Wikipedia Talk:Requests for adminship, once the most lively forum on the project with the exception of ANI, is becalmed. The babble of noise at peak times akin to the background din of a noisy Manchester pub on a Saturday night has dropped not just to a whisper, but to a stony silence. It's become an empty space. Walk through it and you'll make conspicuous footprints in the dust gathering on the floor. Your footfall echoes in the deserted room, "Is there anyone there?" you call halfheartedly before turning round and going back outside into the sunlight. In the street there is also little activity. A kid sits on a doorstep poking vandalism into K-Pop music bios through his cheap Chinese smartphone. A bunch of teenagers sit round their Samsungs seeing who can tag the most new pages in sixty seconds.
The whole place has the feel of a deserted Wild West film set. Across the almost traffic free road, you enter a half open door with a dilapidated sign hanging on one nail: Café Anna it announces in sun-faded coloured letters. Inside the pretty room with many colourful interactive pictures on the wall, there is a stuffed effigy of 'The Founder' in an armchair, but there is no busy bustle in this place either. There's a lady editing an article about a golf complex in Hainan. The article is almost as complete as the complex. She's looks startled when you enter – she obviously wasn't expecting anyone. "Yup, it's kinda quiet here," she says. "April's customers are down to a fifth of the usual month's average."
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idea, or at even template editor. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 19:51, 24 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]I think there's something wrong with Rick Bot's edit summary if you look at the actual chart. Mkdw talk 15:30, 25 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]The second reason is that admins have exactly zero authority to settle content disputes. Nor is there any process on Wikipedia that can authoritatively settle content disputes that an admin can shovel them to. It is soul destroying as an admin to watch these disputes in progress knowing that any action has to be to warn all parties or block all parties no matter how dumb or biased one side is being. Again, I think the solution is a small group of trusted editors; an editorial board. They should certainly be given control of the MOS which has become a toxic minefield for outside editors and a place where no real change or improvement can now ever take place.
Now I know both these ideas will be shot down for giving too much power to a small group, and every small time editor here wants to jelously guard their perceived rights. But hey, you can always vote them out next year. And that's how it's done (not the voting) in every journal in the world, in every encyclopaedia, in every newspaper. If you want something done, you have to give someone the authority to go do it. SpinningSpark 23:29, 25 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:59, 31 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
GodArbCom to remove the permissions. Making desysopping no big deal is the most obvious way I can see to make adminship return to being no big deal. This is not a tenured professorship where we are awarding trusted users freedom to be as crazy as they want once they pass muster. Admins shouldn't be able to go around edit warring and accusing people of being KGB members just because they were seen as competent years ago.{{Historical}}
and shut down. The consensus clearly leans strongly toward the former. Second, reconfirmation RfAs would probably be considered to pass at a lower threshold (e.g. >50%). Third, the other hue and cry about admins is that there's an increasing caste-like disconnect between the "admin class" and "everyday editors". The only way to fix that is for more (percentage-wise) of editors to become admins, and admins who do not represent community expectations to get removed. I don't see any other way to get there but non-forever adminship plus a review process, since it would defuse adminship "seriousness" drama and make the reviews actually happen. PS: I haven't seen a single person make the "no way to ensure he steps down at the end" argument you've suggested; rather, the concern is "no way to ensure he does anything useful with the tools after the end" of that cleanup run, plus questions of whether the candidate is actually experienced or interested enough to try. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:15, 3 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]That said, from a historical and organizational perspective, an observation like "administrators won't really be administrators any more" and might not be needed (in theory) isn't wrong, nor alarming. All sorts of old roles no longer exist in the real world, or have mutated unrecognizably into something else. When's the last time you encountered an armored knight? And is the the US going to collapse because it lacks a knighthood system like the UK's (one that has no resemblance to the medieval one)?
Troubled modern organizations fairly often and sometimes with great success completely re-do their organization charts and role structures. They often find that many roles are not needed and that the work they were doing is better decentralized; that many formalized relationships and hierarchies are faulty impediments to workflow, based on assumptions of how things "should" work rather than metrics of what actually works well; that much dysfunction goes away when unneeded hierarchy, division-forming, role-fencing, etc. are thrown out; and that people in the organization will generally rise to the challenges of new responsibilities they can [or, in real workplaces, are often ordered to] take up, while there are replacement people in the workforce if a particular individual fails at this.
Further, the fact that adminship could theoretically be reduced to one or a few functions isn't inherently problematic in any way. Many roles in many organizations have this character, and we already have some, e.g.: bureaucrats, stewards, oversighters, and arbitrators (and less formal local-consensus ones like editor-in-chief of The Signpost, decision making "authority" at WP:ITN, coordinator positions at large wikiprojects, etc. – mostly leadership by example and by tacit agreement to follow along, though a few wikiprojects actually have elections for some roles).
In the end it's theoretically feasible to eliminate the "admin" category, if we wanted to do. But the community probably wouldn't want to. One re-org lesson is also that many dysfunctional roles in an organization can simply be fixed by reducing their workload/scope, splitting them, or changing/reducing hierarchy structures. That's all compatible with the idea of unbundling most of this stuff, and letting the community hash out disciplinary matters that aren't yet-another-vandal/troll cases, while reserving undiscussed blocks of those kinds of NOTHERE types to elected admins with a lighter workload (but also less hierarchical weight to throw around).
Part of why our adminship system is so screwy is that it's a conflation of unrelated roles of "administration" in the business sense, which involves making and enforcing rules, and "administration" in the sysadmin sense of doing a bunch of complicated geekery that if done incorrectly will screw things up. There's really no sense in commingling these things, but it happened because WP was founded by people from the software-startups world, populated by nerds starting companies and business people entering them having to also get into the nerdy stuff. Almost everything dysfunctional about WMF, from the board to the staffing to the corporate decisions to the community bias, is because it's all topheavy with tech-industry people thinking in terms of a product with a userbase, instead of nonprofit organization people thinking in terms of a mission with a constituency. I've seen this all before, at other tech-connected nonprofits I worked at (where I helped one, the EFF, go through the transition, but left I another because it would not accept that the transition had to happen; that one later imploded despite good and important work it was doing). The problem and the cascading sub-problems that come from it are resolveable, but the process of getting there can be painful and slow, and some people inevitably storm off in a huff – often causing a net increase in productivity because their stonewalling obstructionism goes with them. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 23:07, 3 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]