Office of Advocate missing

Imersion, "lawyers and a judiciary and constabulary" you mention are abound in wikipedia. I am of poor English, and I am worried why my term "Advocate" is confused for "a lawyer". Wikipedia does not need no more no wikilawyers. In fact, "Wikilawyering" has become an insult. My point is that there are way much more than enough people ready to punish a new newcomer, but there seems no office to defend a newcomer, to shield a newcomer from the jungle of wikilaws and from oldtimers. I am sure the latter ones mean no personal harm. It is only they are overstressed and underpaid (wait, not paid at all :-) and have no time to babysit and babytalk a newbie when their pet article is about to be vandalized by an old seasoned pov-pusher. Actual implementation of Wikipedia's "Do not bite" policy requires waste of time on non-productive efforts, not directly related to contributing. It takes a good deal of elevation in the goal recognition to understand that allowing more hands would increase the overall productivity, although your personal productivity (in your favorite subject) will be set back.

Therefore my call was for looking for people who are good at helping others. Not just good at this, but feel good when doing this. (Just like most of wikipedians feel good when editing.) This is goal of my suggested Office of Advocate is: not for enforcing the rules nor training people to follow or circumnavigate the rules, but to help people.

I don't know (and lazy to learn) what went bad with the AMA I mentioned at the top, but I see what's wrong with the current "Mediation Cabal" in en: wikipedia. Many times I saw that a completely clueless person undertakes the role of a mediator. What is worse, recently I noticed a really disturbing case. One guy (call him 'client') requested a mediation. It sat in the queue for some time, and finally was accepted. Suddenly the 'client' notices that mediator's account was created 2 days ago! What do you think the 'client' was thinking? The same stumbling block is for Advocates.

An editor has an immediate and everlasting gratification (unless his contributions are deleted :-) The one who patrols newpages and stuff has a price of a police sorry, peace officer: Keep this garbage and vandal scum at bay. And this feeling of the power... But the work of an Advocate or Mediator, etc., seems to lack these sources of "goodfeel". In search of one, I may put forth the following suggestion:

In applications for the admin rights, the successful work of an Advocate must count favorably and highly. This work would readily demonstrate both hands-on experience with policies and human skills expected from an admin.

OK I think your suggestion for including helping advocacy as an important criterion for admin rights seesm like a just and good step. But I think you should not disdain training and self assessment as vehicles fro getting there either. Wikilawyering is such a pejorative term in wikipedia,that creating a judiciary and constabulary probably is impractical and beyond the bounds; but that itself seems a basic problem in wiki culture: it avoids thoughtful and human solutions in favor of hip, flippant kluges that are fundamentally flawed --- and so o o o (for instance) POV deletions trump incremental aggregations and improvements.

re: "a basic problem in wiki culture": deficiency of "thoughtful and human solutions" is a basic problem of anonymous online communication culture, observed way before the advent of 'internets', not to say wiki. the problem is lies in an inherent contradiction: "human solutions" cannot be implemented in a mechanical way: humans quickly screw them up or circumvent. The only solution is to change the humans themselves. And history show this is a long, gradual evolution, over generations. This evolution can only be guided, not prescribed.

Some complain here to the end that this wikimedia statement is but waving hands and preaching. Well, wikipedia has plenty of rules and processes already. That they not always work is because they are underused, misused and abused. Do we need the policies on how to use the policies? Do we need to have a rule on how to "discourage disruptive and hostile behavior, and repel trolls"? Well, I have a good one: block for failure to "repel trolls".

I guess I have too little experience with Wiki. I have encountered no trolls yet and have no idea what to do If I did; so I guess I do not know what you mean by failure to repel trolls. Please expalin, and is this a new thread or is t related to building advocates?

It was a joke. My point was that some commenters seem to expect from the 'Resolution:Openness' too much: they seem to have expected to see a ready-to-use recipe how to make everything OK, and make it right now. Well, the document must be read for what it is: a mission statement, a "new-year resolution". It must be taken on a personal level, not on bureaucratic level. Making rules less complicates or more complicated and then enforcing them is useless for advancement of this mission. An extreme case was communism. The ultimate goal was noble: to make all people equal, good, and happy. But to make it "fast and now" the solution was to kill all who was not equal, good, or happy, rather than to wait for people to gradually become good, equal and happy. While capitalism does not look ideal society, there is a vast difference between 19th century, with teenagers working 12 hours a day, and today. Just the same, I say, en: wikipedia has changed a lot in 10 years. And it will continue to change. And the goal of any mission statement is to nudge the course of change in right direction, rather to prescribe some rules and laws. Altenmann 19:54, 27 May 2011 (UTC)