User:Lanky/ASBS

Admins do the dirty work which keeps this encyclopedia running, so why do we expect them to do so much?

I just wanted to say that becoming a sysop is *not a big deal*.

I think perhaps I'll go through semi-willy-nilly and make a bunch of people who have been around for awhile sysops. I want to dispel the aura of "authority" around the position. It's merely a technical matter that the powers given to sysops are not given out to everyone.

I don't like that there's the apparent feeling here that being granted sysop status is a really special thing.

— Jimbo Wales, wikimedia.org archive entry, gmane archive entry

Admins shouldn't be Supers.

In fact, the ideal admin candidate is a regular user with a good knowledge of policy with an emphasis on the development of encyclopedic content, not on the administrative aspects of the encyclopedia. Admins should view the administrative details as a minor annoyance in the way of spending time on the development of the encyclopedia and not as an obligation to which they must devote the majority of their time working.

Candidates for adminship are sometimes opposed because they admit they would only work certain portions of the administrative backlog or because they have not taken an especially active role in the administrative side of Wikipedia and this seems a little silly. An admin who does ten minutes of work a day is freeing ten minutes of someone else's time. That alone makes it worth it to grant them the mop and bucket.

The only question on a user's mind should be "Can I trust this candidate with the tools?" If the answer is yes, they should support the user. An admin candidate's main issue should always be a question of trust, not a question of activity.

The Comparison

Let's examine two groups of administrators: A group of 10 admins performing 100 administrative acts a day and a group of 100 admins performing 10 administrative acts a day. Let's assume that each action takes one minute. Which group is better?

The group of 10 admins certainly have a few advantages: As a group, they probably understand the application of policy better than the second group. They will develop experience with the various processes of Wikipedia very quickly. They also have some distinct disadvantages: Presuming that their average of 100 administrative actions per admin per day must be maintained, what happens when two admins decide to take a break? The workload of all the admins increases by 25, leaving them spending nearly half an hour more on administration (duties they spend nearly two hours doing already!) and less time on the encyclopedia. Worse still, what if not all eight of the remaining admins can, or even desire to contribute that extra half hour of their time to administrative duties? Wouldn't that leave those few remaining admins to take up the slack, slack they might not be able to carry? That might leave us with quite the backlog, wouldn't it?

Now let's examine the same situation for the second group: Twenty of the one hundred admins performing 10 acts a day go on break, leaving the same amount of work to their fellows as the two admins from the smaller group. Presuming that these items must be handled to prevent a backlog from developing, the workload of all the admins increases by 2.5, leaving them spending less than three minutes more doing administrative work per day. Others might be able to contribute more time than that, while some may choose not to contribute the extra time required to maintain the backlog. In fact, if an admin from the second group were to contribute the same amount of time as an admin from the first group, they might even clear any potential backlog!

Edit count is almost as accurate as the weather report

Consider the following two edits: Diff 1 & Diff 2

Which contributed more to the article... the total plot rewrite with sourcing shown in Diff 1 or the changing of two words in Diff 2? While all edits contribute to the project, some are larger in scope than others. A user who writes out an article thoroughly in notepad before posting it is going to have a lot less edits than a user who writes a stub article in the project space and improves it from there. The end result might be the same but their edit counts are going to be vastly different. Does the second user's higher edit count make them a superior candidate?

Likewise, some edits are lost to the deletion process. A user who tags a lot of articles for speedy deletion is certainly performing a valuable service but at the end of the day every article they've correctly tagged for deletion is eliminated as an edit. In fact, a user who did nothing but correctly tag articles for Speedy Deletion might not have any edit history at all! Likewise, users who attempt to improve items which are subsequently deleted through deletion discussions likewise appear to have done nothing at all.

What of a user who patrols recent changes? If a user patrols the recent changes for a couple of hours, their edit count can and will jump by a hundred edits in that short span of time. These users perform an invaluable service to Wikipedia and they should be commended at every opportunity, but does this make them a more suitable candidate than a user who only racks up 200 edits a month but raises an article to Featured Status in that time? I would argue that they're two different sides to the same coin. Both are invaluable services to Wikipedia and it's goals, it's just that the former gets exponentially more edits than the latter.

Edit count does serve to give an approximation of the user's contributions to the encyclopedia but requiring an arbitrarily high number of edits before considering support is not going to automatically garner good admins. It might even get admins focused on the wrong thing, which is never a good thing.

The Point

If any admin is spending more time tackling administrative issues than they are working on the encyclopedia, be it in fighting vandals or contributing new content, we as a community have failed them. If Adminship is no big deal then it naturally follows that administrative responsibilities should be no big deal. Those responsibilities, if they truly aren't a big deal, should occupy only a fraction of any given administrator's time editing Wikipedia.