User:El Sandifer/RfA review

Welcome to the Question phase of RfA Review. We hope you'll take the time to respond to your questions in order to give us further understanding of what you think of the RfA process. Remember, there are no right or wrong answers here. Also, feel free to answer as many questions as you like. Don't feel you have to tackle everything if you don't want to.

In a departure from the normal support and oppose responses, this review will focus on your thoughts, opinions and concerns. Where possible, you are encouraged to provide examples, references, diffs and so on in order to support your viewpoint. Please note that at this point we are not asking you to recommend possible remedies or solutions for any problems you describe, as that will come later in the review.

If you prefer, you can submit your responses anonymously by emailing them to gazimoff (at) o2.co.uk. Anonymous responses will be posted as subpages and linked to from the responses section, but will have the contributor's details removed. If you have any questions, please use the talk page.

Once you've provided your responses, please encourage other editors to take part in the review. 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!

Questions

When thinking about the adminship process, what are your thoughts and opinions about the following areas:

Candidate selection (inviting someone to stand as a candidate)
I'm troubled by the degree to which this has been a social phenomenon - where RFA nominations seem like the expected payment for successful collaboration on an article.
Administrator coaching (either formally or informally)
This is an idiotic process. Wikipedia is not that hard. If you cannot figure out basic social skills and the concept of writing an encyclopedia without extensive coaching, you ought not be an admin. Simple as that. The job just isn't that hard for the even mildly well-adjusted, and we ought not get into the psychological adjustment business.
Nomination, co-nomination and self-nomination (introducing the candidate)
The nomination process is ripe for junking - given the existence of self-nomination, we may as well have that be the norm instead of having the charade of a nomination process, which adds all sorts of unfortunate social layers.
Advertising and canvassing
You shouldn't advertise to or canvas at anybody who you do not know well enough to contact via means other than their Wikipedia userpages.
Debate (Presenting questions to the candidate)
Painfully overblown. The original three questions were stupid pieces of tripe with telegraphed answers. I tried to add three more that actually had some substance, and it may yet go down as the dumbest thing I ever did on Wikipedia, as the barn door seems impossible to shut at this point. Some mechanism of dialogue with the nominee is no doubt helpful, but the form questions with obviously telegraphed answers are as stupid here as they are in arbcom elections.
Election (including providing reasons for support/oppose)
As has been frequently pointed out, "doesn't seem like an axe murderer" is the usual reason for support, and thus "reasons for supporting" are superfluous. Reasons for opposing are nice, but once some good ones have been presented it tends to be assumable that the reasons are "as per the good explanations above," and this probably doesn't need to be spelled out. I've certainly never seen an RFA where I've felt like there aren't clear reasons for opposition laid out.
Withdrawal (the candidate withdrawing from the process)
I have no strong feelings here.
Declaration (the bureaucrat closing the application. Also includes WP:NOTNOW closes)
NOTNOW looks like another example of essay creep, and should be consigned to a trash heap along with a lot of other verbiage. Past that, the fact of the matter is that RFA closing is trivial 99% of the time, and impossible the other 1%. In the 99% of cases it's obvious what to do. In the 1% of the cases nobody will like what you do, so you don't promote because nobody ever got hauled up to the arbcom for not promoting an admin. This is perhaps an unfortunate way for the marginal cases to break, but the underlying problem is not an arbcom problem, it's an "our community has an unfortunate but vocal minority of people who are a festering sore on the face of humanity" problem, and nobody has proposed a good solution for that.
Training (use of New Admin School, other post-election training)
The tools interface is pretty easy. Again, we ought not make adminning into some sort of elaborate science. It's really not that hard. "Training" is silly.
Recall (the Administrators Open to Recall process)
If an administrator is willing to stand for recall, that seems like their problem.

When thinking about adminship in general, what are your thoughts and opinions about the following areas:

How do you view the role of an administrator?
Someone has to run the asylum, so it may as well be the inmates.
What attributes do you feel an administrator should possess?
Basic social skills. This rules out a good 95% of the Internet.

Finally, when thinking about Requests for Adminship:

Have you ever voted in a request for Adminship? If so what was your experience?
Yes. I have no idea what on earth the "what was your experience" portion of this question means.
Have you ever stood as a candidate under the Request for Adminship process? If so what was your experience?
Yes. I got elected with a then-unprecedented number of support votes.
Do you have any further thoughts or opinions on the Request for Adminship process?
A cleaning up of the stupid cruft and procedural edifice over RFA is probably due, but this will not solve the underlying problem that we have an overly large portion of the community that confuses "writing an encyclopedia" with "playing the world's biggest and most successful MMOG," and that these people are going to befoul any system on Wikipedia of sufficient importance that they notice it.

Once you're finished...

Thank you again for taking part in this review of the Request for Adminship process. Now that you've completed the questionnaire, don't forget to add the following line of code to the bottom of the Response page by clicking this link and copying the following to the BOTTOM of the list.

* [[User:El Sandifer/RfA review]] added by ~~~ at ~~~~~

Again, on behalf of the project, thank you for your participation.

This question page was generated by {{RFAReview}} at 19:20 on 28 June 2008.