User:Enemyunknown/RfA Review Recommend Phase

Welcome to the Recommendation phase of RfA Review. In this phase, you will be asked to offer suggestions and proposals to address specific concerns and problems with the current Requests for Adminship process.

The questions below are taken directly from the 209 responses from the Question phase, each of which offered editors' thoughts and concerns about RfA. Based on those concerns, we identified the most frequently mentioned problems and included them here. These are the elements of RfA that are currently under review.

Please take your time and read through the concerns below. For each item, you are invited to offer a proposal that addresses the concern. Where possible, you are encouraged to provide examples, references, diffs and so on in order to support your viewpoint. There isn't a limit on the scope of your proposals; the sky is the limit, here. The intent of this phase is to get ideas, not necessarily to write policy - recommendations that gain traction and community support will be refined during later phases.

Most importantly, Answer as few or as many questions as you wish. All responses are evaluated, so any information you provide is helpful.

If you prefer, you can submit your responses anonymously by emailing them to User:Ultraexactzz. Anonymous responses will be posted as subpages with the contributor's details removed. If you have any questions, please use the project talk page at Wikipedia talk:RfA Review.

Once you've provided your responses, please encourage other editors to take part in the review. We stress that editors who didn't participate in the question phase are encouraged to participate now - more responses will improve the quality of research, as well as increasing the likelihood of producing meaningful results.

Once again, thank you for taking part!

Selection and Nomination
A1. Editors note that the RfA process can be daunting to prospective administrators, and that the process itself may discourage otherwise qualified candidates from seeking adminship. How can this "Selection Bias" be countered? Adminship should only last 2 years and it should be empathized that adminship is not a natural progression from editor and that its a special purpose function which involves dealing with administrative tasks and for which only certain people are suited. Editors should be the most important aspect and focus of wikipedia not admins.
 * Response:

A2. Editors expressed concern over unprepared or unqualified candidates at RfA, noting that their candidacies result in NOTNOW and SNOW closures that can be discouraging. In lieu of minimum requirements for adminship, how can prospective candidates be educated about RfA and the community's expectations of its administrators?


 * Response: Someone coming to such RfA should point out to them why they are unqualified and link a page containing minimum qualifications, then others can simply agree with that person, it shouldn't take that much community time and I don't see why it should be discouraging.

A3. 44 editors expressed concern over excessive co-nominations. Some of these editors advocated a limit on co-nominations, perhaps capping them at one or two per candidate; others recommended asking prospective co-nominators to post a Strong Support in lieu of an actual nomination statement. How can the concern over Co-nominations be addressed?


 * Response: Limit at one or max two per candidate.

The RfA Debate (Questions, Election, Canvassing)
B1. 60 editors expressed concern over the number of questions asked of candidates, and indicated that questions should be limited in number. How can this be accomplished? What limits could be fairly imposed? Are there alternative means for the candidate to provide information about themselves without the prompting of questions?


 * Response: RfA questions should have its associated discussion pages (one for each proposed question and one for all of them) where such issues should be decided by consensus.

B2. Editors expressed concern over the content of questions, with 43 editors disapproving of "Trick questions", 8 disapproving of questions that require only a quotation from policy to answer, and 54 favoring questions that relate directly to the candidate and their experiences, contributions, conflicts, etc. How should the scope of possible questions be determined? Conversely, how would the decision to remove bad-faith or problematic questions be made, and by whom? What subjects should be specifically off-limits, and why?


 * Response: Each question should preferentially have its own discussion page where such issues could be decided by consensus.

B3. Editors note that RfA is seen as a negative process, with issues such as badgering of opposes, personal attacks, and a general lack of civility being prominent concerns. How can the RfA process be changed to address these concerns?


 * Response: Incivility in RfAs and everywhere else should lead to bans, first temporary and if this continues to permanent. Incivility when not swiftly opposed early on will only escalate and lead to harassment and abuse.

B4. The very nature of the RfA process was disputed. Some editors desire rationales with every vote, and favor a more discussion and consensus-based process similar to other processes on the English wikipedia. Other editors desire a more vote-based election, where the raw numbers of supports and opposes are the critical factor. Is there one of these methods that would provide a clearer consensus on the community's view of a candidate? Or, alternatively, is a hybrid of the two preferable, and how should that be structured?

It should be divided into two phases: campaign and vote, this system is well established and tried, first a week of giving arguments and discussion, then a week to vote, each person has one vote, number of votes decides. One interesting idea which could perhaps help prevent abuse of power is to only allow normal editors to vote - admins could present arguments but not vote.
 * Response:

B5. The amount of discretion held by Bureaucrats to remove or discount problem votes was also discussed, with some editors favoring increased discretion for Bureaucrats. 25 editors also favored a detailed closing rationale from Bureaucrats, detailing the specific factors that resulted in the candidate being successful (or not successful). What changes to the RfA process or format could clarify community consensus on this issue? Should Bureaucrats take a more active role in managing (or clerking) ongoing RfAs?

I think only number of votes should decide, otherwise its impossible to make the system transparent and corruption free.
 * Response:

B6. 68 editors noted that a limited form of Canvassing or advertising would be acceptable, if such canvassing was done on-site and in a neutral fashion. How could a candidate advertise the fact that he or she is a candidate for adminship, while being completely neutral in the audience to which he or she advertises?

This is a rather complex problem. I think that each user should have a link to a page listing all running elections on his user page. Each user should also have an option to add others to his watchlist so that when anyone from that watchlist is a subject of any kind of election or arbitration the user would be automatically notified in a similar way to when he gets message. I also think that candidates could perhaps be allowed to post messages asking for support on user pages of others. Those messages should have a prominent delete button so any user who doesn't want to receive them could delete them quickly. Maybe users should also have an option to flag themselves that they don't want such advertisements, then it should be impossible to post them and violation of this should be enough ground for voting object in election.
 * Response:

Training and Education
C1. Though 73 editors responded favorably to the Admin Coaching programme, 39 were critical of the process for "Teaching for the test", or for being an RfA preparation programme rather than an Adminship preparation programme. In what ways could Admin Coaching be improved to focus more on adminship itself?
 * Response: ...

C2. In evaluating New Admin School, some editors noted that a Mentorship element would be of great benefit to newly minted administrators - something that Admin Coaching provides in a direct one-on-one coach-coachee team. Similarly, 15 editors characterized Admin Coaching, a primarily pre-adminship process, as being invaluable after the RfA, which is traditionally when New Admin School is used for training. Are there areas where the two processes overlap, and can be made more complimentary? Are there common themes or elements that could be shared between the two processes, in order to improve the effectiveness of both?
 * Response: ...

Adminship (Removal of)
D1. Editors noted that the current voluntary Admins open to Recall process is redundant to Dispute Resolution process such as Requests for Comment and Arbitration. In the absence of Recall (i.e. if it were removed altogether), how could existing processes be adapted to more effectively deal with issues of administrator abuse? If and when arbitrators find out that an admin violated some rule or good conduct his adminship should be removed no matter his contributions or other circumstances, he should be always allowed to reapply, and all the contributions and circumstances can then be evaluated during his RfA.
 * Response:

It is absolutely necessary to have a way to recall admins EFFICIENTLY.

It is absolutely unacceptable to have admins who regularly tell people to "fuck off", and it is even more unacceptable that arbitrators don't immediately terminate such persons adminship, here is a quote from recent RfA: "To use the most obvious example, JzG, an admin, has over 175+ counts of blatant incivility. He's been telling people to fuck off for years. He called another user a cunt for god sakes! And yet, he's still an admin" And here is a link to that arbitration page - so far it looks like that person will remain admin(!!!): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_arbitration/C68-FM-SV/Workshop#All_admins_are_equal.2C_but_some_admins_are_more_equal_than_others

D2. Editors cited the voluntary nature of the Admins open to Recall process as problematic, and 40 went as far as to recommend a mandatory process for all administrators, either as a mandatory form of Admins open to Recall, or a more formal version of the process administered by Bureaucrats. As a separate process from WP:DR, how could the current recall process be standardized for use as a mandatory process? Who would be responsible for such a process?
 * Response:

It is the most important issue for wikipedia at the moment - abuse of power, if the project wants to hope to remain neutral it absolutely has to have an efficient way to recall admins.

The primary rule should be : "If in any doubt recall!", leaving an abusive admin is much more damaging then demoting someone who did not deserve it. Most of new editors who encounter abusive admins will leave this project for ever! It is also highly probable that they will actively discourage others to spare them the same treatment. Adminship is not required and is not a right, its a position which is entrusted to someone by the community and no one who does not have a full trust of community should be an admin.

As for recall mechanism: Each admin should have a "complains" page on which all others can state their objections to his actions, this page should be firmly protected against deletion, nothing should ever be deleted from it under any circumstances, ANY ADMIN WHATSOEVER who deletes something from that page should automatically lose his adminship. Admin in question should be able to discuss those complains on that page, the content of the page should only be removed after the admin resigns or is demoted. All complains should have evidence attached, in case of policy violation that policy should be copied also. Complains without evidence for example "I have an email which states ... but I can't post it cause its private" should be clearly marked as INVALID and the lack of evidence pointed out to the posting person. All evidence has to be accessible to anyone who views the page. After certain number of valid complains each person should be allowed to initiate recall of adminship, it should only require someone else to check whether said person has enough confirmed violations, each doubt should be decided against admin - bad faith should be assumed. Each demoted admin should be able to reapply for adminship and if he still has enough community trust he will regain his adminship.

Being an admin is like being a politician - you have to accept that others have the right to criticize you, If you don't want to be criticized you should not want to be an admin.

D3. 44 editors criticized the recall process for being too open to abuse, both through spurious or bad-faith calls for an admin to be recalled, or through administrators who fail to follow through on a commitment to stand for recall. How can the recall process be amended to address these concerns?
 * Response:

See point above - D2

D4. Some editors recommended that administrators be required to stand for some form of reconfirmation after a given period of time. How would such reconfirmation be structured? How long would an admin have before such reconfirmation would be required? Could such reconfirmation be triggered by an effort to recall an admin, and how would that be handled? What form would such reconfirmation take (RfA, Straw Poll, etc)?
 * Response:

See point above - D2 I propose the complains system discussed above - enough complains with good evidence should automatically lead to recall, and then the ex-admin can use RfA again.

I also think that adminship should only last 2 years, after that time a person should have to reapply.

Overall Process
E1. The earliest version of the RfA policy states that adminship is granted to "anyone who has been an active Wikipedia contributor for a while and is generally a known and trusted member of the community." Current policy leaves the definition of a "trusted editor" to the community. Editors offered a wide range of basic characteristics desirable of administrators, including Trustworthiness, competence, and communication skills. How could the RfA process be amended to either A) more fully ensure that editors selected as admins do indeed have the full trust of the community, or B) more fully fit the community's expectations for administrators?
 * Response:

If there is an efficient and tamper-proof way of recalling admins this won't be such a huge issue since all admins who violate community trust will be promptly demoted. I propose the complains system described above for removal of admins. I think it should be empathized that adminship is not a natural progression from editor and that its a special purpose function for which only certain people are suited.

E2. Editors expressed concern over the format of the Requests for Adminship process. Some suggested that RfA has become a form of high-impact editor review, while others expressed concern over the view of Adminship itself as a goal or "trophy" that all editors should attain after a certain period of time. In taking the RfA process as a whole, what elements work well? What elements should be removed or amended?

Adminship should only last 2 years and it should be empathized that adminship is not a natural progression from editor and that its a special purpose function which involves dealing with administrative tasks and for which only certain people are suited. Editors should be the most important aspect and focus of wikipedia not admins.
 * Response:

Once you're finished...
Thank you again for taking part in this review of the Request for Adminship process.

Your responses will be added to Category:Wikipedian Recommendations to RfA Review, which will be used to review the responses after this phase is concluded.

Footnote
This question page was generated by RFAReview at 00:48 on 23 September 2008.