User talk:Dank/RFA

Vetting
I think this is close to being an important and useful reform, but it needs a small change. A little while before my second RFA I wondered during a discussion thread as to whether my CSD tagging was up to scratch, Balloonman noticed my aside, reviewed my CSD tagging and was sufficiently satisfied that he nominated me for adminship. I think we could usefully modify the endorsement idea into a slightly formalised version of that, so with CSD tagging we would need to persuade some of the RFA regulars who are most concerned at CSD errors to give a CSD tagging review to those who request it. Other areas could be copyvio or AIV tagging. I would suggest we implement it as an extension of Editor review, so editors who are running an editor review could drop a note at Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion, or perhaps we could get people to volunteer at Editor Review.  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers  16:23, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Just occurred to me yesterday that if we had a bot that checked for the creation of new RFAs (i.e. before they're transcluded), that would be a good time to offer these services. Sadly (or happily), I need to focus on my Milhist and FAC writing and reviews rather than RFA stuff  at the moment. - Dank (push to talk) 16:55, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

What next
I'd like to ask people to focus for a moment on just whether we can make RFA less harsh and more sane. I'll try to sketch my impression of recent progress; please correct me if I'm wrong. The problem, as always, is putting together an RFC that we can get wide support for; we need to get many more people rowing in the same direction before any progress is possible.

I did a facepalm last week when I realized that I and the rest of the RFA community generally have been completely wrong about two things ... we really have been too harsh on candidates, and we really haven't done a good job addressing the "admin abuse" issue, which has pulled a lot of angry voters into RFA. I was dreading bringing it up at WT:RFA ... we generally don't deal with new information well ... but I'm delighted to report that people generally seem to be on board. In the past, the RFA community has been shot down when we tried an RFC; now I think we've moved much closer to what the wider community wants.

To repeat what I said at WT:RFA: if you go to get your driver's license, and an examiner hands you a test, then stands over you criticizing all your answers while you take the test, then criticizes your driving while you're driving, she's going to lose her job. That's RFA. We need to stop doing that. Several ideas have been proposed; the one I like best is to spend the first 3.5 days of RFA with no voting, while potential supporters work together with the candidate to come up with solid nomination statements with the opposers offering counterevidence and asking questions, but not making their own unrelated points; then you vote over the next 3.5 days with the roles reversed: the opposers make their points, and others can only agree or disagree with those points, not bring up new points in support. This will need tweaking, but the basic idea is that it's very poor social skills (and many people not involved with RFA already understood this; we weren't getting the message) to get up in the face of either the candidate or the opposers while they're trying to make their cases. This does call for some judgment in which arguments you allow on which days, but all legal traditions have fairly simple rules for what an "irrelevant" point is. As a bonus, one of the main points of contention at RFA has been that one side or the other or both have felt like no one was listening to them; under these new rules, you don't have to like what the other side says, but you do have to pay attention (if you're going to be effective as a voter), at least for a few days.

As Bobrayner was just pointing out, those who have strong feelings about admin unaccountability are going to oppose any RFC if our proposed measures are not strong enough. We can get a two-fer on this one ... not only can we get these people on board, but we can stay focused on the goal of making RFA saner and less harsh by saying that after (say) May 1, anyone promoted to admin will no longer be able to do some of the things that have been perceived as abuse (and sometimes are abuse). It came as a shock to me last week to realize that you can make an argument that I and many other admins have been behaving badly ... there are situations where the community tried and failed to get consensus, but we go ahead and delete a page or block a user anyway, believing that at RFA we were elected to use our judgment in such cases. At least some of those actions need to stop; the community never elected us to overrule them, and no one has appointed RFA voters to hand out or withhold this kind of power. I strongly believe that some kind of anti-"abuse" resolution (I put "abuse" in quotes because it doesn't feel like abuse when I do it, and I think other admins feel the same) will make RFA saner, because then we won't be dragging every hot-button, political issue into RFA. - Dank (push to talk) 15:30, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
 * There will never, never be sanity on this issue until we get a streamlined desysop procedure... &bull; Ling.Nut (talk) 02:33, 27 March 2011 (UTC)
 * That's the answer. On the other hand, there are inherent problems. Making difficult-yet-necessary decisions carries with it the risk of controversy and unpopularity, which could make thinks like renomination RfAs unviable - it'd incentivise administrators shoving their heads in the sand whenever problematic stuff comes up. Ironholds (talk) 02:37, 27 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Sigh, but it's all right. I've pointed a lot of people here and haven't so far gotten a single positive response to the idea of having a supporters-first version of RFA.  I thought it was a fairly natural extension of all Western legal, legislative and debating traditions, but I think RFA people are having doubts, and if that's the case, we'll never get it through an RFC.  I have a backup position that I'll go discuss over at User talk:Kudpung/RfA reform.
 * Thanks for your feedback, Ling and Ironholds. I'm happy to discuss desysopping criteria for all newly promoted admins, but I'm not going to discuss a streamlined desysopping procedure for all admins, because that's not the RFA community's problem, that's the whole community's problem, and it gets in the way of the good stuff that goes on at RFA when we try to fix other people's problems. - Dank (push to talk) 02:49, 27 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Yeah, but my point is, you can't get to Point A (sane RfA) without first going through Point B (streamlined desysop). Any other route of travel will be a long and wearying maze that will accomplish nothing meaningful, and will simply wear you and other participants down. Sorry to be so cynical realistic. &bull; Ling.Nut (talk) 02:52, 27 March 2011 (UTC)
 * At the moment, I'm ambivalent, but on the day that we succeed at RFC in writing in some kind of "anti-abuse" clause for newly promoted admins, my answer will be: no. Let me drag in the well-known example I gave at WT:RFA: husband drinks, wife makes excuses, husband loses jobs, wife finds him more jobs.  The husband will say: You have to help me!  I can't help myself!  You'll suffer if you don't!  But she's in for a lifetime of misery, and she loses the ability to help herself or him, if she allows her husband to convince her that she's responsible for his problems.  It isn't clear of course who the "RFA community" is, but the idea is clear: there's a group of people who are interested in encouraging, training and evaluating potential admins, and RFA is only the most visible thing that we do.  Some of us (not me) also deal with "disciplinary" issues, but when we do, we're wearing a different hat, and that's largely a different community, and one that has a different set of goals and problems from the RFA community. - Dank (push to talk) 03:13, 27 March 2011 (UTC)
 * You said, "...here's a group of people who are interested in encouraging, training and evaluating potential admins". See this, then.&bull; Ling.Nut (talk) 03:21, 27 March 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm with you on the need for a more humane treatment of RFA candidates, though I thought you were one of the ones that realised that ages ago. Remember the discussions we had about bandaging the wounds of rejected candidates? I think we've made real progress there, even if it is still considered acceptable to promise unspecified shedloads of reasons to oppose, say you aren't sure why but you don't trust the candidate, compare their nomination to excreta, or tell them they've only been here x months and therefore aren't really yet part of the community.
 * As for the link between RFA and CDA, I still think that is at best a distraction. The supporters of CDA range from those who think admins are for life and are impervious to criticism, basically people who aren't aware just how frequently Arbcom and before it Jimmy have desysopped admins; To those who want to purge the admin cadre of dozens sometimes hundreds of unspecified bad admins. If the latter group had the evidence or the support we'd have seen it in recent Arbcom elections. The vast majority of currently active Admins went through RFA before it entered the drought it has been in since March 2008, i.e. before RFA broke. I got through RFA some time after that, have an unusually thick skin, and have paid sufficiently close attention to it that I've a pretty good idea of the sorts of candidates that could get through now. But for most admins RFA is a broken, nasty and unpleasant system that they rarely if ever have participated in since they got the mop. Replacing a system that works with one that doesn't is always going to be a hard sell, especially if you need a weighted majority to do so. Anyone who dislikes the way Arbcom handles desysoping should either try and reform Arbcom or fix RFA.  As long as Arbcom works and RFA is broken, CDA proposals that are based on RFA are dead in the water.  Ϣere  Spiel  Chequers  17:07, 30 March 2011 (UTC)