User talk:Dru of Id/Archives/2011/September

News and progress from RfA reform 2011
(You are receiving this message because you are either a task force member, or you have contributed to recent discussions on any of these pages.)

The number of nominations continues to nosedive seriously, according to  these monthly figures. We know why this is, and if the trend continues our reserve of active admins will soon be underwater. Wikipedia now needs suitable editors to come forward. This can only be achieved either through changes to the current system, a radical alternative, or by fiat from elsewhere.

A lot of work is constantly being done behind the scenes by the coordinators and task force members, such as monitoring the talk pages, discussing new ideas, organising  the project  pages, researching  statistics and keeping  them  up  to  date. You'll also see for example that  we have recently  made tables to  compare how other Wikipedias choose  their sysops, and some tools have been developed to more closely examine !voters' habits.

The purpose of WP:RFA2011 is to focus attention on  specific issues of our  admin  selection  process and to develop  RfC proposals for solutions to improve them. For this, we have organised the project into dedicated sections each with their own discussion pages. It is important to understand that  all Wikipedia policy changes take a long  time to implement whether or not the discussions appear to  be active - getting the proposals right before offering them for discussion by the broader community is crucial to the success of any RfC. Consider keeping the pages and their talk pages on your watchlist; do check out older threads before starting a new one on topics that have been discussed already, and if you start a new thread, please revisit it regularly to follow up on new comments.

The object of WP:RFA2011 is not  to make it  either  easier or harder to  become an admin -  those criteria are set by  those who  !vote at  each  RfA. By providing  a unique venue for developing ideas for  change independent  of  the general discussion  at  WT:RFA, the project has two  clearly  defined goals: The fastest way is through improvement to the current system. Workspace is however also available within the project  pages to  suggest  and discuss ideas that are not  strictly  within  the remit  of this project. Users are invited to make use of these pages where they  will  offer maximum exposure to  the broader community, rather than individual  projects in  user space.
 * 1) Improving the environment  that  surrounds RfA in  order to  encourage mature, experienced editors of the right  calibre to  come forward, pass the interview, and dedicate some of their  time to  admin  tasks.
 * 2) Discouraging, in the nicest  way  possible of course, those whose RfA will be obvious NOTNOW or SNOW, and to  guide them towards the advice pages.

We already know what's wrong with RfA - let's not clutter the project with perennial chat. RFA2011 is now ready to propose some of the elements of reform, and all the task force needs to do now is to pre-draft those proposals in the project's workspace, agree on the wording, and then offer them for central discussion where the entire Wikipedia community will be more than welcome to express their opinions in  order to  build consensus.

New tool Check your RfA !voting history! Since the editors' RfA !vote counter at X!-Tools has been down for a long while, we now have a new RfA Vote Counter to replace it. A significant improvement on the former tool, it provides a a complete breakdown of an editor's RfA votes, together with an analysis of the participant's voting pattern.

Are you ready to help? Although the main engine of RFA2011 is its task force, constructive comments from any  editors are always welcome on  the project's various talk  pages. The main reasons  why  WT:RfA was never successful in  getting  anything  done are that threads on different aspects of RfA are all mixed together, and are then archived where nobody  remembers them and where they  are hard to  find - the same is true of ad hoc threads on  the founder's talk  page.

Delivered by MessageDeliveryBot on behalf of RfA reform 2011 at 15:54, 25 September 2011 (UTC).