Meta talk:Requests for adminship/Archives/2013

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Regarding adminship or elevated privileges on a Wikimedia content project

Moved from Meta talk:Administrators to proper place. --Nemo 17:51, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
It seems the adminship requirements are duplicated. No idea why. --MZMcBride (talk) 22:48, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Hi.

Old text
  • Be an administrator, bureaucrat, or checkuser on a Wikimedia content project.
New text

Changed in this edit, following a short discussion here. I feel this is an uncontroversial and straightforward change, but let me know if there are disagreements or disputes about this. --MZMcBride (talk) 02:57, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

[1] Read the poll section [and other related sections] of Meta talk:Requests_for_adminship please. πr2 (t • c) 03:03, 22 February 2013 (UTC)
Those sections are pretty idiotic, even for Meta-Wiki. Are there current objections to the idea that a global sysop (i.e., a user with admin privileges on several Wikimedia content projects) does not qualify as an administrator under this rule? You don't seem to object (you've stated the opposite, in fact), so I'm not sure why you reverted me. If there are no actual objections to my edit, I think this text can safely be re-inserted, as it's simply clarifying the rule. --MZMcBride (talk) 03:21, 22 February 2013 (UTC)
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

Arbitrary section break added at some point after people commented below

Draft text, based on feedback above (feel free to edit)

Please note: Ill-considered nominations for adminship can be draining and deflating to both the community and the candidate. Any successful candidate will need to be able to demonstrate sufficient experience within the Wikimedia community, in addition to a familiarity with Meta-Wiki. If a candidate is not already a local administrator or holder of advanced permissions on a Wikimedia content project or member of a global administrative group (such as global sysops), he or she will very likely notis less likely pass a request for adminship here at Meta-Wiki.

  • Support Support this change, hmm we could perhaps conceive it as "Administrator or holder of advanced permissions" perhaps? Snowolf How can I help? 10:42, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Oppose Oppose and strongly: we have enough discussions on how Meta is supposedly "disconnected" from the projects, it's extremely dangerous to reinforce such doubts by eliminating this rule. Meta-Wiki is here to serve Wikimedia projects, therefore its admins must know how such projects work and be trusted as admins by them. A solution looking for a problem.
    Previous poll has some support for the GS exception (being voted above) and for the eligibility requirement as implementation of the "sysop elsewhere etc." principle; run another poll for that if you wish. --Nemo 11:14, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
    • It still isn't clear to me and many others why you feel being a local admin on one of Wikimedia's 700-plus content projects (some of which have very, very small active communities) makes a user qualified to be an admin here. This isn't a solution looking for a problem: there have been several demonstrated cases where this rule has created an actual problem. The draft text attempts to offer a reasonable solution. Can you explain what problems you have with the draft text? --MZMcBride (talk) 22:20, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Oppose Oppose strongly per Nemo and Kylu. -- MarcoAurelio (talk) 11:55, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
    • It still isn't clear to me and many others why you feel being a local admin on one of Wikimedia's 700-plus content projects (some of which have very, very small active communities) makes a user qualified to be an admin here. Can you explain? --MZMcBride (talk) 22:20, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Oppose - I opposed that change before and still oppose it. I totally agree with what kylu said ages ago (link see MA) and also what Nemo says. -Barras talk 12:08, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Oppose Basically per Kylu's comment in MA's link and Nemo. Pmlineditor (t · c · l) 14:11, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Oppose. As said before, GS has a defined scope and acting as a local admin would be out of it. That is why a GS doesn't necessarily have this kind of required experience. We have to remember that Meta is a community with lack of rules and that may not be a problem as we expect that Meta's admins have previous experience on their projects and have done a good job there in such a way that would allow them to come here and make use of good sense to work with what appears to benefit the project without being stuck on what is written. So, previous community interaction should be a basic requirement. And, yeah, that should have been proposed before changed of course.—Teles «Talk to me ˱@ L C S˲» 16:34, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
    • "Meta is a community with lack of rules"? What? Meta-Wiki is overrun by rules and bureaucracy. The adminship requirements alone demonstrate this. Nobody is suggesting that Meta-Wiki admin candidates not have previous community interaction. The draft text strongly recommends it. But is being an admin on some Wikimedia content project with three active users relevant to being an admin here? I don't see how. --MZMcBride (talk) 22:23, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
Which rules you are refering to? "All" these six rules and perhaps a couple more not listed? Only because you don't like this rule you can't say we have too much. Blocking, unblocking, protecting, giving user rights, right to vote, revert rule... and list of rules we don't have can be larger. Some of them we never needed, but other projects use it every day and that is a way to try to ensure that people will act for the community. It seems that Meta has decided not to have them, but keep an eye on its users.—Teles «Talk to me ˱@ L C S˲» 07:50, 26 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Support Support. This change really doesn't mean we'd start appointing lousy inexperienced candidates who'll do terrible things here. Changing this requirement into a recommendation will give our community more freedom, the kind of freedom that allows us to choose the administrators we want, while we'd still be able to refuse the candidates we don't want. "The active community here is smart enough to judge each candidate on a case-by-case basis" (as Peter said) and we can still be just as "cautious about who gets access to the rights" (as Kylu said). I think a little more faith in the good judgement of our community would be appropriate. Mathonius (talk) 17:10, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
    This requirement was chosen by this same smart enough community as it considered local adminship a real need. No separation between them.—Teles «Talk to me ˱@ L C S˲» 17:17, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
    Communities evolve and times change, so maybe there is a separation. The community should be able to change their own rules. Mathonius (talk) 17:30, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
    I disagree that we'd get "more freedom": we already have the freedom to get all the admins we need and want and anyone has the freedom to become an admin. For the rest, see point 2 of my last reply, on requirements. --Nemo 17:49, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
    The requirement excludes candidates who aren't administrators elsewhere, so it's not like "anyone has the freedom to become an admin". Furthermore, because of this rule, we can't "get all the admins we [...] want" if we also want candidates who aren't administrators elsewhere. Mathonius (talk) 18:07, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
    Sure they have, they're free to get adminship on the other projects. I said need and want. --Nemo 18:23, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
    It isn't clear why you feel this rule should be binding. Can you explain what issue you have with the rule being a strong recommendation? Yes, you may want to vote based on whether the candidate is a local admin elsewhere. So may MarcoAurelio and others. Why should that rule preclude anyone from being nominated, though? Why should this rule be a hard requirement? --MZMcBride (talk) 22:40, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Support Support per Teles and PeterSymonds above. (disclosure: I have a COI as a GS with no local adminships who is active on Meta) πr2 (t • c) 17:23, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
    You mean "per Mathonius" and not "per Teles", right?—Teles «Talk to me ˱@ L C S˲» 17:27, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
    Oops. I got the comments mixed up because I saw your sig at the end, I guess it was in a subcomment. I disagree with your comment and I agree with Mathonius's. Especially this part (by PeterSymonds): The active community here is smart enough to judge each candidate on a case-by-case basis. No need to disqualify people, just oppose them. πr2 (t • c) 17:29, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Support, I cannot remember that being an admin on a content project ever helped me as a meta admin. If we trust the candidate to do the stuff which needs to be done on meta, such rule should not undergo our decision. Cheers, —DerHexer (Talk) 18:15, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Support per the reasons above. PeterSymonds (talk) 20:26, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Support Support as said above meta is the place to coordinate cross wiki actions, and GS are prototype of cross wiki actor! a×pdeHello! 21:18, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Support Support: as the person who wrote most of the draft text. I fail to see why this rule must be binding. A binding rule does not align with Meta-Wiki's values or common sense. A strong recommendation and an explanation of the recommendation is completely sufficient here, in my opinion. --MZMcBride (talk) 22:46, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Comment Comment: I haven't been following this discussion, but from what I've read, what about temporary administrators and administrators who resigned in good standing? I'm leaning towards support at the moment, though.  Hazard-SJ  ✈  23:41, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
    • The clarification being proposed here is mostly "you need to be familiar with Wikimedia wikis and be familiar with Meta-Wiki; for a lot of people, they'll judge your level of familiarity based on whether you're a local admin on a Wikimedia content project, but that isn't a hard requirement, just a strong recommendation for you to have when being nominated."

      So in the case of temporary admins or admins who resigned in good (or in bad) standing, it's a matter of voters weighing whether the candidate is sufficiently familiar with Wikimedia wikis and sufficiently trusted to not break anything around here. --MZMcBride (talk) 02:19, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

  • Support Support don't see any issues with this. --Rschen7754 00:42, 24 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Support Support Being a local administrator is important... but believe this community is wise enough to evaluate case by case. Per Mathonius and DerHexer. Érico Wouters msg 00:48, 24 February 2013 (UTC)
  • In my opinion, it should be a trivially recognized that every self-given policy we maintain is not some sort of iron law to be followed to the letter but a convention we created as a community to broadly improve the ways we conduct our work (exceptions like implementation of privacy policy-style stuff, etc. aside). The underlying idea expressed here - that (any) policy, i.e. self-given convention, could (or should) be implemented regardless of the character of the case at hand (no one seems to have substantial reasons to deny the current request) - strikes me as very odd (assuming that is indeed the view). The sentiment also strikes me as running against one of the very basic principles this wiki has operated on to date. The policy serves an important purpose - reminding both RfA-hopefuls and their voters that we are serving content projects and should be both respectful of and informed about their ways - but its still a convention. If rewording it helps making this (really semantic) status-issue more explicit and ease processes, I'm happy to support a copyedit, regards --Jan eissfeldt (talk) 02:19, 24 February 2013 (UTC)
    What you say is not trivial at all and depends on the local culture of each wiki. On many wikis, RfA is a very strict and democratic process (note: democratic, not consensual) with very precise numerical rules which cannot be ignored at all, including e.g. edit count and wiki-age requirements. The current policy can look strange only to someone with a poor knowledge of our global culture. Of course, Meta can decide to follow one method or another, but personally I think it should value the projects it's here to serve, and that any reasoning having as premise the marginalization of other wikis' systems an cultures must be disregarded. --Nemo 11:07, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
    Nemo, you are moving the goalpost (unintentionally, I assume). I've said "_should_..._we_" and neither talked about other wikis culture in this respect nor that it indeed is trivially recognized by everyone here on Meta - how could it, given that we have this conversation right now. However, taking your broader point on board I think it is fair to make transparent that my judgement is based on having been elected by the biggest and in a lot of ways most combative community practicing knife-edge RfA votes nearly four years ago with open relection mode nearly as long every since (the later mechanism was introduced in the same year).
    I'm therefore very curious how the implicit argument connecting a formal RfA-requirement here on Meta with the way content communities judge their occasional encounters with Meta-admins is supposed to work. As Savh has not yet provided an argument explaining why Wikidata could be seen as a non-content project, so has Kylu connected two distinct things without providing the explicit causal link some seem to think exists between her two argumentative parts: 1) formalities and 2) our good standing and careful behaviour in inter-community actions we take. Surely, we should be looking whether a content project admin coming to ask for the tools here has not just beeing formally vetted somehow on his homewiki but actually has made a positive contribution to it after the vetting and is in good standing in this role at home. At least, if one takes her point on board not just formalistically but its spirit seriously. Regards, --Jan eissfeldt (talk) 11:38, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Support Support. I see no reason why global sysops should not be allowed to stand for an administrator election. They would not be given the rights by default just because they are global sysops, they would just be eligible for the Meta-Wiki community to consider their request. I don't mind lowering the barriers to entry. Cbrown1023 talk 05:00, 24 February 2013 (UTC)
    Are you voting for the text in this now-subsection or for the one above? The proposal in this section is not about GS, that was the section above. --Nemo 10:46, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
    The proposal in this section includes a mention of global sysops. --MZMcBride (talk) 18:37, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
    Not relevant, because it's still not clear whether Casey wanted to vote for the broader change you proposed later or the simple one above. Plus, now it doesn't. ;-) --Nemo 21:29, 1 March 2013 (UTC)
  • Support Support I don't see why not. While I appreciate that some users think that requiring someone to be an admin on a content project as a sort of tether to hold Meta to the others, such tether is mostly illusory, as there are so many projects out there. It is also mostly irrelevant - adminship shouldn't be about public relations, but about maintaining/improving a wiki. The soft requirement of the proposal makes sense to me, since it considers those with experience with the admin tools and have a track record of tool use to reference here. Let this be sufficient. – Philosopher Let us reason together. 08:10, 24 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Support Support someone with GS is certainly trusted and I think meets the admin requirements here. Aude (talk) 14:36, 24 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Neutral Neutral I think we should determine per user if they are experienced enough, but also per Nemo and Kylu though ... Trijnsteltalk 18:16, 24 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Strong support, the opposing reason that meta is interworked with all projects is true, but a ridiculous one. Let's not lose site of what the reality is here. Adminship here is not some role that mentors admins from other projects, it is not some role which makes decisions that affect any other projects (except maybe closing RfCs that affect them, but in that case it's the global community and not admins), and it is currently broken. We have a system which has tens of admins here that do absolutely nothing, so much so that a twice-a-year process is needed to weed out the inactive ones. We have a system here which prevents people who are active on meta and obviously trusted to use the tools well from getting access to them. Let's fix that, shall we? Ajraddatz (Talk) 18:52, 24 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Support; while I think that the thought behind the current requirement is reasonable, I don't think it reaches the goal of ensuring that sysops here are also trusted and active users on another wiki, because we mostly don't know anything about someone's sysop work/behaviour on another wiki, if we aren't active there as well, and will mostly only take activity on Meta into consideration on RFAs here. It however excludes people who for some reason simply are not interested in doing administrative tasks on their homewiki, but would like to do such on Meta. Adminship somewhere does not have a value in itself to make people suitable for Meta adminship, while everyone else would not be. Therefore, I support removing the requirement and instead adding the recommendation that someone "will very likely not pass" if he is not a sysop [or has other tools]. --MF-W 23:58, 24 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Support Seems reasonable to me -FASTILY (TALK) 00:59, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Support Support conditioned on removing the line about global sysops (which I have struck out above, taking the advice "feel free to edit". Looking at the reasons supplied to oppose this measure, they mainly fall into two groups.
    1. We require some measure of successful community interaction which can be demonstrated through achieving local admin status.
    2. We require an indication that the nominee understands how projects work which can be demonstrated through achieving local admin status.
I agree wholeheartedly with both requirements. However, I disagree that achieving admin status is the only way to demonstrate this knowledge and thus help separate potentially successful meta admins from those more likely to be unsuccessful. My personal experience has had me interact with non-advanced permissions holders whose "clue" level would be rated genius, and advanced permissions holders whose interpersonal mannerisms left a lot to be desired. I think that metapedians are, as a whole, capable of investigating individual users on their own merits. Similarly to how we would look into the potential candidacy on our home wiki(s), we can look into the activity of a candidate on meta itself, the candidate's home wiki(s) if we understand the language, or the candidate's actions on wiki's which we understand. And, if after all that is done, we do not have a feel for the candidate, that is a perfectly reasonable and respectable explanation for a regretful oppose. While when the projects were smaller and becoming an admin was less of a deal than it is now (which in and of itself may be a reason to lament) being a local admin may have been a decent indicator, now that being a sysop has become more difficult on many projects, I feel it restricts potentially good candidates who choose to spend much of their time here, if we were to demand achievement of an advanced permission on another project. That being said, I do not like the addition of "global sysop" to the explanation of which permissions may indicate potential success. Global sysops do not indicate the user interactivity for which we may be looking, especially as they should not be acting as global sysops on projects for which there is sufficient user interaction to support a sizable sysop corps. Similarly, the understanding of how projects work is less shown by global sysops in my opinion, as they deal with the items that are the same across all projects, and do not have to deal with the peculiarities and eccentricities of particular projects. Someone who is a sysop on both EnWiki and WikiCommons, with their very different philosophies about various items, has demonstrated the ability to understand individual project sensitivities; a global sysop does not. This does not mean that I think being a global sysop is an impediment, but that it may not be as good an indicator as being a local sysop is, and thus should not be listed with the others in the "box". -- Avi (talk) 22:36, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
I absolutely agree, and in fact I know at least one global sysop who consistently fails to demonstrate understanding of basic principles of Wikimedia projects.--Ymblanter (talk) 03:06, 26 February 2013 (UTC)
I can think of dozens and dozens of admins on content wikis that "fails to demonstrate understanding of basic principles of Wikimedia projects"... Snowolf How can I help? 21:29, 2 March 2013 (UTC)
All the more reason to allow us to judge each person on his or her merits, notwithstanding privileges on other projects. -- Avi (talk) 02:52, 3 March 2013 (UTC)
Indeed, that's what I was trying to say :) Snowolf How can I help? 11:14, 3 March 2013 (UTC)
All right. --MZMcBride (talk) 05:46, 26 February 2013 (UTC)
I've changes the wording up top to be more a statement of probability than a dire warning. -- Avi (talk) 02:55, 3 March 2013 (UTC)

I believe there's sufficient consensus to make this change. We can (and will) always continue to revise the exact wording going forward, of course, but as a general principle, it seems to have support for inclusion. I'll update Meta:Requests for adminship and Meta:Administrators in a few days unless there are objections. --MZMcBride (talk) 03:10, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

I agree that there is sufficient consensus for the change. Are there any objections? πr2 (t • c) 03:06, 11 March 2013 (UTC)
Now done with this edit and this edit. I probably screwed up the translation code. Sorry if so. --MZMcBride (talk) 09:34, 20 March 2013 (UTC)

Temporary administrators for CentralNotice

I've seen a number of huge mistakes by temporary administrators appointed to manage CentralNotices, lately. I suggest we stop allowing temporary administrators for CN, or that temporary administrators are disallowed from managing/enabling CN they also are promoter of (see mailarchive:wikimania-l/2013-April/004608.html). Temporary administrators are just not experienced enough with the tool, and in general it would be nice to have at least a double check, i.e. two pairs of eyeballs responsible of a CentralNotice (or if only one pair, a very experienced stable one). --Nemo 15:08, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

What about WM:CNA? PiRSquared17 (talk) 16:19, 14 April 2013 (UTC)
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