Mailing List Archive

On 5/22/06, THD <theodoranian@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi, Friends,
> There are some people proposing a policy for administrator's term of
> service
> in Chinese Wikipedia. In the proposing policy, when the term of service is
> over, administrators shall get their administrative power through a
> re-election. I want to know that is there any Wikimedia project with this
> kind of policy? In my own opinion, this is quite weird. I want to know
> what
> will other language editions do when facing this kind of proposal. Thanks.
> THD


This sounds like Meta's policy for administrators. At the end of each
year-long term, an administrator is up for election and he must win a
majority of the votes to keep his sysop powers for another year. On the
English Wikisource, a similar policy was just enacted, where a vote of
confidence is held at the end of each adminstrator's term of service and the
community must give support to have the admin keep his rights. Having terms
of service isn't a common policy, but it is not unheard of on the Wikimedia
projects.

Z
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The Swedish Wikipedia also uses this system, with terms of one year at
a time; reëlections are held four times a year, once a quarter. They
just enacted the policy, and the first round of reëlections seems to
have gone quite well, with many administrators reëlected, and some
being desysopped.

On 5/22/06, Ryan Dabler <zhaladshar@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/22/06, THD <theodoranian@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi, Friends,
> > There are some people proposing a policy for administrator's term of
> > service
> > in Chinese Wikipedia. In the proposing policy, when the term of service is
> > over, administrators shall get their administrative power through a
> > re-election. I want to know that is there any Wikimedia project with this
> > kind of policy? In my own opinion, this is quite weird. I want to know
> > what
> > will other language editions do when facing this kind of proposal. Thanks.
> > THD
>
>
> This sounds like Meta's policy for administrators. At the end of each
> year-long term, an administrator is up for election and he must win a
> majority of the votes to keep his sysop powers for another year. On the
> English Wikisource, a similar policy was just enacted, where a vote of
> confidence is held at the end of each adminstrator's term of service and the
> community must give support to have the admin keep his rights. Having terms
> of service isn't a common policy, but it is not unheard of on the Wikimedia
> projects.
>
> Z
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> foundation-l@wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


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The Dutch Wikipedia (NL.wiki) has this policy. After each year, people can
make objections against an administrator. When no objections appear within
one week, nothing happens. When there is at least one objection, there will
be a vote, in which the administrator has to get at least 75% support. We
organize this every three month, to re-elect the administrators whose year
end in that quarter. Normally all administrators are re-elected, bus
especially too inactive moderators loose support.

Johan Bos (Jcb)

----- Original Message -----
From: "THD" <theodoranian@gmail.com>
To: <foundation-l@wikimedia.org>
Sent: Monday, May 22, 2006 5:21 PM
Subject: [Foundation-l] Term of service?


> Hi, Friends,
> There are some people proposing a policy for administrator's term of
> service
> in Chinese Wikipedia. In the proposing policy, when the term of service is
> over, administrators shall get their administrative power through a
> re-election. I want to know that is there any Wikimedia project with this
> kind of policy? In my own opinion, this is quite weird. I want to know
> what
> will other language editions do when facing this kind of proposal. Thanks.
> THD
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l@wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
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Nothing wrong with it. For one thing, inactive administrators would
be purged, as well as those who simply don't work out. On English,
they can only be removed if they are nasty enough that they end up in
arbitration, and that is very nasty indeed.

Fred

On May 22, 2006, at 9:21 AM, THD wrote:

> Hi, Friends,
> There are some people proposing a policy for administrator's term
> of service
> in Chinese Wikipedia. In the proposing policy, when the term of
> service is
> over, administrators shall get their administrative power through a
> re-election. I want to know that is there any Wikimedia project
> with this
> kind of policy? In my own opinion, this is quite weird. I want to
> know what
> will other language editions do when facing this kind of proposal.
> Thanks.
> THD
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l@wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

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On 5/22/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud@ctelco.net> wrote:
> Nothing wrong with it. For one thing, inactive administrators would
> be purged

I never understood the need for that. It should be sufficient to flag
them as inactive. It's true that the irreversibility of image
deletions does represent a bit of a security hole, of course, but that
applies to active admins as well.

> as well as those who simply don't work out. On English,
> they can only be removed if they are nasty enough that they end up in
> arbitration, and that is very nasty indeed.

As long as adminship only represents a certain level of trust and is
primarily used to push buttons for those who can't, that shouldn't be
a problem. I've long felt that admins should be called "trusted
users". To de-admin someone is then to explicitly label them as
untrusted, and that should only be done in nasty cases. It would also
mean that everyone who contributes and understands the policies should
eventually become trusted, without a need to sum up percentages for
namespace contributions or edit summaries.

Erik
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On Mon, May 22, 2006 at 09:28:46PM +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
> As long as adminship only represents a certain level of trust and is
> primarily used to push buttons for those who can't, that shouldn't be
> a problem. I've long felt that admins should be called "trusted
> users".

But is it that way anywhere? In both wiki communities I know something
about it seems
-any explicit level of trust has social implications
-status of admins in the community is increased more than what would
derive from technical powers of admins
-this leads to increased demands on adminiship candidates
-there is a positive feedback, more trust is demanded and admins are
more trusted group

My guess is this works naturally, and repeatig "adminship is not a
big deal" doesn't help much.

> To de-admin someone is then to explicitly label them as
> untrusted, and that should only be done in nasty cases. It would also
> mean that everyone who contributes and understands the policies should
> eventually become trusted, without a need to sum up percentages for
> namespace contributions or edit summaries.
>

Does it actually work that way on any project of moderate to large size?

Jan Kulveit (Wikimol)
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On 5/22/06, Jan Kulveit <jk-wikifound@ks.cz> wrote:
> > To de-admin someone is then to explicitly label them as
> > untrusted, and that should only be done in nasty cases. It would also
> > mean that everyone who contributes and understands the policies should
> > eventually become trusted, without a need to sum up percentages for
> > namespace contributions or edit summaries.

> Does it actually work that way on any project of moderate to large size?

I don't know if you count en.wikinews.org as moderate to large, but it
certainly has a very high percentage of admins (41, 0.5% of reg'd
users vs. en.wikipedia's 0.06%), much more so among active users.
There are two conditions for becoming an admin:

1. You've done at least a month's work on Wikinews.
2. You are trusted by the community.

We flag inactive admins as such. We've had a couple of wheel wars, but
I think over time policy will evolve to prevent that. So far I haven't
seen a trend at all to assign admins editorial roles, rather there
seems to be a strong community culture against that.

WN is different from WP in many ways (most importantly, community
attention always focuses on a small set of articles at a given time).
Yet, I see no automatism towards bigger editorial roles for sysops or
stronger criteria for nomination within any given community. For
instance, in spite of both communities being huge, admin roles in
de.wp are significantly broader than in en.wp.

I think it depends more on what the philosophy of the most active
initial contributors in a community is. This tends to guide the
evolution of policy and practice. Newbies tend to assume the word of
oldbies as unquestionable fact. "It is so because it has always been
so."

The notion that policy itself is a mechanism that can be radically
edited, literally, is alien to many. After all, it doesn't work like
that in the real world. In the real world, people whine about things
they feel they cannot change. So, rather than proposing constructive
changes to policy, newbies often whine about evil admin power abuse,
etc.

As I said, I also think the term "adminship" notoriously tends to lead
to stronger assumptions of roles. I have seen countless media reports
where "admins" were, essentially, considered to be the staff of the
site that makes editorial decisions. This is understandable given the
choice of name, and many newbies have the same expectations. And
doesn't "admin cabal" sound much scarier than "trusted user cabal"?
The name suggests much more power than I think the role should hold.

This discussion, particlarly on foundation-l, is a good idea, BTW. We
need a lot more communication about policies across projects and
languages. Statistics and comparison grids would be even nicer.

Erik
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THD wrote:

>Hi, Friends,
>There are some people proposing a policy for administrator's term of service
>in Chinese Wikipedia. In the proposing policy, when the term of service is
>over, administrators shall get their administrative power through a
>re-election. I want to know that is there any Wikimedia project with this
>kind of policy? In my own opinion, this is quite weird. I want to know what
>will other language editions do when facing this kind of proposal. Thanks.
>THD
>
I think that this idea should be strongly discouraged on the Chinese
Wikipedia. As long as the people in the PRC are not fully represented
because of their government's actions, this sort of action could easily
be seen as discriminatory.

Ec

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Jan Kulveit wrote:
> But is it that way anywhere? In both wiki communities I know something
> about it seems
> -any explicit level of trust has social implications
> -status of admins in the community is increased more than what would
> derive from technical powers of admins
> -this leads to increased demands on adminiship candidates
> -there is a positive feedback, more trust is demanded and admins are
> more trusted group
>
> My guess is this works naturally, and repeatig "adminship is not a
> big deal" doesn't help much.
>

I know I got adminned on en.wikipedia.org without much discussion, while
I was still pretty new. I edited for 4-5 weeks, requested adminship,
and was given it. Since admins don't really have that much power, and
what they do have is easy to take away, I don't see why that isn't ideal.

-Mark

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2006/5/22, Erik Moeller <eloquence@gmail.com>:

> As long as adminship only represents a certain level of trust and is
> primarily used to push buttons for those who can't, that shouldn't be
> a problem. I've long felt that admins should be called "trusted
> users". To de-admin someone is then to explicitly label them as
> untrusted, and that should only be done in nasty cases. It would also
> mean that everyone who contributes and understands the policies should
> eventually become trusted, without a need to sum up percentages for
> namespace contributions or edit summaries.

Please not. I don't want to be an admin. I don't want to get into
fights about admin policy again. When someone makes a mistake, I
prefer being able to call admin abuse above getting into a
blocking/deblocking war. It would be nice to have the rollback buttons
again, but becoming an admin would be too high a price for that.

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2006/5/22, Erik Moeller <eloquence@gmail.com>:

> As long as adminship only represents a certain level of trust and is
> primarily used to push buttons for those who can't, that shouldn't be
> a problem.

But is it primarily used that way? I don't see it being used as such.
If I, as a non-admin, want someone to be blocked, there's a procedure
so difficult and long that I might as well not do it, which will
probably fail anyway. If an admin wants someone to be blocked, they do
it, and a day later some other admin comes by and decides that the
block was too long and unblocks.

Can an admin do anything then? No, certainly not. That's what I
discovered. I unblocked addresses. That was so bad that I basically
got into a war with another admin on nl:, which ended in both of us
resigning. I don't want those fights any more. I don't want to be an
admin the way things are now. Even though it would be damn nice to
have that rollback button, but then again, another advantage of not
being an admin is that I don't feel the pressure to help fight
vandalism.

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2006/5/22, Erik Moeller <eloquence@gmail.com>:

> As long as adminship only represents a certain level of trust and is
> primarily used to push buttons for those who can't, that shouldn't be
> a problem.

But is it primarily used that way? I don't see it being used as such.
If I, as a non-admin, want someone to be blocked, there's a procedure
so difficult and long that I might as well not do it, which will
probably fail anyway. If an admin wants someone to be blocked, they do
it, and a day later some other admin comes by and decides that the
block was too long and unblocks.

Can an admin do anything then? No, certainly not. That's what I
discovered. I unblocked addresses. That was so bad that I basically
got into a war with another admin on nl:, which ended in both of us
resigning. I don't want those fights any more. I don't want to be an
admin the way things are now. Even though it would be damn nice to
have that rollback button, but then again, another advantage of not
being an admin is that I don't feel as much pressure to help fight
vandalism.

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My apologies with the double post, I was having some small problem with gmail.

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Am Dienstag, 23. Mai 2006 08:18 schrieb Andre Engels:
> Please not. I don't want to be an admin. I don't want to get into
> fights about admin policy again.

At least in Wikimedia Commons you're still bureaucrat although you haven't
used these "powers" a lot in the last time. ;-)

> When someone makes a mistake, I prefer being able to call admin abuse above
> getting into a blocking/deblocking war. It would be nice to have the
> rollback buttons again, but becoming an admin would be too high a price for
> that.

I think this motivation problem shows clearly that any policy with regular
adminship votes should be discouraged. Why? Here my reasons:
* Regular voting tends people to transform Wikipedia into a democracy
simulation (creating a full nation with constitution, parliament, parties,
judges and whatnot) with votes on every edit. Wikis are no democracies
(although they have some demecratic elements), wikis are more like
involvement in a charity organisation: "Just change world on your own now."
It's not that democracy in reallife is bad -quite the contrary our ancestors
have fought for it- but online is not real life.
* Voting is easy in contrast to a useful ns-0 edit. Trolls are happy voters.
Also a thoughtfull comments and creativity get often neglected if you call
for a vote.
* Many voting tends to create a lot of arbitrary policies (wikis and exact
policies are two things that don't really fit that much together. Policies
should be thatfor reduced to the absolute minimum) that makes our life hard
and reduce our own motivation why we are here at all and happy policy-trolls
will try to enforce every policy to the letter against better knowledge.
* You don't get real power in a wiki by becoming an admin. You get power by
trust. And this power is the one that matters (especially when you see that
you have just made something that you consider useful and a large group of
people likes it and defends your action). For example I got a half call for
de-admin in de.wp because a troll thought I am an admin and have abused my
admin rights. Well this was really funny. I wasn't an admin at that time.
* In the end the good admins that do the hard work will get discouraged and
only some policy fanatics will remain.

With regard to the inititial thing on zh.wp. This is very much the same:
Admins are no angels. Admins are voluntarily users and demanding from other
users some "terms of service" is exactly the wrong thing and will frustrate
the good people. And I really hope that every admin everytime risks his
adminship status in case he sees that something goes wrong or in case he
notices that something must be done. Of course as long as you're reasonable
and not arrogant...

So my small wish is: Please let us vote less and do more. If there is a strong
disagreement of a larger group we can still vote in order to come to a
decission. If an admin misbehaves make a deadmin-vote in case it is necessary
but not regularly. Create policies by doing things and forseeing and
respecting the positions of others. The strongest policies are the informal
ones that get considered after a certain time the "natural thing" (TM).

Arnomane
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2006/5/23, arnomane@gmx.de <arnomane@gmx.de>:

> I think this motivation problem shows clearly that any policy with regular
> adminship votes should be discouraged. Why? Here my reasons:

I don't see the connection between your reasons and my message.


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Am Dienstag, 23. Mai 2006 10:26 schrieb Andre Engels:
> I don't see the connection between your reasons and my message.

The connection is that admins are seen as some kind of superman and in the end
admins expect from each other the same too and then you have nice revert- and
block-unblock-wars because the admins think the action of each other is
against policy $foobar. The consequence is that admins themselves take their
actions too serious and too political and loose joy.

And regular voting and "terms of service" policies and thus no ethusiastic
collaboration are the deeper reason behind that frustration. Not some recent
controversy.

Arnomane
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sorrr?



>From: arnomane@gmx.de
>Reply-To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l@wikimedia.org>
>To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l@wikimedia.org>
>Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Term of service?
>Date: Tue, 23 May 2006 12:54:01 +0200
>
>Am Dienstag, 23. Mai 2006 10:26 schrieb Andre Engels:
> > I don't see the connection between your reasons and my message.
>
>The connection is that admins are seen as some kind of superman and in the
>end
>admins expect from each other the same too and then you have nice revert-
>and
>block-unblock-wars because the admins think the action of each other is
>against policy $foobar. The consequence is that admins themselves take
>their
>actions too serious and too political and loose joy.
>
>And regular voting and "terms of service" policies and thus no ethusiastic
>collaboration are the deeper reason behind that frustration. Not some
>recent
>controversy.
>
>Arnomane
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On 5/23/06, Andre Engels <andreengels@gmail.com> wrote:
> Please not. I don't want to be an admin. I don't want to get into
> fights about admin policy again. When someone makes a mistake, I
> prefer being able to call admin abuse above getting into a
> blocking/deblocking war. It would be nice to have the rollback buttons
> again, but becoming an admin would be too high a price for that.

My view of admins as "trusted users" implies that adminship does not
automatically come with a responsibility to use it. If you don't want
to block because of the conflicts it may cause, you can still act like
a regular user -- while deleting spam when you see it.

The problem begins when people start arguing "User X hasn't done any
admin action on this project for months, he shouldn't be an admin".
That is a view of adminship as a "job" which I do not share. Adminship
should only indicate that you are a good faith contributor who can be
trusted to use certain software features responsibly. This seems to
work on en.wikinews, and on en.wp to a certain extent (RfA criteria
creep has gotten quite bad on en.wp).

I do not know if this is the case on nl: and if not, how difficult it
would be to reform it. Given how quickly people scream about "top
down" approaches to policy, my inclination is to believe that the best
way to fix broken admin policies in various language editions is
probably to come up with a completely new technical model of trust
that provides obvious advantages to the current one (e.g. higher rate
of vandalism clean-up), leading communities to adopt it.

Erik
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On Mon, May 22, 2006 at 08:39:36PM -0400, Delirium wrote:
>
> I know I got adminned on en.wikipedia.org without much discussion, while
> I was still pretty new. I edited for 4-5 weeks, requested adminship,
> and was given it.

Was that in 2003? In that case, that's what I'm speaking about.
I doubt you would request adminship with the same ammount of contributions
& time spent on Wikipedia if you were to ask now. Read some of recently
failed RfA... demands are rising, judging by what people request while
voting, you should
-have editcount in order of thousands
-contribute ~3months
-satisfy various demans on structure of contributions
-good portion of contribution should be "signifficant" contributions
in main namespace
-portion should be housecleaning work
-you should have some experience in Project ns
-but do not spent too much time on Project!
-you should have led 1 article to featured status
-fill edit summaries!
-be nice in edit summaries
-no POV!
-preferably, almost no serious conflicts
-yet some experience with conflicts
and so on...

Jan Kulveit
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On Mon, May 22, 2006 at 11:21:14PM +0800, THD wrote:
> Hi, Friends,
> There are some people proposing a policy for administrator's term of service
> in Chinese Wikipedia. In the proposing policy, when the term of service is
> over, administrators shall get their administrative power through a
> re-election. I want to know that is there any Wikimedia project with this
> kind of policy? In my own opinion, this is quite weird. I want to know what
> will other language editions do when facing this kind of proposal. Thanks.
> THD

The problem is that this is impracticable on a large wiki where you
have a lot of trusted users (aka admins). I'd prefer to have a large
ratio of admins to users (something like 95% admins) so that
adminship really *isn't* such a big deal.

Every time the ratio goes down, you get all kinds of silliness
erupting. We've seen that on en.wikipedia.

Reconfirmation of admins will force you to keep a smaller admin pool,
thus worsening the ratio admins:normal users, and ultimately causes
unpredicatble social effects.

If you have ways of predicting the social effects, I'm all ears here
by the way :-)

read you soon,
Kim Bruning (who almost typed ~~~~ in a mail)

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