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Please use the discussion section to reply to any of the proposals. "Proposals" section is for proposals only. Any other comment will be either moved or removed.
I think different levels of adminship should be given. Currently there are 5 major levels of access on wikipedia. These are: anonymous, regular users, administrators (sysops), bureaucrats, stewards. Having levels between users and administrators would be productive. These levels should not however be "trial admins". -- Cat chi? 20:53, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
I think Requests for adminship should be refactored into Requests for Comment form; after reading the nomination statement and answers to the three standard questions, anyone who wants (besides the candidate) can make their own header and, under it, state why they think the nominee should or shouldn't become an admin. Others, including the nominee, can then endorse or rebuke these sections. After seven days, a bureaucrat (maybe two in tricky cases) evaluates the merits of the support and opposition, after which they either promote or they don't. The end. Picaroon 22:09, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
I think that all of this is aleady solved. According to a key policy, Wikipedia is not a democracy, and because of this many users believe that it would be better if we were to discuss instead of voting when it comes to new administrators; but really, it is perfect how it works right now. This is because users vote but behind-the-scenes discussing is what encourages those votes. Votes are the results of discussions, so we discuss voting, making Wikipedia a non-democracy but a place where decisions are easilly handled. ♠ TomasBat ( @)( Contribs)( Sign!) 02:59, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
The problem as I understand it is that, while not officially, RfA is actually being handled as a vote. Many votes are based on pre-existing sympathy/antipathy or parotting arguments given by others. Many votes are not even accompanied by an explanatory comment at all. I believe there is no way to change that. But we do have the opportunity to enhance the meaning of the numbers: RfA should officially be a vote.
But to gain credibility, candidates and all supporters and opposers must be able to spread relevant info regarding new arguments/developments. Very often, support votes are not changed even in the face of substantial disqualifiers. Oppose votes are redundandtly discussed in the RfA page, distracting interested users (and the closing b'crat) from quickly assessing who said what. In my opinion there is an easy solution to all of this that would not increase the bureaucrat workload, but instead drastically decrease it.
WP:CANVASS—as far as canvassing for RfAs is concerned—should be abandoned, while commenting on other users' voting comments within the RfA page should be forbidden. The existing possibility to canvass only behind the scenes (via quick e-mail notification, for example) strongly favours established cliques while discriminating against all others. Currently, for example, it is forbidden as canvassing to inform voters of new developments and/or arguments on their respective talk pages. Commenting on support votes is easily seen as canvassing, commenting on oppose votes rarely so. Actual discussions as opposed to votes may be too controversial and tedious for any b'crat to sort through and decide upon. Most of these problems regarding the relative weight of the given votes and comments could be solved simply by the two things I propose: Allow canvassing and establish a rule that makes it possible to vote and comment, and to add to or change your comment, but forbids commenting on other users' comments within the RfA page. — KNcyu38 ( talk • contribs) 09:46, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
I think the root of the problem lies in the fact that people vote on the adminship of people that they do not personally know and trust. Perhaps a RFC style page that is not linked to some centralised page but instead linked only to the user's talk page and perhaps to their signature. That way, only people who had actually interacted with the user in some capacity would know they are up for adminship and only they would comment on whether they are trustworthy. I want adminship to be granted based on a candidate's past behaviour, not on how well they answer a set of standard questions. Theresa Knott | Taste the Korn 10:54, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
My proposal is written up at User:Sam Blacketer/RfA reform. In brief it aims at getting away from the vote-counting and looking at assessing adminship candidates in the round, based on their editing histories in several different aspects. By doing so it gives discretion to bureaucrats (who continue to be appointed in the same way as now) to decide whether concerns raised by other editors over aspects of the candidate's contributions demonstrate suitability or unsuitability for the admin tools. Sam Blacketer 11:34, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
Perhaps rather than a pure vote, rfa should be more like rfar.
-- Cat chi? 20:53, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
Reduce the amount of work that admins have to do by allowing normal editors to close AfD's etc. Then admins would only be required to deal with problem cases, essentialy blocking editors that close incorrectly, vandalise, etc. There would have to be a concurrent improvement of the current policy guides for closing AfD's etc. but that would happen naturally as a way of avoiding anarchy. RFA's could happen the same way. Regards sbandrews ( t) 20:18, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
As linked. Discuss on proposal's talk page. -- Random832
I've written up a brief proposal for improving RfA. The process would remain the same up until closure. RfA that aren't obvious pass/fails enter a discussion period of all bureaucrats. I believe this would help to reduce the perception of "rogue" bureaucrats and also increase the number of successful RfAs by widening the discretionary range to 60-80% support. I welcome any feedback and hope this can be refined into a workable process. Thanks! ChazBeckett 17:45, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
I know, radical idea, right? :) Seriously, there have been a bazillion proposals dating back to not long after RfA began. Virtually none of them gained any traction, and the very, very few that did were for very minor changes. For example, creating a subpage for each RfA. Ooo what a radical idea that! :) Proposal after proposal after proposal that has suggested significant change has fallen flat on its face. The long list of proposals on this page will be no different. There will not be significant traction to any of them. Enough of the proposals already!
What I think should be done is a more careful analytical process. One of the first steps of this should be ascertaining what is wrong with the current RfA system. Please contribute to the beginnings of this at User:Durin/What is wrong with RfA. Another early step should be ascertaining the goals of RfA. I did this at Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_adminship/Archive_82#What_are_the_goals_of_RfA.3F, though I don't think there was enough discussion.
In short, before we can decide what direction to go in, we should get a firm understanding of where we are (what is wrong), why we are here (what causes these problems) and where we want to be (the goals of RfA). Only then can we start intelligently discussing what car to jump in to get from Point A to Point B. Lots of shiny cars here. All of them might be wheel-less or out of gas for all we know.
Enough proposals :) -- Durin 18:42, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
The only real problem on RFA is people employing arbitrary and meaningless benchmarks to judge candidates by. This is a matter of culture. The assertion that RFA is horrendously difficult to pass is self-perpetuating because some people who would pass easily don't dare to face it, and inexperienced people who shouldn't be admins are unaware of this, thus skewing the results. The way to fix this is simply by nominating candidates. Therefore I propose that everyone active on this page finds a suitable nominee this week. >Radiant< 10:57, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
Abolish the "support", "oppose" and "neutral" sections and lump all the votes, and !votes into one section as is done on AFD (where "keep", and "delete" sections are a rejected idea except on the French Wikipedia). This format is far more well-designed for a discussion and also makes it much clearer how the debate is developing. Keeping a count of the votes and !votes is a bit tougher, but in the end it is the final one which counts and that can be established quite easily anyway. Sjakkalle (Check!) 13:30, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
Create an actual set of criteria to eliminate ridiculous votes. This would work similar to the criteria used for GAs and FAs. This could be based on: Experience, Quality of Work, Civility/Behavior, and Administrative Duties. Arranged in order from most important (top) to least important (bottom):
Similar to Sjakkalle's proposal above mine, this would also abolish the current setup of separate sections for Support/Oppose/Neutral (though not the votes themselves) by lumping all comments into one section. This proposal would also eliminate the "vote counter" as certain criteria are considered more important than others. Finally, instead of the three current questions, the nominee would answer questions more related to the criteria. This would eliminate any outlandish "oppose" reasons that have little to do with the sysop tools. Mr.Z-man talk ¢ 18:57, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
I personally do not like the way that admins selection is conducted. I agree with several past proposals that guidelines and benchmarks are arbitrary and users who vote many times vote for a RfA candidate whom they know almost nothing about. Here is my proposal for refroming the RfA system:
Just some thoughts Rackabello 05:36, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
My dear ghosts, ladies and gentlemen! Lend me your ears. I must be a bit uncouth and churlish so that my words my find a place in your kitchen cabinets! RfAs have been a major pain in the ass for a while now, and all we have done is aggregated more problems rather than finding solutions (that includes me!). From the look of it, we are nowhere near getting a revolutionary new concept of deciding the worthiness of a candidate to become a system administrator. So we must salvage what we have and build upon it.
Well, that's the easy way of passing RfAs. There are some who do not follow these unwritten laws and get involved in high-scoring matches and revellers fire up altercations on talk pages, spitting and swiping at the unlucky devil who happened to promote or dismiss the candidates. Here's what I think, and I have said it before – [1], [2]. –
WP:CANVAS should be abolished in relation to RfAs. The users who are best-qualified to judge a candidate's suitability for adminship are those who have already encountered and/or worked with that user. Therefore, although sales pitch shouldn't be encouraged, candidates should be allowed to advertise their RfA to other users. Linking to an RfA in your signature and on your userpage should also be allowed, for the same reason; if you spot the RfA while in the midst of discussion with someone, you're more qualified to judge their suitability for adminship than if you see them for the first time at RfA. Wal ton Vivat Regina! 18:58, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
I do not know how we will abolish the ideal of a vote, or how we will ever manage to survive the incessant deluge of RFA reform suggestions, but I do know that we must have one thing: the setting of actual standards to evaluate a nominee for adminship and cratship. Just as we have policies for reliable sources, deletion, and all that other good stuff, we must eliminate the arbitrariness that is going on. I believe it's really preventing people who would otherwise be good sysops or crats from attaining such a position, especially RFB. I acknowledge that this page is for RFA only, but if we do reform this and it is successful, it is inevitable that requests for bureacratship will have an overhaul. I seriously believe that if Taxman or Raul tried to run today, they would have been opposed many times over. As for me, I very much like the RFA standards that Z-man proposed:
- Civility/Behavior - Has the user engaged in edit/revert wars? Have they been blocked in the past? Have they made personal atatcks, added unsourced POV to articles, made any serious policy violations? If the answer to all of these questions is No, or at least Nothing serious in the past 2-3 months, then this should not be an issue.
- Administrative Duties invloves work in XfDs, Speedy/Proposed deletions, RfC, AIV, and other "administrative functions" though not necessarily all of these.
- Quality of Work would not focus on any one namespace. Some users are great with templates, others articles, some inages, and others policies/guidelines/essays. This would also take into consideration edit summary usage.
- Experience would be based on both edit count and time based experience. This would be set lower than many current arbitrary standards (any actual number ranges TBD by consensus).
I apologize for making my statement tedious and dragging, but I felt my sanity was at stake. :P bibliomaniac 1 5 01:31, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
Addendum: After examining the reforms and the plans that we've made in the past, I've come to a conclusion: many of us lack foresight. We only see what we want in the beginning when in fact, we'll be kicking ourselves a year later. Consider the case of Esperanza. Formed during rough times in 2005, what happened after that? It created a bureaucracy and shut down. Similarly, we've already created the present RFA format that we haven't anticipated would be so derided. We have to start thinking more in terms of the future and how we will affect a new wave of future admins. bibliomaniac 1 5 00:22, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
Adminship is no big deal? But de-adminship IS. As a consequence, some people are afraid to support, being afraid of possible abuse. I propose developing a simple and clear policy on removing sysop rights. Easy come, easy go. What it should be? Discussion like on AfD, votish discussion like on current RfA, vote like the Board Elections? I don't know, but the CAT:CSD backlog suggests that something must be done. MaxSem 18:46, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
Disadvantages
Advantages
Currently, the proposal by Sjakalle is being tried at Moralis' RfA. Although I am not very pleased with that experiment (to put it mildly), I think the idea behind it is good, but lacks a proper elaboration. So instead of just complaining, I thought I would contribute a new proposal (sorry Durin).
As most of the contributors have said already, RfA is not a vote, but in practice it is dealt with as if it were a vote. And according to the Admin survey, RfA has become a popularity contest, with canvassing as an unwanted side effect. Time for a radical change. I propose the following changes:
Abolish the support and neutral sections, and disallow any support or neutral statements. The RfA should focus on objections as to why the candidate should not become an admin. These objections will have to be documented, and can be discussed by the candidate and other contributors. Candidates will not benefit anymore from canvassing, so that would put an automatic stop to that practice.
If the closing bureaucrat decides that all objections have been answered to his or hers satisfaction, the candidate is sysopped; optionally the bureaucrat can give a statement as to why he or she feels this should be the outcome.
Finally, I think the current questions to the candidate are not very relevant to the process and could be deleted. Er rab ee 12:48, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
Regarding a recent request for adminship I've just looked at - This appears to be a good example of a user which would have made a good admin being rejected purely on their beliefs rather than their potential ability to administrate. I propose that arguments for or against a candidate should need to be based on valid grounds written down within existing Wikipedia policy and/or guidelines. Any votes not based on such policy should not be counted. -- Rebroad 17:07, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
Opening - Like I suggested on the adminship survey, RfA should have a set of criteria that the editor must meet before they can get promoted. This idea is similar to the proposals by Mr Z man & Bibliomaniac above (Darn, you beat me to it...) ;). These criteria would undoubtedly be decided by Jimbo & the Wikipedia elites (But would probably have to go through the community to see if there's a consensus on which requirements would be needed - the final decision however, would be made by Jimbo etc...) & would have points that needed to be met before you could be given sysop powers. These could include -
Nominations - So that would be the first change. Next would be the method of nominating & being promoted. To be promoted, you would need X number of Buerocrats to endorse your nomination - that way there wouldn't be as much pressure on a single crat to make the right decision. In addition to the endorsement of the crats, there would be a "citation" section on the nomination, where normal users could "cite" the nominated user of any uncivil behaviour or breach of site rules (This would act like the oppose section now & would advise the crats on how the user has acted in the past). This would be in place because just meeting the rrequirements of the list would be too easy to pass & thus the imput from other users would be needed to affect the end descision. After reading the "oppose citations", the crats would then endorse the nomination & if you get enough, one would make you a sysop. (Similarly, crats could also oppose the nomiantion & if X nubmer oppose, then the nomination would be removed - No explaination would be needed, just a solid endorsement or opposition....)
Reasons why this may work - This way of voting would cancel out a number of problems people have with RfA at the moment - the pile on support votes, editors getting promoted who don't meet many requirements, popularity contests & questionable crat judgements to name a few. Techincally, supporting a nomiantion would be taken out - the only support which would be needed would be that of the crats. More notice would be taken of oppose votes, as they would be the ones advising the crats how this user has acted other than meeting the requirements to the list. This would also save much time, as cratswould only need to see if the user met all the requirements & if any users had cited them for bad behaviour. Also, there would undoubtedly be a cut down in the amount of users who have failed RfA's leaving the project in despair, since they would know if they met the requirements before they even nominated themselves (IE, there'd basically be no "You're not good enough, that's why we're failing you", but rather a "I need to improve in these areas before I can get nominated for adminship"). I see this as a very simple system which Jimbo could have a direct hand in creating & would solve many of the problems we all have. We all hate calling things a vote, so why not put up this "procedure" & make things simpler for everyone? Cheers, Spawn Man 02:50, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
I think many of the concerns on Requests for Adminship may be slightly exaggerated. The current simple voting method is not horrendous as noted by some editors. The final decision is in the hand of bureaucrats. Anyways, here are my proposal:
That's it for now. Excuse me if I have been redundant, as I did not read much of other proposals. AQu01rius ( User • Talk) 01:40, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
Intention
The intention behind this approach is to somewhat standardize the process and create a more even, predictable, and fairer outcome, and let potential admins know what to expect and approximately when they should expect to be ready, while still permitting community discretion and escape valves to address an editor the community believes to be a problem, and still permitting a very straightforward process with "support", "oppose", and "neutral".
Create guidelines to guide process: 1. A set of threshold requirements setting basic minimum standards that establish a clear threshold based on fairly objective criteria -- see below for a proposal. 2. A set of soft competency requirements with skills that candidate must demonstrate (see below) 3. A set of objection guidelines identifying legitimate reasons to oppose.
Process: 1. A candidate would have to meet the threshold guidelines to be considered -- speedy remove from RfA if they're not met. Suggested threshold standards: Depending on the community's preferences, 2000-3000 edits, a few hundred minimum in each of main, talk, and project space, four to six months of regular editing on the project, absence of recent blocks or repeat warnings (with mechanism to override/discount abusive ones). Also, suggest that an editor review be required first (with no particular outcome.) 2. Competencies would be demonstrated through questions etc. Candidate would have to provide diffs demonstrating them. Suggested categories: editing skills, knowledge of policy, interaction with users, civility and level-headedness during disputes, and similar. Nom and/or candidate would be required to provide examples demonstrating each of the areas. 3. A person who meets minimum guidelines is presumed eligible. Supporters don't have to explain anything, but objectors would be required to state a specific objection and give examples of the problem. Suggested Oppose standards: damage to the encyclopedia, lack of civility, serious misunderstanding of policy, poor judgment, and similar. Objectors would have to identify specific diffs and explain why they represent objectionable behavior. However, guidelines should be broad enough to permit objectors to explain why they believe an individual can't be trusted. 4. Within these guidelines, "concensus" means a supermajority vote as currently, with votes not complying with guidelines (oppose votes which don't state a legitimate reason) discounted. Thus there would be discussion, yet clear standards to discuss by which would permit support, oppose, and neutral declarations as at present.-- Shirahadasha 03:08, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
While oppose categories would be worded broadly enough to permit judgment, the requirement to present specific diffs would hopefully get rid of objections such as "no need for tools", objector doesn't like (permissable) userboxes, insufficient experience where guideline minimum is met, and and various others. -- Shirahadasha 02:54, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
How about randomly generating a jury of voters? I'm sure I remember a "random user" generator somewhere. Randomly select 100 users who have been active in the past week, and say they have been granted the singular honour of voting on this candidate's RfA. This is a bit like jury service in the UK, which, with checks and balances, is essentially a random selection of your peers to sit in judgement on you. People selected at random tend to take their duties very seriously. If this idea took off, and if even only 20% of the 100 random users participated, then you would get 20 people carefully picking through the contributions history and giving their opinion on the candidate. Also, in case you get a random selection of 100 trolls, allow the candidate to rebut oppose votes, and still leave the ultimate decision to the bureaucrat. Randomly selecting from the entire pool of users might be a bit much, so instead maybe randomly select from a large of list of those "willing to serve at RfA". Carcharoth 17:23, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
A.Z. no longer supports this proposal.
There is an essay about this
here, although this proposal is a bit different.
Why not have a trial adminship were the people who would like to become admins. are given the tools over a period of time. The first week they could get the ability to protect pages and un-protect pages, and edit full protected pages. A week later, they would have the ability to delete pages, recreate, ect. Finally on the 3rd week they would be able to block and unblock users. After a month, they could go to WP:RfA where users would support or oppose their RfA. This would eliminate people voting purely on edit counts. Even if a user had a high edit count and was irresponsible, mostly likely they would not pass. If they had a lower edit count but used the tools responsibly, then their chances of passing are higher. During their trail adminship, the user would also have to make a certain amount of "admin-only" edits, so we could see how they would react to different situations, instead of that user picking out the easier task to do.
This is based on what I saw in the last two trials (the formats used in the Moralis and Matt Britt RfAs). Instead of sorting comments by support/oppose/neutral, sort comments by the area in which they comment about (e.g. if you oppose someone due to lack of XfD edits, put your Oppose comment in a section marked 'XfD' or 'Deletion'). People could make as many comments as they liked, so they could just make a generic 'Support' comment in a generic section at the top, or if their support was based on something in particular (or the lack of a particular problem that had been brought up) they could place it in that section, or in all relevant sections. With any luck this would help identify the issues involved in that particular RfA and help reduce a voting-like mentality without actually making the RfA harder to close.
A.Z. no longer supports this proposal.
1) Allow anyone to become an Admin once they meet certain criteria, such as length of time with an account and number of edits. No utility nor personality criteria, such as "quality of edits" or "difficult to work with" should be used.
2) Allow Admins to desysop each other, but only allow bureaucrats to grant Admin status.
The only proposal that I have is to change the passing range, 75% shouldn't be needed, if that's what it is right now, it should be brought down to 67%. I believe this is fair because a "tiebreaker" is usually made with 2/3. If 2/3 supports are made, or close to 67%, the admin hopeful should pass. No big deal, but I thought I'd bring it up. -- Imdanumber1 ( talk · contribs) 12:23, 27 May 2007 (UTC)
I don't think there is much wrong with RFAs as they are currently run. If the idea of trying to reform RFAs is to try to get more admins, we should try to get more people to run for adminship.
To do this, I think a search committee could be formed. The committee would be made up of admins, and they would try to look for good candidates. To help look at who would be interested in going through an RFA, a user could add a template to his talk page, essentially saying he wants to be an admin someday {{ User wikipedia/Administrator someday}}. The members of the search committee would look through the users who added that template, and nominate them if they feel the candidate is qualified.
Another way to find more candidates could be to have a bot suggest an RFA if a user has been on wikipedia for a certain period of time (6 months) and has made a certain amont of edits (2400).
There are also some minors changes I would make to RFAs.
First, the community needs to realize that RFAs are in actuality votes; few RFAs fall into the Crat's discretionary range. This would help potential candidates because the process would be easier for them to understand.
Second, I think that 67% support should be the minimum for guaranteed passing. 2/3 (67%) is considered to be a super-majority (by US congress, for instance), so I don't see why 75% is needed. The new discretion range would be from 63% support to 66% support. The cloing Crat would also have to explain his decision if the vote fell into the discretionary range.
Third, I would disallow voters from questioning the position of any other voter, except in instances where specific policies may have been broken (Conflict of Interest, Canvassing, ect). This would especially apply to oppose votes, where it seems that in many RFAs support voters try to pester an opposer into dropping opposition.
That's the solution I envision to this "problem". If you have any questions or comments either discuss them at my
talk page, or at
Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_adminship/Reform#.23Proposal_by_New_England_.28formerly_Black_Harry.29
Thank You
Black Harry (Highlights| Contribs) 16:58, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
Requests for adminship should be much simpler and easier. By that I mean that those requesting for adminship shouldn't be judged so harshly as if they are being given some great permission. They are simply being given a little more access to wikipedia than other editors and that's it. Administrators should be chosen with much less scrutiny and should have their administrator abilities taken away with much less trouble. As Jimbo Wales has said on the issue "I just wanted to say that becoming a sysop is *not a big deal*."[ [3]] Wikidudeman (talk) 01:51, 3 July 2007 (UTC)
This is quite a rough draft of a proposal. I think there should be a commitee which RfA's are brought to. Anyone can nominate someone, including themselves. It's made up of about 30 or so admins, and nonadmins can comment about the Nominee, and the commitee votes on it, and it is successful if it comprises a 70% support vote.
The committee is not made up of the same sysops each time; each RfA has a committee of sysops randomly selected.
"Silence equals consent" is the ultimate measure of consensus
I feel the above statement should be the sole groundwork of the future incarnation of rfas. With the current method of rfas, it is often possible for concerns raised by others to be literally drowned out by a large amount of supporters.
I propose only concerns (oppositions) be posted. Each seperate concern would initially be created as its own subsection. In those subsections, others would express their thoughts about the concern raised and help determine if the raised concern is both relevant and substantial enough to warrant the candidate not being promoted to admin status. The same contributor would be able to create more than one concern subsection.
When it is time for the rfa to close, the closing bureaucrat would be required to go through the sections and rule each complaint section as one of the following:
based on the discussion in each subsection. If a complaint section is not refuted by any responses (and is not clear vandalism/attack) then the default ruling would be 'Substantial and relevant', according to the Silence=consensus ideology.
If even one of the concerns is maked as 'Substantial and relevant' or 'No consensus reached' then the rfa would fail, else it would pass. If there are no concerns raised by the time the rfa is over, the default is promotion to admin status.
Below are two hypothetical complaints and possible discussions that would take place:
==This user is too aggressive==
I'm concerned that if user FooBar is promoted to an admin they would continue their aggressive behavior as displayed here [4] and [5]. --Some arbitrary user
Concern unsubstantial --Closing Bureaucrat
==This user is alligned with the XYZ political party==
My concern is that user FooBar has openly admiting to being alligned with the XYZ political party. I think that means they will set a bad image of wikipedia if promoted to admin status --Some arbitrary user 4
Concern irrelevant --Closing Bureaucrat
If this type of proposal has already been made, my mistake. I've skimmed through most of the proposals but might have missed one that is proposing the same idea. -- Android Mouse 06:01, 10 July 2007 (UTC)
The only reform that is really needed right now, is a de-adminship procedure. The best procedure should be copied from other wikipedias. Some have these in place. -- Matt57 ( talk• contribs) 21:54, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
So you're suggesting we leave it as is? Hardly a reform, is it...and I'm against this, I think the RfA could do with improvement (as outlined in my responses to other proposals). ~ G1ggy! blah, blah, blah 11:09, 2 May 2007 (UTC)
I tend to agree with the idea of having b'crats evaluate and agree on success/failure of RfAs that have not reached consensus with the community. Personally, I believe that there are more problems regarding RfA than closure of the undecided cases. But your proposal and mine could well be merged, in my opinion. — KNcyu38 ( talk • contribs) 13:18, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
What do you propose regarding RfA reform? — KNcyu38 ( talk • contribs) 19:42, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
I think the RfA reform may take a little longer than a couple of months, especially if it's going to be a big and meaningful reform. A.Z. 19:27, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
I have thought of this as well. Seems quite a fair suggestion as AfD guidelines do actually specifically say not to separate comments, to stop it looking like a vote. Camaron1 | Chris 18:04, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
Just thought I'd add my two cents. This format is intensely confusing and irritating. It's made a mess of Moralis' RfA. mcr616 Speak! 19:32, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
I agree with mcr616, the current format at Moralis' RfA is simply terrible (the main problem is the chronological ordering, which creates a lot of redundancy). As regards the "positive outcome" noted above, I think that's just an illusion. Is there really a difference between the two examples below?
*Oppose. Too few portal talk edits. User:Portals are the future (PATF) *Oppose per PATF. User:Per user
*Oppose. Too few portal talk edits. User:Portals are the future (PATF) *Oppose. Not enough portal talk edits. User:Per user
Just because no one wrote "per X" doesn't mean everyone gave a different reasoning. The same can be said of the "support" comments. -- Black Falcon 04:46, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
I was thinking of this myself - a set of community agreed guidelines like WP:BIO is for AFD. Good idea. MER-C 04:14, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
This comes closest to how I believe RfA should work: it's a mixed system where candidates meet certain requirements, but are then discussed. The requirements should be quite simple, & be made public: the criteria I would propose (just so people know what I'm talking about) would be three consecutive months of activity, 1000 non-minor edits, & the person is not currently being considered for sanctions (either from the ArbCom or a Community Ban), or has been so sanctioned. In the case above, where a possible candidate is short of the minimum number of edits, the solution should be simple: go out & make more edits. Yet I would go further than setting definite requirements: anyone who meets or exceeds these requirements & does not explicitly refuse to be an Admin (there are a number of people that I think would be good Admins who have declined), is automatically nominated. This automatic nomination might make the RfA process less of a beauty contest. -- llywrch 19:25, 24 April 2007 (UTC) Z-man
While I do support having some cut-off points, and a range which is "always pass" and one which is "always fail", I think it is too inflexible to make an absolute cut-off between "always passes" and "always fails". I feel that a vote along the lines of "Oppose. Wikipedia is a waste of time. Why bother?" should never be allowed to break a nomination. A discretion range which is sufficiently narrow to prevent adminship being decided by bureaucrats instead of community, but sufficiently wide to prevent obvious frivolous votes from being the deciding outcome, is needed. I have never yet seen an RFA where blatantly frivolous votes make up as much as 5% of the votes. If a frivolous vote knocks the RFA out of "discretion" to "always fail", there were probably plenty of valid concerns anyway, if it knocks the RFA out of "always passes" to "discretion", I think almost any bureaucrat would ignore the frivolous vote. I just don't like the prospect of those votes knocking it from "always pass" to "always fail". Sjakkalle (Check!) 09:06, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
Another issue here is that of socks, trolls, and even well-meaning but clueless editors. With the current system, those can generally be identified, and their views weighted accordingly (or in the cases of clear socks, vandals, or trolls, stricken entirely.) Under this system, we may as well have a "cratbot", which would be totally incapable of identifying such disruption, and without being able to look for frivolous comments (or a total lack thereof), such things can be damn hard to find even for a human. Seraphimblade Talk to me 12:35, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
I support this proposal with a slight modification: change the range of admin discretion from 75-80% to 70-85%. To address the issue of "votes in the absence of information", bureaucrats could extend an RfA to allow editors to reconsider their positions. -- Black Falcon 04:58, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
I oppose this proposal on basic principles. Polling is not a substitute for discussion, and placing a strict, high, and arbitrary numerical support limit on Rfas nullifies any and all useful discussion. On top of everything else, this would make Rfas far more political, far more petty, and far more prone to canvassing than they ever could be under the present system. Doing this would turn Rfas into an un-collegial, likely personal, and decidedly political process. -- Thesocialistesq/M.lesocialiste 19:47, 16 July 2007 (UTC)
I oppose this proposal. Wikipedia policies and guidelines can't cover the factors involved in an RfA. There is no Wikipedia policy that can answer the questions: Does this candidate have good judgment? Is she likely to abuse the tools? Misuse them, perhaps? Is she overly temperamental? RfA is primarily about trust; it's pointless to try to argue whether trust or the lack thereof is "valid". Trust is trust. It exists or it doesn't. -- Black Falcon 04:36, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
I'm not really liking applying a certain must-have months for attendance. For example, Nishkid worked on the project for 3 months before being sysopped, and he's a fine admin. The second thing I don't like is your mention of "Wikipedia elites." Adminship only entails a few tools, but they're working towards the same goals. What is it that majorly separates us from users like Taxman or Angela? We all work towards a common goal, and we all have the same rights as Wikipedians. bibliomaniac 1 5 03:34, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
I really dislike the idea of having set requirements mandated by "Wikipedia elites". Let editors decide on their own standards. For instance, anyone with a justified block in the last 2 months doesn't have a chance of succeeding anyway. Also, the specification of a set number of edits may encourage people interested in adminship to rack up edit counts instead of making quality contributions. -- Black Falcon 04:31, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
The idea of an essay sounds good, but we need to give people time to come and give their opinion. Maybe a length of 3 or so days. bibliomaniac 1 5 01:47, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
1. This is opposed by
WP:ANOT. No amount of edits will earn you adminship.
2. This is the current process, is it not?
3. This I like...but it seems similar to the current process.
4. I'm fully in favour of this. But it would be hard to agree on.
Only element 4 has my approval/support here. ~ G1ggy! blah, blah, blah 11:07, 2 May 2007 (UTC)
This seems a little anti-wiki to me, what issues is it trying to solve? As the proposal says, people would be picked at random and people picked at random will take it seriously. Even if only 20 editors take part, they will carefully pick through the contribs of a nominee...I don't see how that can be supported at all. Just the concept of a pool goes against how Wikipedia is run, and if you generate a different pool for every RFA the standards will shift with every RFA...at least now the "pool" is the same for every RFA. RxS 15:20, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
Wikiversity has a system like this, see v:Wikiversity:Custodianship. MER-C 09:27, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
The RfAs should not judge the character nor the personality of the candidates. Candidates should not need to be "trusted" by a supermajority of users to have access to the tools.
The implementation of a criterion to give the tools to an user should serve the sole purpose of making it harder to become an administrator than to be desysopped.
The criterion should be something hard to do, just that. By no means should it be something that judges whether the candidate would be a good administrator or not. By no means something that judges whether the person is trustable or trusted.
The tools should not be given only to those that are trusted, nor to those that are popular, nor to those that are intelligent, nor to those that are beautiful, nor to those that want really bad to be an administrator, nor to those that "need" the tools. The tools should be given to all of those who fulfill the criterion: to all of those who made the effort to fulfill the criterion.
The effort needed is something that a person takes time to do. It can be a number of edits, it can be a number of characters typed, it can be an amount of time with the account, it can be a number of sentences that make logical sense and that are pertinent to the pages where they were written.
The proposal is fair so far, but it cannot be implemented unless desysopping becomes easier. Therefore, every administrator should have the ability to desysop other administrators, but not the ability to promote other users to administrator status: this ability will remain with only the bureacrats.
The proposal would work: all users that made the effort would become administrators and it would be easy to get rid of administrator vandals, since there would be a great number of administrators to quickly desysop them. It would not be rewarding to be an administrator vandal, because the effort to create another account and fulfill the requirements again once they are desysopped will be much bigger than the reward of being able to vandalize Wikipedia for one or two minutes.
One example of how things will (or would) work: Vandals who wish to become administrators will have to make the effort, but the effort will be worth nothing if they use the tools to vandalize Wikipedia, or to harm the project, because they will very soon be desysopped by one of the many administrators that there will be. Their actions will be reverted by other administrators (all admin actions are reversible).
Another example: If a vandal desysops administrators without giving a reason to do so, the vandal will be desysopped soon by another administrator, and no other administrator vandal will be able to promote the vandal to administrator status again, because administrators will not have the ability to do that. The bureaucrats will re-sysop the desysopped administrators, and the vandal will remain desysopped. A.Z. 05:15, 13 May 2007 (UTC)
Maybe there should be a commitee which RfA's are brought to. Anyone can nominate someone, including themselves. It's made up of about 30 or so admins, and nonadmins can comment about the Nominee, and the commitee votes on it, and it is successful if it comprises a 70% support vote. Then a 'crat officially closes it as successful. The committee is not made up of the same sysops each time; each RfA has a committee of sysops randomly selected.
J-stan
Talk 02:55, 2 July 2007 (UTC)
I think having a "search committee" is a good idea, you will find that there is such a template and category already (look at my user page for example) for admin hopefuls - which would help a committee get going. Camaron1 | Chris 18:52, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
I like your idea in principal - but I would like to know how you intend to achieve these changes to adminship. How do you intend to make adminship simpler and how would you like it to be made easier for admins to lose their tools in the event of abuse? Camaron1 | Chris 18:57, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
Note that this is very similar to the Proposal by Carcharoth (above). I liked it and it nearly had a trail run which never went ahead. Camaron1 | Chris 19:03, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
I would object to this plan mainly because its too bureaucratic. New England 18:33, 13 July 2007 (UTC)
This has in fact been proposed before, so I guess you have at least one supporter :-). See this section. A.Z. 23:16, 10 July 2007 (UTC)
I disagree with this proposal. Consensus means a majority agrees with something. If an RfA is split right down the middle, obviously the community is disagreeable. Also, there would be many more passing RfAs with unsuitable candidates. J-stan Talk 02:04, 15 July 2007 (UTC)
I'm going to have to disagree with this. While nice to hear it said, it's disastrous to see it done. This proposal will essentially allow two thirds of the community to oppose someone and still allow that user to be an admin. An admin without the confidence of the majority of the community is not what Wikipedia needs. — Kurykh 03:24, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
I just found this page. It's nearly four months old and there's no obvious consensus emerging. Or is there? The format of the page doesn't really help work toward consensus. Could someone with a big noggin find a way to move this on? Alternatively, I move to close. -- Dweller 22:24, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
OK, those points seem reasonable. Could someone therefore begin tidying this up, because in its current format, it's very off-putting to a newcomer and it's very hard to sort the wheat from the chaff. -- Dweller 05:24, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
What is wrong with the way things are now? Tcrow777 talk 00:33, 29 July 2007 (UTC)
I think A.Z. is basing his view entirely on philosophy without enough of a nod to practicality, and thus takes this to an unneccessary extreme. However, I have to partly agree with him here. I'd be in favor of a system that grants admin rights fairly liberally, but then has a community discussion process for removing them. This answers a couple common objections, such as 1) We can't be too liberal with how we grant admin privs unless we have a lightweight process for removing them when there's trouble and 2) It's too much work to have an anti-RFA-like process. If we remove most of the work of granting adminship, we can do that work as necessary when removing it, probably without a net increase in the amount of time spent. Friday (talk) 17:40, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
Ok, this page is now 4 1/2 months old now, and I propose that we set a timeline for closure. First would come the basic proposals.... and please do not turn this into another lengthy discussion; limit your vote explanations to 1 sentence please.
Naturally, opposes would vote for the other proposal....
Once consensus has been established on these proposals, we can move on to the more specific ones below. Thank you! Panoptical 23:49, 19 August 2007 (UTC)
This discussion will close and be stored away as inactive. Discussion can be raised again if there is enough support for it.
Note: This would probably have to be confirmed by the community as a whole on another page.
The reality is this page is dead. In the last three weeks, just eight different people have contributed to it. Contrast with WT:RFA in the same time period; 102 unique contributors (not including anon IPs). There's no consensus, no ongoing discussion, no progress towards something conclusive. With such a lack of participation here, to conclude this page has support for reform of RfA would be a serious mistake. This page has had its day in the sun. It's been advertised on WT:RFA for weeks now, and the attention to it has fallen dramatically. There's no point continuing here. I'm marking this page as historical. If someone wants to generate a new page using this page as a supporting reference, that's fine. But, using this page as a means to the end of RfA reform is improper. -- Durin 14:10, 20 August 2007 (UTC)
Moved from Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship to prevent disruption there. — AldeBaer 13:09, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
How about this: Has there ever been a " Sadie Hawkins" RfA, i.e. a "nomination to stay a normal editor"? — AldeBaer 16:57, 28 August 2007 (UTC)
What's the point other than getting attention for oneself? It's a useless process. You can just request desysopping the way everybody else does without making an event out of it. -- W.marsh 00:34, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
Y'all 're lookin' for Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/silsor. Splash - tk 08:54, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
Following
gadfium's suggestion, I'm reposting my proposal in this subsection. My idea is simply to occasionally format RfAs —on a voluntary basis only— as requests to stay a normal editor. Not as a request for desysopping for already-admins, but as a usual RfA for non-admins formulated and formatted as going in the other direction, because becoming an admin is not "going somewhere", but merely becoming an admin. I'm not trying to pull a prank or make a joke in any way with this - I genuinely believe it may make a little difference to the better at RfA in general, as it may make people stop and consider that any RfA really can also be regarded as going into the other direction as well. I wouldn't know since I'm not an admin, but from what I hear, it's not all fun and powergames to be an admin, but also a somewhat stressful thing at times. So admins may agree that adminship is not a "prize to win", but rather only one of two possible outcomes of an RfA. Staying a normal editor after an RfA is not "failing", becoming an admin is not "winning".
So here is the basic premise: To have an inverted RfA, where failing would result in promotion while succeeding would result in staying a normal user. —
AldeBaer 23:52, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
This proposal seems more like a game than an attempt at improving anything. -- Deskana (apples) 11:35, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
FWIW, if you think ideas regarding the RfA process shouldn't be posted here, let me know. I don't want to disrupt this page. Then again, if can live with the proposal itself being posted here and just don't agree with it, post your disagreement. — AldeBaer 12:34, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
This page is currently inactive and is retained for
historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump. |
Please use the discussion section to reply to any of the proposals. "Proposals" section is for proposals only. Any other comment will be either moved or removed.
I think different levels of adminship should be given. Currently there are 5 major levels of access on wikipedia. These are: anonymous, regular users, administrators (sysops), bureaucrats, stewards. Having levels between users and administrators would be productive. These levels should not however be "trial admins". -- Cat chi? 20:53, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
I think Requests for adminship should be refactored into Requests for Comment form; after reading the nomination statement and answers to the three standard questions, anyone who wants (besides the candidate) can make their own header and, under it, state why they think the nominee should or shouldn't become an admin. Others, including the nominee, can then endorse or rebuke these sections. After seven days, a bureaucrat (maybe two in tricky cases) evaluates the merits of the support and opposition, after which they either promote or they don't. The end. Picaroon 22:09, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
I think that all of this is aleady solved. According to a key policy, Wikipedia is not a democracy, and because of this many users believe that it would be better if we were to discuss instead of voting when it comes to new administrators; but really, it is perfect how it works right now. This is because users vote but behind-the-scenes discussing is what encourages those votes. Votes are the results of discussions, so we discuss voting, making Wikipedia a non-democracy but a place where decisions are easilly handled. ♠ TomasBat ( @)( Contribs)( Sign!) 02:59, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
The problem as I understand it is that, while not officially, RfA is actually being handled as a vote. Many votes are based on pre-existing sympathy/antipathy or parotting arguments given by others. Many votes are not even accompanied by an explanatory comment at all. I believe there is no way to change that. But we do have the opportunity to enhance the meaning of the numbers: RfA should officially be a vote.
But to gain credibility, candidates and all supporters and opposers must be able to spread relevant info regarding new arguments/developments. Very often, support votes are not changed even in the face of substantial disqualifiers. Oppose votes are redundandtly discussed in the RfA page, distracting interested users (and the closing b'crat) from quickly assessing who said what. In my opinion there is an easy solution to all of this that would not increase the bureaucrat workload, but instead drastically decrease it.
WP:CANVASS—as far as canvassing for RfAs is concerned—should be abandoned, while commenting on other users' voting comments within the RfA page should be forbidden. The existing possibility to canvass only behind the scenes (via quick e-mail notification, for example) strongly favours established cliques while discriminating against all others. Currently, for example, it is forbidden as canvassing to inform voters of new developments and/or arguments on their respective talk pages. Commenting on support votes is easily seen as canvassing, commenting on oppose votes rarely so. Actual discussions as opposed to votes may be too controversial and tedious for any b'crat to sort through and decide upon. Most of these problems regarding the relative weight of the given votes and comments could be solved simply by the two things I propose: Allow canvassing and establish a rule that makes it possible to vote and comment, and to add to or change your comment, but forbids commenting on other users' comments within the RfA page. — KNcyu38 ( talk • contribs) 09:46, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
I think the root of the problem lies in the fact that people vote on the adminship of people that they do not personally know and trust. Perhaps a RFC style page that is not linked to some centralised page but instead linked only to the user's talk page and perhaps to their signature. That way, only people who had actually interacted with the user in some capacity would know they are up for adminship and only they would comment on whether they are trustworthy. I want adminship to be granted based on a candidate's past behaviour, not on how well they answer a set of standard questions. Theresa Knott | Taste the Korn 10:54, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
My proposal is written up at User:Sam Blacketer/RfA reform. In brief it aims at getting away from the vote-counting and looking at assessing adminship candidates in the round, based on their editing histories in several different aspects. By doing so it gives discretion to bureaucrats (who continue to be appointed in the same way as now) to decide whether concerns raised by other editors over aspects of the candidate's contributions demonstrate suitability or unsuitability for the admin tools. Sam Blacketer 11:34, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
Perhaps rather than a pure vote, rfa should be more like rfar.
-- Cat chi? 20:53, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
Reduce the amount of work that admins have to do by allowing normal editors to close AfD's etc. Then admins would only be required to deal with problem cases, essentialy blocking editors that close incorrectly, vandalise, etc. There would have to be a concurrent improvement of the current policy guides for closing AfD's etc. but that would happen naturally as a way of avoiding anarchy. RFA's could happen the same way. Regards sbandrews ( t) 20:18, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
As linked. Discuss on proposal's talk page. -- Random832
I've written up a brief proposal for improving RfA. The process would remain the same up until closure. RfA that aren't obvious pass/fails enter a discussion period of all bureaucrats. I believe this would help to reduce the perception of "rogue" bureaucrats and also increase the number of successful RfAs by widening the discretionary range to 60-80% support. I welcome any feedback and hope this can be refined into a workable process. Thanks! ChazBeckett 17:45, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
I know, radical idea, right? :) Seriously, there have been a bazillion proposals dating back to not long after RfA began. Virtually none of them gained any traction, and the very, very few that did were for very minor changes. For example, creating a subpage for each RfA. Ooo what a radical idea that! :) Proposal after proposal after proposal that has suggested significant change has fallen flat on its face. The long list of proposals on this page will be no different. There will not be significant traction to any of them. Enough of the proposals already!
What I think should be done is a more careful analytical process. One of the first steps of this should be ascertaining what is wrong with the current RfA system. Please contribute to the beginnings of this at User:Durin/What is wrong with RfA. Another early step should be ascertaining the goals of RfA. I did this at Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_adminship/Archive_82#What_are_the_goals_of_RfA.3F, though I don't think there was enough discussion.
In short, before we can decide what direction to go in, we should get a firm understanding of where we are (what is wrong), why we are here (what causes these problems) and where we want to be (the goals of RfA). Only then can we start intelligently discussing what car to jump in to get from Point A to Point B. Lots of shiny cars here. All of them might be wheel-less or out of gas for all we know.
Enough proposals :) -- Durin 18:42, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
The only real problem on RFA is people employing arbitrary and meaningless benchmarks to judge candidates by. This is a matter of culture. The assertion that RFA is horrendously difficult to pass is self-perpetuating because some people who would pass easily don't dare to face it, and inexperienced people who shouldn't be admins are unaware of this, thus skewing the results. The way to fix this is simply by nominating candidates. Therefore I propose that everyone active on this page finds a suitable nominee this week. >Radiant< 10:57, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
Abolish the "support", "oppose" and "neutral" sections and lump all the votes, and !votes into one section as is done on AFD (where "keep", and "delete" sections are a rejected idea except on the French Wikipedia). This format is far more well-designed for a discussion and also makes it much clearer how the debate is developing. Keeping a count of the votes and !votes is a bit tougher, but in the end it is the final one which counts and that can be established quite easily anyway. Sjakkalle (Check!) 13:30, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
Create an actual set of criteria to eliminate ridiculous votes. This would work similar to the criteria used for GAs and FAs. This could be based on: Experience, Quality of Work, Civility/Behavior, and Administrative Duties. Arranged in order from most important (top) to least important (bottom):
Similar to Sjakkalle's proposal above mine, this would also abolish the current setup of separate sections for Support/Oppose/Neutral (though not the votes themselves) by lumping all comments into one section. This proposal would also eliminate the "vote counter" as certain criteria are considered more important than others. Finally, instead of the three current questions, the nominee would answer questions more related to the criteria. This would eliminate any outlandish "oppose" reasons that have little to do with the sysop tools. Mr.Z-man talk ¢ 18:57, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
I personally do not like the way that admins selection is conducted. I agree with several past proposals that guidelines and benchmarks are arbitrary and users who vote many times vote for a RfA candidate whom they know almost nothing about. Here is my proposal for refroming the RfA system:
Just some thoughts Rackabello 05:36, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
My dear ghosts, ladies and gentlemen! Lend me your ears. I must be a bit uncouth and churlish so that my words my find a place in your kitchen cabinets! RfAs have been a major pain in the ass for a while now, and all we have done is aggregated more problems rather than finding solutions (that includes me!). From the look of it, we are nowhere near getting a revolutionary new concept of deciding the worthiness of a candidate to become a system administrator. So we must salvage what we have and build upon it.
Well, that's the easy way of passing RfAs. There are some who do not follow these unwritten laws and get involved in high-scoring matches and revellers fire up altercations on talk pages, spitting and swiping at the unlucky devil who happened to promote or dismiss the candidates. Here's what I think, and I have said it before – [1], [2]. –
WP:CANVAS should be abolished in relation to RfAs. The users who are best-qualified to judge a candidate's suitability for adminship are those who have already encountered and/or worked with that user. Therefore, although sales pitch shouldn't be encouraged, candidates should be allowed to advertise their RfA to other users. Linking to an RfA in your signature and on your userpage should also be allowed, for the same reason; if you spot the RfA while in the midst of discussion with someone, you're more qualified to judge their suitability for adminship than if you see them for the first time at RfA. Wal ton Vivat Regina! 18:58, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
I do not know how we will abolish the ideal of a vote, or how we will ever manage to survive the incessant deluge of RFA reform suggestions, but I do know that we must have one thing: the setting of actual standards to evaluate a nominee for adminship and cratship. Just as we have policies for reliable sources, deletion, and all that other good stuff, we must eliminate the arbitrariness that is going on. I believe it's really preventing people who would otherwise be good sysops or crats from attaining such a position, especially RFB. I acknowledge that this page is for RFA only, but if we do reform this and it is successful, it is inevitable that requests for bureacratship will have an overhaul. I seriously believe that if Taxman or Raul tried to run today, they would have been opposed many times over. As for me, I very much like the RFA standards that Z-man proposed:
- Civility/Behavior - Has the user engaged in edit/revert wars? Have they been blocked in the past? Have they made personal atatcks, added unsourced POV to articles, made any serious policy violations? If the answer to all of these questions is No, or at least Nothing serious in the past 2-3 months, then this should not be an issue.
- Administrative Duties invloves work in XfDs, Speedy/Proposed deletions, RfC, AIV, and other "administrative functions" though not necessarily all of these.
- Quality of Work would not focus on any one namespace. Some users are great with templates, others articles, some inages, and others policies/guidelines/essays. This would also take into consideration edit summary usage.
- Experience would be based on both edit count and time based experience. This would be set lower than many current arbitrary standards (any actual number ranges TBD by consensus).
I apologize for making my statement tedious and dragging, but I felt my sanity was at stake. :P bibliomaniac 1 5 01:31, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
Addendum: After examining the reforms and the plans that we've made in the past, I've come to a conclusion: many of us lack foresight. We only see what we want in the beginning when in fact, we'll be kicking ourselves a year later. Consider the case of Esperanza. Formed during rough times in 2005, what happened after that? It created a bureaucracy and shut down. Similarly, we've already created the present RFA format that we haven't anticipated would be so derided. We have to start thinking more in terms of the future and how we will affect a new wave of future admins. bibliomaniac 1 5 00:22, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
Adminship is no big deal? But de-adminship IS. As a consequence, some people are afraid to support, being afraid of possible abuse. I propose developing a simple and clear policy on removing sysop rights. Easy come, easy go. What it should be? Discussion like on AfD, votish discussion like on current RfA, vote like the Board Elections? I don't know, but the CAT:CSD backlog suggests that something must be done. MaxSem 18:46, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
Disadvantages
Advantages
Currently, the proposal by Sjakalle is being tried at Moralis' RfA. Although I am not very pleased with that experiment (to put it mildly), I think the idea behind it is good, but lacks a proper elaboration. So instead of just complaining, I thought I would contribute a new proposal (sorry Durin).
As most of the contributors have said already, RfA is not a vote, but in practice it is dealt with as if it were a vote. And according to the Admin survey, RfA has become a popularity contest, with canvassing as an unwanted side effect. Time for a radical change. I propose the following changes:
Abolish the support and neutral sections, and disallow any support or neutral statements. The RfA should focus on objections as to why the candidate should not become an admin. These objections will have to be documented, and can be discussed by the candidate and other contributors. Candidates will not benefit anymore from canvassing, so that would put an automatic stop to that practice.
If the closing bureaucrat decides that all objections have been answered to his or hers satisfaction, the candidate is sysopped; optionally the bureaucrat can give a statement as to why he or she feels this should be the outcome.
Finally, I think the current questions to the candidate are not very relevant to the process and could be deleted. Er rab ee 12:48, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
Regarding a recent request for adminship I've just looked at - This appears to be a good example of a user which would have made a good admin being rejected purely on their beliefs rather than their potential ability to administrate. I propose that arguments for or against a candidate should need to be based on valid grounds written down within existing Wikipedia policy and/or guidelines. Any votes not based on such policy should not be counted. -- Rebroad 17:07, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
Opening - Like I suggested on the adminship survey, RfA should have a set of criteria that the editor must meet before they can get promoted. This idea is similar to the proposals by Mr Z man & Bibliomaniac above (Darn, you beat me to it...) ;). These criteria would undoubtedly be decided by Jimbo & the Wikipedia elites (But would probably have to go through the community to see if there's a consensus on which requirements would be needed - the final decision however, would be made by Jimbo etc...) & would have points that needed to be met before you could be given sysop powers. These could include -
Nominations - So that would be the first change. Next would be the method of nominating & being promoted. To be promoted, you would need X number of Buerocrats to endorse your nomination - that way there wouldn't be as much pressure on a single crat to make the right decision. In addition to the endorsement of the crats, there would be a "citation" section on the nomination, where normal users could "cite" the nominated user of any uncivil behaviour or breach of site rules (This would act like the oppose section now & would advise the crats on how the user has acted in the past). This would be in place because just meeting the rrequirements of the list would be too easy to pass & thus the imput from other users would be needed to affect the end descision. After reading the "oppose citations", the crats would then endorse the nomination & if you get enough, one would make you a sysop. (Similarly, crats could also oppose the nomiantion & if X nubmer oppose, then the nomination would be removed - No explaination would be needed, just a solid endorsement or opposition....)
Reasons why this may work - This way of voting would cancel out a number of problems people have with RfA at the moment - the pile on support votes, editors getting promoted who don't meet many requirements, popularity contests & questionable crat judgements to name a few. Techincally, supporting a nomiantion would be taken out - the only support which would be needed would be that of the crats. More notice would be taken of oppose votes, as they would be the ones advising the crats how this user has acted other than meeting the requirements to the list. This would also save much time, as cratswould only need to see if the user met all the requirements & if any users had cited them for bad behaviour. Also, there would undoubtedly be a cut down in the amount of users who have failed RfA's leaving the project in despair, since they would know if they met the requirements before they even nominated themselves (IE, there'd basically be no "You're not good enough, that's why we're failing you", but rather a "I need to improve in these areas before I can get nominated for adminship"). I see this as a very simple system which Jimbo could have a direct hand in creating & would solve many of the problems we all have. We all hate calling things a vote, so why not put up this "procedure" & make things simpler for everyone? Cheers, Spawn Man 02:50, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
I think many of the concerns on Requests for Adminship may be slightly exaggerated. The current simple voting method is not horrendous as noted by some editors. The final decision is in the hand of bureaucrats. Anyways, here are my proposal:
That's it for now. Excuse me if I have been redundant, as I did not read much of other proposals. AQu01rius ( User • Talk) 01:40, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
Intention
The intention behind this approach is to somewhat standardize the process and create a more even, predictable, and fairer outcome, and let potential admins know what to expect and approximately when they should expect to be ready, while still permitting community discretion and escape valves to address an editor the community believes to be a problem, and still permitting a very straightforward process with "support", "oppose", and "neutral".
Create guidelines to guide process: 1. A set of threshold requirements setting basic minimum standards that establish a clear threshold based on fairly objective criteria -- see below for a proposal. 2. A set of soft competency requirements with skills that candidate must demonstrate (see below) 3. A set of objection guidelines identifying legitimate reasons to oppose.
Process: 1. A candidate would have to meet the threshold guidelines to be considered -- speedy remove from RfA if they're not met. Suggested threshold standards: Depending on the community's preferences, 2000-3000 edits, a few hundred minimum in each of main, talk, and project space, four to six months of regular editing on the project, absence of recent blocks or repeat warnings (with mechanism to override/discount abusive ones). Also, suggest that an editor review be required first (with no particular outcome.) 2. Competencies would be demonstrated through questions etc. Candidate would have to provide diffs demonstrating them. Suggested categories: editing skills, knowledge of policy, interaction with users, civility and level-headedness during disputes, and similar. Nom and/or candidate would be required to provide examples demonstrating each of the areas. 3. A person who meets minimum guidelines is presumed eligible. Supporters don't have to explain anything, but objectors would be required to state a specific objection and give examples of the problem. Suggested Oppose standards: damage to the encyclopedia, lack of civility, serious misunderstanding of policy, poor judgment, and similar. Objectors would have to identify specific diffs and explain why they represent objectionable behavior. However, guidelines should be broad enough to permit objectors to explain why they believe an individual can't be trusted. 4. Within these guidelines, "concensus" means a supermajority vote as currently, with votes not complying with guidelines (oppose votes which don't state a legitimate reason) discounted. Thus there would be discussion, yet clear standards to discuss by which would permit support, oppose, and neutral declarations as at present.-- Shirahadasha 03:08, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
While oppose categories would be worded broadly enough to permit judgment, the requirement to present specific diffs would hopefully get rid of objections such as "no need for tools", objector doesn't like (permissable) userboxes, insufficient experience where guideline minimum is met, and and various others. -- Shirahadasha 02:54, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
How about randomly generating a jury of voters? I'm sure I remember a "random user" generator somewhere. Randomly select 100 users who have been active in the past week, and say they have been granted the singular honour of voting on this candidate's RfA. This is a bit like jury service in the UK, which, with checks and balances, is essentially a random selection of your peers to sit in judgement on you. People selected at random tend to take their duties very seriously. If this idea took off, and if even only 20% of the 100 random users participated, then you would get 20 people carefully picking through the contributions history and giving their opinion on the candidate. Also, in case you get a random selection of 100 trolls, allow the candidate to rebut oppose votes, and still leave the ultimate decision to the bureaucrat. Randomly selecting from the entire pool of users might be a bit much, so instead maybe randomly select from a large of list of those "willing to serve at RfA". Carcharoth 17:23, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
A.Z. no longer supports this proposal.
There is an essay about this
here, although this proposal is a bit different.
Why not have a trial adminship were the people who would like to become admins. are given the tools over a period of time. The first week they could get the ability to protect pages and un-protect pages, and edit full protected pages. A week later, they would have the ability to delete pages, recreate, ect. Finally on the 3rd week they would be able to block and unblock users. After a month, they could go to WP:RfA where users would support or oppose their RfA. This would eliminate people voting purely on edit counts. Even if a user had a high edit count and was irresponsible, mostly likely they would not pass. If they had a lower edit count but used the tools responsibly, then their chances of passing are higher. During their trail adminship, the user would also have to make a certain amount of "admin-only" edits, so we could see how they would react to different situations, instead of that user picking out the easier task to do.
This is based on what I saw in the last two trials (the formats used in the Moralis and Matt Britt RfAs). Instead of sorting comments by support/oppose/neutral, sort comments by the area in which they comment about (e.g. if you oppose someone due to lack of XfD edits, put your Oppose comment in a section marked 'XfD' or 'Deletion'). People could make as many comments as they liked, so they could just make a generic 'Support' comment in a generic section at the top, or if their support was based on something in particular (or the lack of a particular problem that had been brought up) they could place it in that section, or in all relevant sections. With any luck this would help identify the issues involved in that particular RfA and help reduce a voting-like mentality without actually making the RfA harder to close.
A.Z. no longer supports this proposal.
1) Allow anyone to become an Admin once they meet certain criteria, such as length of time with an account and number of edits. No utility nor personality criteria, such as "quality of edits" or "difficult to work with" should be used.
2) Allow Admins to desysop each other, but only allow bureaucrats to grant Admin status.
The only proposal that I have is to change the passing range, 75% shouldn't be needed, if that's what it is right now, it should be brought down to 67%. I believe this is fair because a "tiebreaker" is usually made with 2/3. If 2/3 supports are made, or close to 67%, the admin hopeful should pass. No big deal, but I thought I'd bring it up. -- Imdanumber1 ( talk · contribs) 12:23, 27 May 2007 (UTC)
I don't think there is much wrong with RFAs as they are currently run. If the idea of trying to reform RFAs is to try to get more admins, we should try to get more people to run for adminship.
To do this, I think a search committee could be formed. The committee would be made up of admins, and they would try to look for good candidates. To help look at who would be interested in going through an RFA, a user could add a template to his talk page, essentially saying he wants to be an admin someday {{ User wikipedia/Administrator someday}}. The members of the search committee would look through the users who added that template, and nominate them if they feel the candidate is qualified.
Another way to find more candidates could be to have a bot suggest an RFA if a user has been on wikipedia for a certain period of time (6 months) and has made a certain amont of edits (2400).
There are also some minors changes I would make to RFAs.
First, the community needs to realize that RFAs are in actuality votes; few RFAs fall into the Crat's discretionary range. This would help potential candidates because the process would be easier for them to understand.
Second, I think that 67% support should be the minimum for guaranteed passing. 2/3 (67%) is considered to be a super-majority (by US congress, for instance), so I don't see why 75% is needed. The new discretion range would be from 63% support to 66% support. The cloing Crat would also have to explain his decision if the vote fell into the discretionary range.
Third, I would disallow voters from questioning the position of any other voter, except in instances where specific policies may have been broken (Conflict of Interest, Canvassing, ect). This would especially apply to oppose votes, where it seems that in many RFAs support voters try to pester an opposer into dropping opposition.
That's the solution I envision to this "problem". If you have any questions or comments either discuss them at my
talk page, or at
Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_adminship/Reform#.23Proposal_by_New_England_.28formerly_Black_Harry.29
Thank You
Black Harry (Highlights| Contribs) 16:58, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
Requests for adminship should be much simpler and easier. By that I mean that those requesting for adminship shouldn't be judged so harshly as if they are being given some great permission. They are simply being given a little more access to wikipedia than other editors and that's it. Administrators should be chosen with much less scrutiny and should have their administrator abilities taken away with much less trouble. As Jimbo Wales has said on the issue "I just wanted to say that becoming a sysop is *not a big deal*."[ [3]] Wikidudeman (talk) 01:51, 3 July 2007 (UTC)
This is quite a rough draft of a proposal. I think there should be a commitee which RfA's are brought to. Anyone can nominate someone, including themselves. It's made up of about 30 or so admins, and nonadmins can comment about the Nominee, and the commitee votes on it, and it is successful if it comprises a 70% support vote.
The committee is not made up of the same sysops each time; each RfA has a committee of sysops randomly selected.
"Silence equals consent" is the ultimate measure of consensus
I feel the above statement should be the sole groundwork of the future incarnation of rfas. With the current method of rfas, it is often possible for concerns raised by others to be literally drowned out by a large amount of supporters.
I propose only concerns (oppositions) be posted. Each seperate concern would initially be created as its own subsection. In those subsections, others would express their thoughts about the concern raised and help determine if the raised concern is both relevant and substantial enough to warrant the candidate not being promoted to admin status. The same contributor would be able to create more than one concern subsection.
When it is time for the rfa to close, the closing bureaucrat would be required to go through the sections and rule each complaint section as one of the following:
based on the discussion in each subsection. If a complaint section is not refuted by any responses (and is not clear vandalism/attack) then the default ruling would be 'Substantial and relevant', according to the Silence=consensus ideology.
If even one of the concerns is maked as 'Substantial and relevant' or 'No consensus reached' then the rfa would fail, else it would pass. If there are no concerns raised by the time the rfa is over, the default is promotion to admin status.
Below are two hypothetical complaints and possible discussions that would take place:
==This user is too aggressive==
I'm concerned that if user FooBar is promoted to an admin they would continue their aggressive behavior as displayed here [4] and [5]. --Some arbitrary user
Concern unsubstantial --Closing Bureaucrat
==This user is alligned with the XYZ political party==
My concern is that user FooBar has openly admiting to being alligned with the XYZ political party. I think that means they will set a bad image of wikipedia if promoted to admin status --Some arbitrary user 4
Concern irrelevant --Closing Bureaucrat
If this type of proposal has already been made, my mistake. I've skimmed through most of the proposals but might have missed one that is proposing the same idea. -- Android Mouse 06:01, 10 July 2007 (UTC)
The only reform that is really needed right now, is a de-adminship procedure. The best procedure should be copied from other wikipedias. Some have these in place. -- Matt57 ( talk• contribs) 21:54, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
So you're suggesting we leave it as is? Hardly a reform, is it...and I'm against this, I think the RfA could do with improvement (as outlined in my responses to other proposals). ~ G1ggy! blah, blah, blah 11:09, 2 May 2007 (UTC)
I tend to agree with the idea of having b'crats evaluate and agree on success/failure of RfAs that have not reached consensus with the community. Personally, I believe that there are more problems regarding RfA than closure of the undecided cases. But your proposal and mine could well be merged, in my opinion. — KNcyu38 ( talk • contribs) 13:18, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
What do you propose regarding RfA reform? — KNcyu38 ( talk • contribs) 19:42, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
I think the RfA reform may take a little longer than a couple of months, especially if it's going to be a big and meaningful reform. A.Z. 19:27, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
I have thought of this as well. Seems quite a fair suggestion as AfD guidelines do actually specifically say not to separate comments, to stop it looking like a vote. Camaron1 | Chris 18:04, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
Just thought I'd add my two cents. This format is intensely confusing and irritating. It's made a mess of Moralis' RfA. mcr616 Speak! 19:32, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
I agree with mcr616, the current format at Moralis' RfA is simply terrible (the main problem is the chronological ordering, which creates a lot of redundancy). As regards the "positive outcome" noted above, I think that's just an illusion. Is there really a difference between the two examples below?
*Oppose. Too few portal talk edits. User:Portals are the future (PATF) *Oppose per PATF. User:Per user
*Oppose. Too few portal talk edits. User:Portals are the future (PATF) *Oppose. Not enough portal talk edits. User:Per user
Just because no one wrote "per X" doesn't mean everyone gave a different reasoning. The same can be said of the "support" comments. -- Black Falcon 04:46, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
I was thinking of this myself - a set of community agreed guidelines like WP:BIO is for AFD. Good idea. MER-C 04:14, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
This comes closest to how I believe RfA should work: it's a mixed system where candidates meet certain requirements, but are then discussed. The requirements should be quite simple, & be made public: the criteria I would propose (just so people know what I'm talking about) would be three consecutive months of activity, 1000 non-minor edits, & the person is not currently being considered for sanctions (either from the ArbCom or a Community Ban), or has been so sanctioned. In the case above, where a possible candidate is short of the minimum number of edits, the solution should be simple: go out & make more edits. Yet I would go further than setting definite requirements: anyone who meets or exceeds these requirements & does not explicitly refuse to be an Admin (there are a number of people that I think would be good Admins who have declined), is automatically nominated. This automatic nomination might make the RfA process less of a beauty contest. -- llywrch 19:25, 24 April 2007 (UTC) Z-man
While I do support having some cut-off points, and a range which is "always pass" and one which is "always fail", I think it is too inflexible to make an absolute cut-off between "always passes" and "always fails". I feel that a vote along the lines of "Oppose. Wikipedia is a waste of time. Why bother?" should never be allowed to break a nomination. A discretion range which is sufficiently narrow to prevent adminship being decided by bureaucrats instead of community, but sufficiently wide to prevent obvious frivolous votes from being the deciding outcome, is needed. I have never yet seen an RFA where blatantly frivolous votes make up as much as 5% of the votes. If a frivolous vote knocks the RFA out of "discretion" to "always fail", there were probably plenty of valid concerns anyway, if it knocks the RFA out of "always passes" to "discretion", I think almost any bureaucrat would ignore the frivolous vote. I just don't like the prospect of those votes knocking it from "always pass" to "always fail". Sjakkalle (Check!) 09:06, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
Another issue here is that of socks, trolls, and even well-meaning but clueless editors. With the current system, those can generally be identified, and their views weighted accordingly (or in the cases of clear socks, vandals, or trolls, stricken entirely.) Under this system, we may as well have a "cratbot", which would be totally incapable of identifying such disruption, and without being able to look for frivolous comments (or a total lack thereof), such things can be damn hard to find even for a human. Seraphimblade Talk to me 12:35, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
I support this proposal with a slight modification: change the range of admin discretion from 75-80% to 70-85%. To address the issue of "votes in the absence of information", bureaucrats could extend an RfA to allow editors to reconsider their positions. -- Black Falcon 04:58, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
I oppose this proposal on basic principles. Polling is not a substitute for discussion, and placing a strict, high, and arbitrary numerical support limit on Rfas nullifies any and all useful discussion. On top of everything else, this would make Rfas far more political, far more petty, and far more prone to canvassing than they ever could be under the present system. Doing this would turn Rfas into an un-collegial, likely personal, and decidedly political process. -- Thesocialistesq/M.lesocialiste 19:47, 16 July 2007 (UTC)
I oppose this proposal. Wikipedia policies and guidelines can't cover the factors involved in an RfA. There is no Wikipedia policy that can answer the questions: Does this candidate have good judgment? Is she likely to abuse the tools? Misuse them, perhaps? Is she overly temperamental? RfA is primarily about trust; it's pointless to try to argue whether trust or the lack thereof is "valid". Trust is trust. It exists or it doesn't. -- Black Falcon 04:36, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
I'm not really liking applying a certain must-have months for attendance. For example, Nishkid worked on the project for 3 months before being sysopped, and he's a fine admin. The second thing I don't like is your mention of "Wikipedia elites." Adminship only entails a few tools, but they're working towards the same goals. What is it that majorly separates us from users like Taxman or Angela? We all work towards a common goal, and we all have the same rights as Wikipedians. bibliomaniac 1 5 03:34, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
I really dislike the idea of having set requirements mandated by "Wikipedia elites". Let editors decide on their own standards. For instance, anyone with a justified block in the last 2 months doesn't have a chance of succeeding anyway. Also, the specification of a set number of edits may encourage people interested in adminship to rack up edit counts instead of making quality contributions. -- Black Falcon 04:31, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
The idea of an essay sounds good, but we need to give people time to come and give their opinion. Maybe a length of 3 or so days. bibliomaniac 1 5 01:47, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
1. This is opposed by
WP:ANOT. No amount of edits will earn you adminship.
2. This is the current process, is it not?
3. This I like...but it seems similar to the current process.
4. I'm fully in favour of this. But it would be hard to agree on.
Only element 4 has my approval/support here. ~ G1ggy! blah, blah, blah 11:07, 2 May 2007 (UTC)
This seems a little anti-wiki to me, what issues is it trying to solve? As the proposal says, people would be picked at random and people picked at random will take it seriously. Even if only 20 editors take part, they will carefully pick through the contribs of a nominee...I don't see how that can be supported at all. Just the concept of a pool goes against how Wikipedia is run, and if you generate a different pool for every RFA the standards will shift with every RFA...at least now the "pool" is the same for every RFA. RxS 15:20, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
Wikiversity has a system like this, see v:Wikiversity:Custodianship. MER-C 09:27, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
The RfAs should not judge the character nor the personality of the candidates. Candidates should not need to be "trusted" by a supermajority of users to have access to the tools.
The implementation of a criterion to give the tools to an user should serve the sole purpose of making it harder to become an administrator than to be desysopped.
The criterion should be something hard to do, just that. By no means should it be something that judges whether the candidate would be a good administrator or not. By no means something that judges whether the person is trustable or trusted.
The tools should not be given only to those that are trusted, nor to those that are popular, nor to those that are intelligent, nor to those that are beautiful, nor to those that want really bad to be an administrator, nor to those that "need" the tools. The tools should be given to all of those who fulfill the criterion: to all of those who made the effort to fulfill the criterion.
The effort needed is something that a person takes time to do. It can be a number of edits, it can be a number of characters typed, it can be an amount of time with the account, it can be a number of sentences that make logical sense and that are pertinent to the pages where they were written.
The proposal is fair so far, but it cannot be implemented unless desysopping becomes easier. Therefore, every administrator should have the ability to desysop other administrators, but not the ability to promote other users to administrator status: this ability will remain with only the bureacrats.
The proposal would work: all users that made the effort would become administrators and it would be easy to get rid of administrator vandals, since there would be a great number of administrators to quickly desysop them. It would not be rewarding to be an administrator vandal, because the effort to create another account and fulfill the requirements again once they are desysopped will be much bigger than the reward of being able to vandalize Wikipedia for one or two minutes.
One example of how things will (or would) work: Vandals who wish to become administrators will have to make the effort, but the effort will be worth nothing if they use the tools to vandalize Wikipedia, or to harm the project, because they will very soon be desysopped by one of the many administrators that there will be. Their actions will be reverted by other administrators (all admin actions are reversible).
Another example: If a vandal desysops administrators without giving a reason to do so, the vandal will be desysopped soon by another administrator, and no other administrator vandal will be able to promote the vandal to administrator status again, because administrators will not have the ability to do that. The bureaucrats will re-sysop the desysopped administrators, and the vandal will remain desysopped. A.Z. 05:15, 13 May 2007 (UTC)
Maybe there should be a commitee which RfA's are brought to. Anyone can nominate someone, including themselves. It's made up of about 30 or so admins, and nonadmins can comment about the Nominee, and the commitee votes on it, and it is successful if it comprises a 70% support vote. Then a 'crat officially closes it as successful. The committee is not made up of the same sysops each time; each RfA has a committee of sysops randomly selected.
J-stan
Talk 02:55, 2 July 2007 (UTC)
I think having a "search committee" is a good idea, you will find that there is such a template and category already (look at my user page for example) for admin hopefuls - which would help a committee get going. Camaron1 | Chris 18:52, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
I like your idea in principal - but I would like to know how you intend to achieve these changes to adminship. How do you intend to make adminship simpler and how would you like it to be made easier for admins to lose their tools in the event of abuse? Camaron1 | Chris 18:57, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
Note that this is very similar to the Proposal by Carcharoth (above). I liked it and it nearly had a trail run which never went ahead. Camaron1 | Chris 19:03, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
I would object to this plan mainly because its too bureaucratic. New England 18:33, 13 July 2007 (UTC)
This has in fact been proposed before, so I guess you have at least one supporter :-). See this section. A.Z. 23:16, 10 July 2007 (UTC)
I disagree with this proposal. Consensus means a majority agrees with something. If an RfA is split right down the middle, obviously the community is disagreeable. Also, there would be many more passing RfAs with unsuitable candidates. J-stan Talk 02:04, 15 July 2007 (UTC)
I'm going to have to disagree with this. While nice to hear it said, it's disastrous to see it done. This proposal will essentially allow two thirds of the community to oppose someone and still allow that user to be an admin. An admin without the confidence of the majority of the community is not what Wikipedia needs. — Kurykh 03:24, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
I just found this page. It's nearly four months old and there's no obvious consensus emerging. Or is there? The format of the page doesn't really help work toward consensus. Could someone with a big noggin find a way to move this on? Alternatively, I move to close. -- Dweller 22:24, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
OK, those points seem reasonable. Could someone therefore begin tidying this up, because in its current format, it's very off-putting to a newcomer and it's very hard to sort the wheat from the chaff. -- Dweller 05:24, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
What is wrong with the way things are now? Tcrow777 talk 00:33, 29 July 2007 (UTC)
I think A.Z. is basing his view entirely on philosophy without enough of a nod to practicality, and thus takes this to an unneccessary extreme. However, I have to partly agree with him here. I'd be in favor of a system that grants admin rights fairly liberally, but then has a community discussion process for removing them. This answers a couple common objections, such as 1) We can't be too liberal with how we grant admin privs unless we have a lightweight process for removing them when there's trouble and 2) It's too much work to have an anti-RFA-like process. If we remove most of the work of granting adminship, we can do that work as necessary when removing it, probably without a net increase in the amount of time spent. Friday (talk) 17:40, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
Ok, this page is now 4 1/2 months old now, and I propose that we set a timeline for closure. First would come the basic proposals.... and please do not turn this into another lengthy discussion; limit your vote explanations to 1 sentence please.
Naturally, opposes would vote for the other proposal....
Once consensus has been established on these proposals, we can move on to the more specific ones below. Thank you! Panoptical 23:49, 19 August 2007 (UTC)
This discussion will close and be stored away as inactive. Discussion can be raised again if there is enough support for it.
Note: This would probably have to be confirmed by the community as a whole on another page.
The reality is this page is dead. In the last three weeks, just eight different people have contributed to it. Contrast with WT:RFA in the same time period; 102 unique contributors (not including anon IPs). There's no consensus, no ongoing discussion, no progress towards something conclusive. With such a lack of participation here, to conclude this page has support for reform of RfA would be a serious mistake. This page has had its day in the sun. It's been advertised on WT:RFA for weeks now, and the attention to it has fallen dramatically. There's no point continuing here. I'm marking this page as historical. If someone wants to generate a new page using this page as a supporting reference, that's fine. But, using this page as a means to the end of RfA reform is improper. -- Durin 14:10, 20 August 2007 (UTC)
Moved from Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship to prevent disruption there. — AldeBaer 13:09, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
How about this: Has there ever been a " Sadie Hawkins" RfA, i.e. a "nomination to stay a normal editor"? — AldeBaer 16:57, 28 August 2007 (UTC)
What's the point other than getting attention for oneself? It's a useless process. You can just request desysopping the way everybody else does without making an event out of it. -- W.marsh 00:34, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
Y'all 're lookin' for Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/silsor. Splash - tk 08:54, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
Following
gadfium's suggestion, I'm reposting my proposal in this subsection. My idea is simply to occasionally format RfAs —on a voluntary basis only— as requests to stay a normal editor. Not as a request for desysopping for already-admins, but as a usual RfA for non-admins formulated and formatted as going in the other direction, because becoming an admin is not "going somewhere", but merely becoming an admin. I'm not trying to pull a prank or make a joke in any way with this - I genuinely believe it may make a little difference to the better at RfA in general, as it may make people stop and consider that any RfA really can also be regarded as going into the other direction as well. I wouldn't know since I'm not an admin, but from what I hear, it's not all fun and powergames to be an admin, but also a somewhat stressful thing at times. So admins may agree that adminship is not a "prize to win", but rather only one of two possible outcomes of an RfA. Staying a normal editor after an RfA is not "failing", becoming an admin is not "winning".
So here is the basic premise: To have an inverted RfA, where failing would result in promotion while succeeding would result in staying a normal user. —
AldeBaer 23:52, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
This proposal seems more like a game than an attempt at improving anything. -- Deskana (apples) 11:35, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
FWIW, if you think ideas regarding the RfA process shouldn't be posted here, let me know. I don't want to disrupt this page. Then again, if can live with the proposal itself being posted here and just don't agree with it, post your disagreement. — AldeBaer 12:34, 30 August 2007 (UTC)