On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 7:44 PM, Charles Matthews <[email protected]> wrote:
<snip> > Well, "active" admins are the only ones likely to be the subject of an > Arbitration case, no? It's not common, but there are also the cases of admins (and editors) who take a very long break, and then come back. I'm not talking months here, but years. Or who are only sporadically active. Consider someone who became an admin in 2003, then went inactive and resurfaces in 2009. It's not totally implausible. Or an admin who was very active for two years, then only edited 20 times a year or so for the next four years and then becomes very active again. There are real reasons why people would do this (university, jobs, even some kinds of enforced absences, or just wanting a very long break), but also reasons for people to be concerned about whether trust and knowledge of the "norms" (which change over time) have carried over from before the break (let alone lingering concerns about compromised accounts). The same applies to editors, though less so (or more so, YMMV). Having said that, such cases are rare enough that they can be treated on a case-by-case basis. In the general case, my feeling is that if you take a long enough break (enough that the community, the encyclopedia, the "rules" and the editor/admin themselves, may have all changed), then such editors and admins are effectively starting "from scratch" and need to rebuild knowledge and trust. The difference is that admins carry over their bit. Ditto for other tools such as checkuser and oversight. Essentially, I'm saying that a certain minimum "activity level" should be built in somewhere, but how to judge what that activity level should be is difficult (different people have naturally different activity levels). Some people will ease themselves back in gently. Others will wade back in. In both cases, some will succeed, and some will fail, in adapting to the changed environment. There is also the case of long-term tool users failing to adapt to changing times and acting in 2009 like they are in the encyclopedia of 2004 (for example), but the level and degree of the resulting problems may vary (and the encyclopedia is so large today that the behaviour is not always consistent across the whole anyway). Carcharoth _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
