know how old someone is? That aside this kind of age discrimination is illegal in some countries where Wikipedia operates, and IMHO its immmoral everywhere. The question we should be asking is about maturity, not age, as maturity directly impacts their ability to be a good admin. Since even AKMask admits that age!=maturity then adding an age barrier does nothing the improve the RfA decision process but it is instruction creep. We already judge people on their maturity and find some older folks lacking and some younger folks to be wise. I may be old and creaky myself but I still remember being young. Gwernol 22:07, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
Age should not be a factor. If for no other reason, we don't know most users' ages. That would then make it unfair on those who have chosen to be honest and tell their age, and are then punished for it. If someone isn't acting like a little kid (in the bad way), then don't oppose them for it. -Goldom ‽‽‽ ⁂ 22:12, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
(edit conflict with Newyorkbrad)Discriminating against someone based on their age makes as much sense as discriminating against someone based on their being from developing country. Many young people are not as mature as adults. Many people from non-first world countries are either computer illiterate and/or unable to communicate effectively in English. Therefore young people and people from non-first world countries are less likely to make good admins. This should be taken into account when judging RfAs from people under the age of 21 (the age of majority in many countries) or RfAs involving people from less well off countries. It's just more reassuring to know that someone has grown up in an English speaking country and surrounded by technology. It seems to temper them for the online environment and add a bit of English communication proficiency from what I see. We don't live for the exceptions. We should pass over people from countries outside of the developed world. Right, or did I miss your point? Basing an argument on stereotypes and generalizations is not a mature rhetorical approach.—WAvegetarian•(talk) 23:47, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
I agree, I think. Your sarcasm confused me for a moment. (You are being sarcastic right?) There is no reason to think that a 40-year-old new to Wikipedia should be more knowledgeable about the project than a 15-year-old who has been around for a year. -- tariqabjotu (joturner) 23:54, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
Yes, it was meant to be a weak reductio ad absurdum, commonly seen as sarcastic agreement. I'm sure that there are some people on the project that feel that admins should only come from English speaking countries in the Western world. If someone commenting here feels that way then my argument could be rejected, however I have a strong feeling that the vast majority of commenters will agree that it is an absurd conclusion. Breakdown of logical argument follows. Let A stand for young people, B stand for immature people, C stand for good admin candidates, D stand for people from places outside the developed/English speaking world and E stand for computer illiterate people/people with poor English communication skils. AKMask said Most A are B. B are not C. Therefore A are not C. I responded Most A are B. Most D are E. B and E are not C. Therefore all A and D are not C, but all D != C is an absurd conclusion. —WAvegetarian•(talk) 07:15, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

Youthful RfA candidates should be treated just like everyone else if they are serious candidates. I ran successfully for public office when I was in my early 20's and can shout as loud as anyone "judge people by their qualifications, not by their ages." Of course, in some cases we don't know a candidate's age anyway (e.g., I had no idea User:Mets501 was a teen when I supported his RfA last month, but now I am sad I'll never get to reminisce with him about the 1986 World Series).

On the other hand, when a young nominee (such as a current candidate at this writing who appears to be 12 years old) has no real chance for the mop in his/her current RfA, the situation calls for the same kindness and thoughtfulness that we would have wanted to receive if there had been an Internet and a Wikipedia when we all were 12 or 13. Especially if, as in this case, the user is a serious article editor and we want him to stick around in that capacity. It's particularly important that at least some of the comments be positive -- but that this be done without patronizing the candidate, these are some of the brightest kids around and will see through that -- and that we avoid pile-ons in these situations. Newyorkbrad 23:43, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

WOW! I just felt bad for a certain RfA candidate who was getting shredded without regard for his age (12-14). I just found his mistakes more understandable as age/maturity related. Then I find out we have a teenage 'crat. I don't care how old an editor is. All that matters is ability. I don't think we should take age into considerationregardling qualifications. Should we temper our "constructive criticism in any way? Cheers :) Dlohcierekim 00:01, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
I haven't edited this page since the HRE fracas, but I think I need to say a few things. As someone who was made admin at 15 (I became admin a few days before my 16th birthday last year), age plays little to no part in it, it's maturity. HOWEVER, regardless of one's age, I think there's one underlying point that must be made here: If you accept and choose to go through with the nomination, you have to expect and accept what comes at you. This certain candidate is being opposed on mostly fair grounds, with, as far as I can see, only one struck out age-related issue. He's being opposed on how he would use the tools, and his actions in the past regarding policy, not his age. Chacor 01:28, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

"On the internet, no one knows you're really a [16 year old] dog." -Kim Bruning 10:41, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

I've been discriminated against because of my age before on Wikipedia (quite often by vandals but a couple of times by respected editors too). I don't think age should play a part in the process – quite often a 13, 14, 15 year old can be more mature, and more responsible than a 30 year old. — FireFox (talk) 10:51, 13 August '06

As a member of the over-30 admin group, I also think that it more relates to maturity than chronological age. I happen to think that there is a positive correlation between the two, but it isn't 1. If over a period of six months to a year, and a few thousand edits, the user demonstrates the maturity, diplomacy, and discipline needed to be a 'crat or sysop, then why not? I know plenty of fourty year olds that make my kids look like sagacious octogenarians :) -- Avi 14:57, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Because I'm 13, I can't be an admin sometime soon? That is not right. Until I stated my age just a few weeks ago, I could have been mistaken as an adult because of my maturity. Abdullah Geelah should certainly be an admin soon. --Kitia

Based on the discussion above, Kitia, I don't think anyone is saying that being 13 (or any age) means you can't be an administrator if you are qualified. To the contrary, I think the consensus above is to judge the candidates strictly on the basis of qualifications and that age is either not a factor at all or at most a peripheral one. In fact, I think that younger people have a greater chance of being treated as individuals and on the same plane with older people on Wikipedia and similar projects than virtually anywhere else -- which is exactly how it should be, and exactly how I would have wanted it if there had been a 'net and a Wikipedia when I was 13. Newyorkbrad 18:09, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

FAC talk

I am a little confused. Some editors demand !FA, which would necessitate/demonstrate communication skills in just trying to bring the article to that level. It appears some discount FAC talk in favor of user talk and article talk. Why would FAC not be enough to show a user communicates well enough to be an admin? (Pleae pardon any typos. I'm at work and don't have a spell checker to help me proof. :) Dlohcierekim 23:54, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Being able to develop an article up to FA-class demonstrates exceptional writing skills, which many users see as extremely important in the context of administering an encyclopedia. However, it's also fairly common for users (such as myself) to disagree with that particular standard, because one's ability to administer the encyclopedia does not depend upon the quality of one's writing style.
Personally, I'd say that while having a Featured Article or two under one's belt is pretty impressive, it means nothing in terms of one's ability to delete articles, block users and the like. A good writing style is an advantage to an admin, but should never be considered the sole basis on which to judge a candidate's suitability - AfDs, User Talk and other areas of participation are more relevant as examples of how a user communicates in other contexts, and are equally (if not more) important. RandyWang (chat me up/fix me up) 09:31, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
I disagree with the above statement where you've only cited three points to being an admin. I'm not sure if you've participated in FAC before, but getting an article featured is a stressful exercise. For a newbie to get an article featured shows a lot of positive attitude in building consensus. Take a look at the FACs to judge how a candidate has responded to the oppose remarks. Secondly, adminship is not about just explicit vandalism fighting, if you're a dedicated wikipedian, reverting vandalism is part and parcel of your work here, admin or not. And being a editor-admin, it's a lot easier to judge if an article needs to be deleted or not. Lastly, an editor-admin can edit pages protected pages such as DYKs and ITN. =Nichalp «Talk»= 13:46, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
It's a good thing that wikipedia admins don't administer any encyclopedias. Some of them seem to have enough trouble using the admin flag on a wiki. Kim Bruning 10:45, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

Adding a question on Recall

I would like to propose changing the RfA template to include a question with regard to Category:Administrators open to recall, to be answered mandatorily. Now that we have a precedent of an administrator being recalled, I want to see the recall process get more defined, and the perfect way to get all admin candidates to consider recall and to go on record with their opinion on how they would handle theirs is to add a question, as follows:

Q4: If promoted, do you plan to take the optional step of joining Category:Administrators open to recall and why? If yes, what course of action will you take if recalled?

Doing so will raise the profile of the recall process and will put a lot of peer pressure on candidates to volunteer - which I think is a net good thing (proceeding from the premise that recall is fundamentally a good thing, which could be debatable). I have added this question (on an optional basis) to a couple of still-pending RfA's, and my understanding is that Lar has asked a similar question of candidates in the past. Prior discussion is at Category talk:Administrators open to recall - CrazyRussian talk/email 14:55, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

I Support this idea 110% (could turn nominees into politicians however - how do we make them keep their word??? ;) Great idea - Glen 14:59, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
I object to the entire category on principle. It should be all admins or no admins. Trying to pressure some admins (or admin candidates) into joining creates an ugly double standard. It is on the same spectrum as saying: "If you have nothing to hide, then surely its okay if the police know every detail of your life", i.e. "If you are going to be a good admin, then surely you won't mind being held to a higher standard than other admins". And if an admin candidate refuses to join, do we really want to believe that this person is more nefarious than all the other admins who haven't joined? If something is a "good idea" then refusing to participate will look bad even though being forced to participate would create an unfair double standard. I'm on record in multiple places as supporting some form of admin recall for all admins, but I absolutely think it is unfair to create de facto policy applying only to new admins by pressuring them into it. Dragons flight 15:16, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
What DF said. The idea of admin recall is good and sound as a check on the system, but so far none of the proposed systems have gained both consensus and widespread use. The self-nominated category has some flaws (not least of which is small usage), and applying this only to new admins actually intensifies the problem, not solves it (IMO). Anyone can ask voluntary questions of candidates, though... -- nae'blis 15:20, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
I feel the question would back people into a corner. The vast majority of admins have not joined the category, but that does not mean they don't feel they should be held accountable for their actions. However, some !voters would take objecting to joining the category as an indication that they don't feel it's necessary to be held accountable for their actions. I think some people, including myself, feel the structure of the open to recall category is a bit too rigid and would result in the admin in question being forced to step down despite relatively minor infractions. Admins will run into trouble, garner a few enemies. It happens, but that's part of the job. I'm sure I could easily find six people who believe Cyde, for instance, is a bad admin, but that doesn't mean he really is; he's just willing to put his neck on the line in controversial situations. -- tariqabjotu (joturner) 15:25, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
Forcing this into the standard questions now amounts to blackmail to join a category that has significant opposition to it's use. Get consensus on admin recall for all admins, then and only then can it go in the standard questions. - Taxman Talk 15:28, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
But we now have the issue of people asking it at all. People are currently welcome to ask this question on every single RfA which would essentially have almost the same effect as being a standard question. -- tariqabjotu (joturner) 15:40, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
Adding it to the template makes it a standard part of the process and indicates consensus for it being a criterion for evaluating an administrator, which all candidates must answer; instead as an optional question, it is one editor asking it to help him and some others make their own decisions. —Centrx→talk • 16:12, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
Taxman, would you then consider me guilty of blackmail if I asked that question on a voluntary basis? Would you like me to withdraw the yet unanswered question I posed to Wangi a few minutes ago? Nevermind [2]. Good answer. - CrazyRussian talk/email 15:43, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
A number of the issues people seem to have with this question is the idea that saying no could be then taken as a reason perhaps to oppose. However consider Alphachimp's response: Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Alphachimp. I think such an elegant reply on why they would not join does their RFA no harm at all (in fact it does the opposite). Saying that I don't feel it should added in to the template, it's fine as an optional question. Thanks/wangi 15:50, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
This is a terrible idea and I object to asking the question at all. It will just make people think they have to join that category or say they will for them to get the vote of the person asking. The category is not anywhere near accepted by anywhere near a consensus or majority of admins, and questioning people at all about such a controversial thing does nothing but make them think they have to go along with it. Wangi's answer cited above is a perfect example of this. People are so afraid of things on RFA anyway, that few will say "no I won't join" because of the implication that if you don't join you are a bad admin. This is nothing but a way for the supporters of admin recall to advertise their category. pschemp | talk 15:52, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
I second that statement--this is indeed terrible. While I have no issue with someone voluntarily joining this category, to raise this as a questions implies that if someone says no others will try to blackball their nomination. --Alabamaboy 16:04, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
I concur with all of the above - this idea is awful. Raul654 16:42, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
(edit conflict) I totally agree with Pschemp - asking this to candidates is and would be a very bad idea. Supporting or submitting to a highly muddy and controversial proposal (which is probably new or of little interest to many or most Admin Candidates anyway) should not be added to the list of mulitcoloured hoops that candidates here have to jump though (which it will become, as many have stated above). Plus, during/just before an RfA is not the environment in which to decide on it. Each individual Wikipedian should decide where they stand on it when they hear about it naturally and have no pressure on them either way. Thanks! —Celestianpower háblame 16:08, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
I also agree with Pschemp -- it's fine as an optional question, but making it mandatory should only come after there is consensus that the category is beneficial, at the least. Even then, since the point of the category is to implement a voluntary recall standard (as opposed to making the recall process a regular part of the admin policy) it would be arguable that making the question mandatory gives it a higher profile in the RfA process than appropriate. Mike Christie 16:11, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
Well you missed half my point then. I'm opposed to asking it at all, even voluntarily, because I think that is just the supporters of the category advertising it. pschemp | talk 16:22, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
You're right; I didn't make it clear which part of your comment I was agreeing with -- my mistake. Personally I wouldn't ask the question and don't feel it is necessary, though I did find AlphaChimp's "no" to be useful and informative. However, I don't oppose it as an optional question because I have a hard time placing limits on the optional questions. Optional questions are clearly from individuals and I don't see a reason to oppose any questions other than obvious time-wasting. Mike Christie 16:30, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

That's a lot more opposition than this proposal had gotten at the talk page of the category - which makes some sense. - CrazyRussian talk/email 16:14, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

I have nominated the category for deletion as inherently divisive. Dragons flight 16:24, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Wow. Somone asks a question here and as a reaction you put this cat on CfD. Not really nice. (Warning: this was a divisive statement. Let's call the wiki thought police). I would propose that all admins here step down from adminship because adminship is divisive. A statement from a humble non-admin --Ligulem 17:46, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
Not to mentions I doubt you'd be asking anyone about this if you hadn't just been recalled CryzRussian. Asking that question, even voluntarily is advertising for your cause, and as such does not belong in an RFA. pschemp | talk 16:25, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
Recall is not my cause. I would like to either see it made near-universal or deleted altogether. A rejection of this proposal is something I am 100% ok with, but I definitely want recall discussed. - CrazyRussian talk/email 16:36, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
"I want to see the recall process get more defined, and the perfect way to get all admin candidates to consider recall and to go on record with their opinion on how they would handle theirs is to add a question" sure sounds like it is your cause. pschemp | talk 16:42, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
(proceeding from the premise that recall is fundamentally a good thing, which could be debatable) on which the jury is apparently still out, as I have now heard. - CrazyRussian talk/email 16:46, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
Lookit, I haven't done anything wrong. I asked three optional question, something I was not the first to do, and I started a discussion in a couple of places, to which I've gotten some strong answers, which is a very good thing. That's all. - CrazyRussian talk/email 16:48, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
Calm down. My point is that RFA questions are there to determine the suitability of the candidate, not to promote or make visible a category. Since that was your stated goal, that question is not appropriate. I'm not accusing you of doing wrong, just pointing out why you shouldn't continue. pschemp | talk 16:59, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
100% calm. It was a mixed motivation. I will certainly not continue as recall seems doomed. - CrazyRussian talk/email 17:04, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

I support the category, and encourage admins to consider placing themselves in it, and argued strongly for keeping it just now, but oppose asking this as a standard question, and further note that my comment record shows I have supported people who opposed the idea and opposed people who supported it. It should not be a litmus test for admins. I further argue that it need not be near universal to do siginficant good for the encyclopedia and if it's not near universal, that's no reason to delete it. "Admins willing to make hard blocks" isn't near universal either and yet does a great deal of good by existing. ++Lar: t/c 16:39, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, this question should not be asked in any way. CrzyRussian's quote above points out that the reason for asking is to make it more visible. That is an unacceptable use of RFA questions. RFA questions are there to determine a candidates suitablitiy not to make a category more visible. If you don't care about their answer to the question, it shouldn't be being asked, not even voluntarily. pschemp | talk 16:42, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
Other issues aside, the question seems perfectly reasonable as something to help determine a candidate's suitability for adminship. It's certainly more relevant than some of the other questions that people will ask. Kirill Lokshin 17:05, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
Exactly how is it relevant? pschemp | talk 17:15, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
Because a potential administrator's views on the possibility of recall (if not necessarily on the particular method being discussed) are usually indicative of their view on the role of admins within the community in general—which is a rather important point to a number of people. (Provided the answer to the question is honest, of course; but that's true of all the questions being asked.) Whether you choose to use this information in determining your opinion is entirely up to you; but surely you can see that some (many?) of those commenting might find it useful? Kirill Lokshin 17:20, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
Well then ask about their views of the recall proposal, not if they want to join a category. As it is worded right now, it isn't relevant. pschemp | talk 17:22, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
I can't speak for Crzrussian's reasons for asking but they are not mine. As I say below, I asked (a rather long winded multipart question about both recall and ROUGE) to gauge the answers. To say I don't care what the answers are is not really a very accurate thing to say beacuse I do care very much, but more about the process and the thinking than the actual answer. That's because I don't think that being in or not in it makes you better or worse as an admin. ++Lar: t/c 03:50, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Extremely related to this, an actual Recall policy proposal is currently being discussed at WP:RECALL. Thanks. rootology (T) 17:17, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

The question isn't about WP:RECALL, its about joining the current category. Two different things. To make it relevant, ask about WP:RECALL instead. pschemp | talk 17:20, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
I think both approaches are misguided. If you want to know how the candidate feels about administrator recall, ask them how they feel about administrator recall. Don't ask them to hit a moving target (WP:RECALL is far from solidified, despite the straw poll) or blackmail them into support the current voluntary categorization. Maybe it could be useful to mention both in the question, but that just overcomplicates things in my view. -- nae'blis 20:43, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
I agree. I meant aske them how they feel about recall in general as I said up above. I put Wp;Recall in there because that seems to be Rootology's currrent fascination, but what you said is correct. Ask about the general idea, not the category or the proposal. pschemp | talk 01:27, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

My take on the particular discussion: do NOT add as a mandatory question. Individual people are fine to ask, on their own volition, but as the self-recall is just something a group of admins is willing to do does not make it policy. rootology (T) 17:19, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

I think that would be a good step to take. Michael 02:02, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Voluntary -> no question

May I suggest a simple way out. As it is very well understood, adding your self to the recall list is voluntary. As such, it should not be a question on a RfA, but post the question at the talk page of the new admin as soon as a nomination has been concluded successfully. In that way, they are aware of it, can add themselves, and it will not result in a false suggestion at the RfA if someone for whatever reason does not want to put themselves on the list. -- Kim van der Linde at venus 02:46, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Cool! - CrazyRussian talk/email 02:47, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
Excellent suggestion. I wonder if it would be worth posting this entire discussion over to the talk page of the category, to avoid having to hash this out again in three or four months. -- nae'blis 02:57, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
Sure, assuming the category survives deletion, that is. ++Lar: t/c 03:40, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
It will. There is no way either side will get a consensus. --Kbdank71 15:38, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
good suggestion. thanks Kim. pschemp | talk 02:59, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
I'm not opposed to the suggestion of asking about the category after the successful RfA but I gotta say, I think there is value in asking all sorts of questions of prospective admins to see how they think on their feet. I'm standing behind the versions I asked as having generated a lot of good thinking from candidates (and remind you yet again that my comments of support or oppose were not completely congruent with the yes/no answers I got, rather they were congruent with the level of thoughtfulness I saw) ++Lar: t/c 03:40, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
I'm inclined to agree with you. Michael 03:43, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

I'd be inclined to vote "oppose" to someone who said that they would add themselves to the category. The more people who are unwilling to do anything that might offend anyone (or, well, 6 anyones) the less able Wikipedia is to protect itself from nogoodniks. Guettarda 04:04, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

If a bad-faith recall happened, I'm sure the targetted admin would romp back in. Regards, Ben Aveling 07:02, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
I suppose my underlying concern comes from my experience with teaching evaluations. Student evaluations can influence hiring, tenure and promotion for faculty and teaching assistants. Getting good evaluations pays off, getting bad evaluations can hurt you. I believe that this is a major driver of grade inflation, which lowers the overall quality of tertiary education. There are enough forces which limit your fearlessness as an admin. While there are a few people who are too fearless, starting people off like that seems to be a good way to produce cowed admins. Guettarda 15:01, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
What's a "bad faith recall"? I can't see that happening to me, frankly. (again I refer folk to User:Lar/Accountability for more info) If 6 trolls turned up to try to recall me, regardless of their edit/time numbers, I'd spurn the request and say "I don't consider myself recalled, if you disagree, take it to ArbCom". If somehow that got past me and we got into the discussion phase, I think the bad faithness would come out pretty quickly and I'd say "well that was a nice discussion, I don't consider myself recalled, if you disagree, take it to ArbCom". (in both cases I'd expect ArbCom to laugh and decline to review the case) If on the other hand it was ME acting in bad faith by spurning legitimate requests, or by not being collegial during the discussion or trying to wriggle out of admitting I erred on things or whatever, again I'd expect that it would go to ArbCom.. but in this case I'd expect to be sans the sysop bit pretty quickly. Reading that, you might say... "ok how is that better than just going to ArbCom directly???" and the answer is, those are edge cases. The one case we've seen so far wasn't edge. The petitioners were acting in good faith, had legitimate grievances, and the petitionee and everyone else acted collegially. That he chose the most stringent option, one I would not choose, was his choice. My expectation is that most if not all cases would not be edge cases, because the ArbCom as backup would tend to reduce the tendency of trolls to even waste the time and tend to reduce the tendency of an admin who had previously agreed to be collegial and reasonable to be intemperate and unreasonable. I think this process so far has went swimmingly and the troll argument is a non issue. ++Lar: t/c 18:56, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Image:Rouge-Admin.png

I have put Image:Rouge-Admin.png on IfD. You may say this is a violation of WP:POINT, but I must say I have always found this to be highly divisive. Also the notion of rouge-admins is highly divisive. --Ligulem 18:26, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

You created an en image description page for a mirrored rendering from Wikimedia Commons. I've deleted the empty imagespace page here. If you'd like to nominate this media for deletion, you need to do it at commons:Template:Deletion requests. Jkelly 18:38, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
Ok. Then let's discuss it here, because that banner is used by admins on en. That banner was used by Brigate Rosse, an Italian terrorist group who murdered prime minister Aldo Moro. I find this banner offensive and divisive. Is this what these "ambassador" admins want to express here?
Moro br 1.jpg
--Ligulem 19:01, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
Category:Rouge admins is also discussed for deletion here. That banner is used there. If Category:Administrators open to recall is divisive, is Rouge admins not divisive? --Ligulem 19:24, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
W/ due respect to your comments, i must say that the category would end up w/ a "no concensus". I agree w/ Kelly that the procedure must go thru commons:Template:Deletion requests. -- Szvest 19:28, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
I didn't know where that banner came from, and I have to say that given its origin it is in bad taste for admins to display that on their userpages. Christopher Parham (talk) 01:23, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
May I just say that I find this all rather silly. Themindset 03:23, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
I don't know what aspect exactly you deem silly: the fact that I brought it up here or the fact that some admins on en are using this banner to decorate their user pages. In any case, I admit that this is somewhat a matter of WP:POINT from my side, because none of those admins did put that banner in bad faith on their user pages. Neither was the Category:Administrators open to recall created in bad faith and nobody is forced to comment on that cat. Nevertheless both the rouge banner and the cat were both put on deletion discussion. Now, what is more ridiculous/divisive? Most of those that want the Category:Administrators open to recall have deleted argue it is divisive. Nevertheless some of them are on category:rouge admins, which I try to say is divisive too. How much do we need to extinct divisive things on user pages? --Ligulem 07:58, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
I strongly second Christopher Parham on this. Tyrenius 03:26, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
I thought the image came from a military organization. However, upon learning it's actually from a terrorist organization, I concur that it's quite disrespectful. -- tariqabjotu 03:50, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
Some jokes just push the envelope farther than others, they're still hilariously funny and incisive though. Take, for example, the September 11 joke by an Arab on The Daily Show a few nights ago. They were talking about how Bush and Rice keep saying that the problems in the Middle East are merely "the birth pangs of Democracy" and "a great opportunity". The response was to contrast how the Bush administration expects the people in the Middle East to respond to their crisis and how we responded to ours. We didn't consider 9/11 a "great opportunity", for instance. --Cyde Weys 13:52, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
I'm confused as to how that's relevant. We're talking about using a terrorist banner as a Wikipedia admin symbol. -- tariqabjotu 14:00, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
I agree that the image is in bad taste. =Nichalp «Talk»= 14:13, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

For those who are interested in this image it is now listed for deletion on Commons, here: commons:Template:Deletion_requests#Image:Rouge-Admin.png.--Nilfanion (talk) 16:20, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

What i believe is that none of the admins tagging h/ userpage w/ the image is really "Rouge". We don't really need all this spectacle. I'd have agreed w/ you if one of those admins is behaving as a "terrorist". None. What's the problem? -- Szvest 16:22, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

To be perfectly clear, Ligulem, I think all sides of this "issue" are rather silly... PS, Cyde, I caught that episode of the daily show and was amazed he got a laugh out of an american audience. It was, as you say, hilarious and incisive. Themindset 16:30, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Even I thought it would be tough to get the image deleted from Commons because its use in an inappropriate manner (if even that) on Wikipedia probably shouldn't mean the image ought to be deleted outright. For the most part, I wanted to get this discussion into the right forum. -- tariqabjotu 18:41, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Deletion seems a bit extreme...people are free to be tasteless, with the awareness that it affects how other people view them. Christopher Parham (talk) 04:32, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

But I'm a rouge user, you insensitive clod! Kim Bruning 12:19, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Checkuser?

Given this claim by Karmafist, and the recent debacle over Jtkiefer, I'm beginning to think that every RFA candidate should be checkusered. Thoughts? Thatcher131 (talk) 00:26, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

I was thinking the same thing. The additional workload on RfCU wouldn't be great, and there appears to be a need. -Will Beback 00:28, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
Well, I was thinking it should be privately done. Public requests could be divisive, and ten new requests a week at RFCU would double the load, more or less. There are 12 other checkusers, of course. If done privately and something worrying showed up, it could be discussed privately, hopefully clearing it up without ever having to publicly raise the issue. But I also wonder about the practicallities. If an experienced user was really careful, he might be able to keep multiple accounts so well segregated that he wouldn't leave the kind of trail checkuser can find. Just thinking out loud. Thatcher131 (talk) 00:37, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
I imagine this will quickly get opposed into oblivion over WP:AGF or some such, but I think it's a good idea with a few provisos. The information should be more confidential than a typical checkuser, so people don't have to risk personal location/ISP information becoming public knowledge just by running for RfA. Also the workload on RFCU needs to be considered, I'd like to hear from people active over there before this proposal goes anywhere. But workload alone shouldn't shoot this down, maybe we could promote more people to checkuser status (and no I'm not volunteering, hehe) --W.marsh 00:40, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
I clerk at RFCU and I can pretty much predict Mackensen and Essjay's response :-/ However there are about 14 people with checkuser access, including all the members of Arbcom, and they use it frequently to identify and block abusive socks, open proxies, etc. (Look at Fred Bauder's block log for example). They just don't usually respond to public requests. It is definitely possible to have some of the other checkusers run private checks, only disclosing results if a candidate is a reincarnation of someone who should not be an admin. In fact, it may already be done for all I know. And I am quite prepared to have this shot down on AGF grounds. I am concerned that with people bragging that their socks are going to become admins, its only a matter of time until someone (probably someone who is not bragging) gets through, and I honestly don't know what to do (if anything) about it. Thatcher131 (talk) 00:51, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
<Scratches head> Yeah I see the problem there. I've argued for applying a variant of the turing test before. Would that work? I don't think we'd get many bots as admins :-P , but we'd get some very interesting and useful socks. Kim Bruning 01:10, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
Maybe a Voight-Kampff test instead? How long can the candidate answer loaded questions before breaking out with a giveaway response :-/ Thatcher131 (talk) 01:14, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
Bahahahaha. You win. -- nae'blis 05:18, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
Indeed, totally pwned all my base. Kim Bruning 12:35, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

The danger that somebody may use their admin powers to damage Wikipedia is very real. However, I believe all admin actions are reversible. Also, that potential rogue admin does not have to be a sock of some other rogue user, and then Checkuser won't help.

On the other hand, I am very uneasy with the requirement that each potential admin have to go through the checkuser. To sum it up, I would think mandatory checkuser it is not a good idea at the moment (it may be, if such an incident with a sockpuppet becoming an admin and causing damage actually happens.) Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 01:12, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

I can see both sides here, on one hand a CheckUser could potentially save a whole lot of trouble with rogue admins down the line, but on the other hand, a request for a CheckUser on a candidate of this sort, without any explicit socks or such would probably be denied as a fishing expedition at WP:RFCU, and I'm not sure if going through a checkuser and having one's IP exposed should be required for having a shot at becoming an admin.--digital_me(Talk•Contribs) 01:37, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
I don't think the Privacy policy allows it to begin with, and perhaps useless. Just for hypothetical purposes, let's assume it is a returning banned user, who has not edited in more than two months with the banned account, but keeps editing previously with his/her new username. If we ran a checkuser, the results would be negative because the Recent changes table, where editors' IP addresses are stored, needs to be routinely purged about every four weeks or so. After it is purged, the IPs are lost forever without Apache log analysis, which is hard to do, and in this situation, pointless. Titoxd(?!?) 01:44, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
I would be all for this, if Checkuser were magic computer dust that always worked. If it were, we could dodge any privacy policy issues by making allowing a checkuser on yourself a required part of accepting an RfA nomination. However. It isn't magic computer dust. And if people know they are going to be checkusered, it is not that hard for them to alter their behavior and connectivity strategies to avoid detection. That's exactly why the checkusers tend to shrug at self-requests for checkuser: if someone's requesting it, either they're innocent, or they've gone out of their way to avoid detection. So, the plan to Checkuser admin candidates is only a starter if it is done in secret. In which case, I'm pretty sure it's would be a blatant pricacy violation. Bit of a catch-22. (Plus, the first time a checkuser had to announce the results of one of these secret CUs, the jig would kind of be up.) —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 02:33, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Checkuser is probably worse than useless for this. It's not a privacy violation if the user consents to have it done (which consent would presumably become part of the deal when one accepts an RFA nom), but admin candidates tend to be technical enough to know how to conceal their socks (if they are up to no good) before the checkuser happens. Giving anyone in that position a "checkuser clean bill of health" could be quite misleading, so it's better to stay neutral. Users with checkuser authority might choose to check out candidates sua sponte if they think something odd is up (and intervene if the CU finds something), but this should not be a standardized practice. Phr (talk) 02:56, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

The amount of mischief a rogue admin can do before being de-sysoped and blocked is rather limited. Everything an admin can do can now be reverted, and if some sad lunatic is so revengeful that he's willing to work for many months and make thousands of quality edits just so he can cause a minute of havoc, we should almost be grateful for his rage which brought us the lasting contributions. The worst thing we can do is turn paranoid over this and start suspecting every rfa candidate of being a rogue wikipedian in disguise. That would hurt the project overall much more than some psycho some day maybe making it to admin-status and getting his 1 minute of infamy. Shanes 03:45, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

The problem is that if a user is stealthy enough to stay hidden for months as an editor, they are probably stealthy enough to stay hidden as an admin. I am not worried about the admins that "flameout" in a minute of fun. I am worried about an admin that slow burns for months and makes life uncomfortable for lots of users. --Tbeatty 06:39, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

I want such incidents of rogue admin to be rare, and out of the ordinary. All one can do is make sure the right people get the right tools by voting one conscious. --Masssiveego 06:26, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

"If we CheckUser the candidates, the vandals have already won."? -- nae'blis 05:18, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Checkuser them after they are accepted. That will cut down the workload. Also cuts down on the follwup. It could be done before Bureacrat makes them an admin and after the vote. Problem checkusers can be handled privately giving the candidate the ability to withdraw if it's too problematic. Bureacrats routinely make recommendations to candidates if they think they won't be successful. If they don't withdraw, clear the vote, make the problem known and let the community revote. --Tbeatty 06:39, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

That's sensible. -Will Beback 07:04, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

I don't think we have a need to checkuser. I was ha ha only serious about the Turing Test. If some entity[1] passes requests for adminship, does it matter what that entity actually is? Kim Bruning 11:08, 16 August 2006 (UTC) [1] Human, sock, stephen colbert masquerading as an elephant, or even a sentient bot sometime in the distant future, who cares? On the internet, no one knows you're a dog. As long as you don't bite people, and do normal administrative tasks like everyone else, what the heck, please come and be an admin!

No, it doesn't, but it might matter that said entity hasn't already passed as something else. ;-) SlimVirgin (talk) 11:23, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
Hmm, as long as both entities appear effectively separate, it might turn out that that distinction isn't relevant. Does that make sense, in the context of how the turing test works? Kim Bruning 11:46, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
Yes, indeed, but the Turing test wasn't handing out privileges. :-) The point is simply that it's not a good idea to have one user (human, dog, or sentient bot) with multiple adminships, and this would cut down the possibility, though of course not rule it out entirely. Someone determined enough could post with proxies in the time leading up to his nom, but he'd have to be quite determined, because it would add to the nuisance factor. At least with an automatic check user, we'd make it harder. Or we could have random checks, left to the discretion of the bureaucrat. My own preference would have been not to have this discussion in public, and for bureaucrats to take it upon themselves to check some or all noms discreetly, but it's too late for that now. ;-D SlimVirgin (talk) 11:52, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
Totally agree with Kim. There is absolutely no need to checkuser prospective candidates, it violates the privacy policy and it would not actually fix anything. Where exactly is the problem that this "solution" is designed to fix? This is precisely one of the reasons that the introduction of Checkuser was opposed - it can be used as a fishing expidition, frivolously or otherwise. Checkuser should only be used in the most limited of circumstances to counter abuse of Wikipedia. Prospective admin candidates should be welcomed in good faith, not subjected to an intrusive investigation of their likeliehood to be vandals or undiscovered sockpuppets. The process as it now operates is fraught with stress for candidates, please let's not pile any more upon them.
For those in doubt, the policy staes:
It is the policy of Wikimedia that personally identifiable data collected in the server logs, or through records in the database via the CheckUser feature, may be released by the system administrators or users with CheckUser access, in the following situations:
  • 1. In response to a valid subpoena or other compulsory request from law enforcement
  • 2. With permission of the affected user
  • 3. To the chair of Wikimedia Foundation, his legal counsel, or his designee, when necessary for investigation of abuse complaints.
  • 4. Where the information pertains to page views generated by a spider or bot and its dissemination is necessary to illustrate or resolve technical issues.
  • 5. Where the user has been vandalising articles or persistently behaving in a disruptive way, data may be released to assist in the targeting of IP blocks, or to assist in the formulation of a complaint to relevant Internet Service Providers
  • 6. Where it is reasonably necessary to protect the rights, property or safety of the Wikimedia Foundation, its users or the public.
  • Wikimedia policy does not permit public distribution of such information under any circumstances, except as described above.
This prohibits the random, unchecked use of the Checkuser function for good reason. I am totally opposed to this suggested use on RfA.
--Cactus.man ✍ 12:05, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
A discussion on Meta (not here on the English-language Wikipedia) a while back brought the suggestion that Bureaucrats should have CheckUser access. Originally, the idea was that all Bureaucrats, in all the Wikimedia projects, would have the tool in their respective projects. This was widely rejected given the sensitivity of the information associated with the tool. I suggested that the active Bureaucrats on this Wikipedia (the English-language Wikipedia) could have the tool (currently, Essjay and UninvitedCompany have it). The main reason for my suggestion was the relatively small number of CheckUsers handling public requests at WP:RCU, but as far as RfA is concerned, I had thought that whether or not to use the tool, and actually using it, would become part of Bureaucrat diligence when analyzing any given RfA: if there was reasonable reason to believe that the candidate or any participant was a [so far unidentified] sockpuppet, the Bureaucrat would be able to ascertain the situation (in theory: not forgetting that CheckUser, as it has been said, is not a magical tool, but rather it has limitations, both technical and from our Privacy Policy) and make a decision. I got no feedback from the Meta community though. Redux 16:43, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree w/ Thatcher. I was thinking of requesting another adminship on my infamous sockpuppet account User:Non-existant. -- Szvest 17:09, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

I would like to point out that sockpuppet administrator account(s) can, in fact, cause grave and irreversable damage. If someone did indeed manage to get several accounts through RfA successfully, there could easily be irreversable, though non-technical, implications that I would rather not discuss. The potential damage is real and huge. Whether or not that justifies CheckUser is a another question, though. Thanks! Flcelloguy (A note?) 21:23, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

A couple of points. First of all, Flcelloguy is correct that administrators can indeed cause irreversible damage to the project in various ways. Without spilling any WP:BEANS I can point to the already public situation involving a web site that was publishing the contents of deleted pages. While I don't remember the outcome of that particular fiasco, there was concern expressed on the mailing list that perhaps this was being done through the account of an administrator whose loyalties had been compromised (or misunderstood). Given the kinds of things we delete, that does pose a problem.

Now, regarding checkuser. There are some big problems. The first is that at present IP data isn't kept on the server indefinitely so the results may not be all that insightful -- after all, the mechanism was intended to deal with vandalism, 3RR violations, and the like, not to deal with sneaky long-term intellegence campaigns. The second is regarding interpretation of results and what constitutes a positive. If we find out that someone is editing from Brittanica, or the CIA or DHS, then what? The third is that we can't release results because of the privacy policy. We couldn't even release them with permission of the person being checked, unless they were heavily redacted so that any partial matches (which might be data about someone else who hasn't given us permission) aren't released. Without releasing the results it's hard to have a discussion about them, and in the case of otherwise trusted users I don't think it's fair to tell the rest of the project that we think they might actually also be <<whoever>> without allowing an opportunity for discussion. Unlike troublemakers, it's not fair to handle admin candidates in such a summary fasion.

<shameless plug>I think that this points up the need for overall more effective vetting of candidates, and I again invite everyone to stop by the WikiProject on adminship and share their ideas.</shameless plug>

The Uninvited Co., Inc. 22:14, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

If Bureaucrats handle it, those problems could be avoided. A check can be performed in the recent activity in order to determine if two (or more) given accounts are being controlled by the same person, or if a registered user (who is up for adminship) is editing inappropriately anonymously as well; although there's no guarantee that the results would be definitive for all cases, it would allow for the more serious cases to be dealt with (those that are very recent or even ongoing -- which are the ones more likely to be noticed anyway, as opposed to isolated actions that might have taken place months before the RfA). If a Bureaucrat performs the check and finds conclusive evidence of sockpuppetry, the action would be to close the RfA immediately due to confirmed sockpuppetry; no more information on the results need to be given out. The decision to close the RfA or leave it open, depending on the results found, would be made within Bureaucrat discretion. The situation itself can then be handled through the proper channels, such as RfC, ArbCom or even a discussion at the Administrators' noticeboard.
This would simplify the procedure, since it would not be necessary to check every single candidate or make public posts requesting checks, and certainly not divulge results for discussions in the RfA. Redux 01:16, 17 August 2006 (UTC)