How is administrator attrition being addressed?
I think I agree with Noraft
Has anyone come to any conclusions on this?72.171.0.143 22:59, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
That a good question. I also think we should not require activity from administrators. Administrationship is much more about trust and responsability. My view of what is going on is that communities increasingly tend to worship users who stay several hours long every day on the project more than users who can't (or don't want to) do that. Sadly, people who dedicate such an inportant slice of their time to a wikiproject are not representative of the entire body of wikimedians. I think that this trend is detrimental not only because we need a ecletic and large group of administrators, but it can harm communty's health since a healthy and congenial environment depends on users who have a live outside Wikimedia, who read books and talk to other people.
While I agree in part, we must not ignore the reasons why projects value users who are more active:
- They are better known to the rest, hence more predictable, and can be more trustworthy.
- They are much less likely to ignore the outcome of previous discussions, simply because they know about them.
- To the extent that they work in problematic areas, they generally have a lower percentage of controversial actions, simply because they are generally better at guessing what will prove controversial.
If we want more admins who don't edit for many hours every day, then we will need a support infrastructure for such admins. For example this could include a rational structure for all policy pages, terminology that is consistent with the everyday meanings of terms and is used consistently within the project, and the ability to find prior case law painlessly. Other users would also benefit from this, but I am not sure it's feasible. Therefore I am not sure that a higher percentage of less active admins is feasible.
Respectfully, I don't think your reasons are completely valid. Projects value users who are more active because they do more work. To go through your bullets one by one:
- Those who pass RfA are commonly unknown to half the people who vote for or against them. These people are evaluating their edit history and answers to questions. Being "known" will bring in people to vote for (or against you), but nobody votes against someone just because they don't know them.
- I don't think this is true. There's too much going on with Wikipedia to know every outcome of every discussion, and everyone knows this. Everyone who has enough experience to be an admin knows this.
- I think you're speculating here.
I think it is important that we not conflate inexperience with inactivity. We shouldn't be giving admin tools to those with no experience, but there's no reason to keep them from an editor who has an impeccable two year record, even if he only edits twice a month. That editor will do some good with the admin tools, and if we had a thousand more like him, there would be a lot less load on the more active ones, which means they can spend more time writing/editing articles, innovating, or participating in areas that they most enjoy.
Hans Adler said "They are much less likely to ignore the outcome of previous discussions, simply because they know about them."
That's a good point: you need to have a lot of time to follow Wikipedia's discussions. My view is that we should not address that by requiring editors to dedicate a lot of time to the project, but just the opposite: we should have less discussions and new policies. Policies and guideline are not made for the sack of making them, they exist to guide editors, if regular editors are not able to read and understand all the policies they need to edit, them there's a problem there.
Yes, we need a strategy to reduce the policies. For many, Wikipedia is a huge Nomic game. And it's almost impossible to remove cruft from policies. While an attempt is going on to clean up the Manual of Style of the English Wikipedia, someone pushed through an addition to the effect that there should be no spaces before ordinary punctuation characters. There is a lot of pressure on the policies and guidelines because people come up with eccentric ideas, and then insist that if it's not literally decided by a guideline it's a matter of style or a content dispute.
Sometimes I think we should simply delete all policies, guidelines and essays and re-start the project with all the current content, all the experienced users and admins, but with a blank project space. It seems to be the only way to get rid of all the cruft that has accumulated, because every last bit is venerated by a few people who will fight to death to protect it, no matter how meaningless, redundant or ambiguous it is.