I'm writing from the POV of having just nominated somebody for admin who did not succeed, and where the discussion was exceptionally rancorous--an expoerience I think everyone on both sides found very unpleasant.
I nonetheless think we are basically doing it right. As judging by results, we have made errors in both directions, and corrected some of them. Rejecting a good person is correctable, but some good people, after being once rejected, never tried again. Accepting is--with considerable more difficulty--correctable, but not all the ones whose adminship ought to be removed haver in fact been deadmined ; some of those accepted who need to be removed, and needed to be removed are still there. But I don;t see how we could construct a much process within our limitations. I can think of improvements, of course: in particular, I would favor permitting people only a limit number of questions or comments. I might favor more active supervision of the discussions. And one thing I am sure of: we do not need more admins. We need more admins who are substantially active. We need more active people willing to help. Most of what I do that occurs in the various processes can actually be done by anyone who knows the rules. The key step in getting more admins is in any case the first step, getting more people to start writing Wikipedia in the first place. The only actually necessary step to get more people actively involved, admin or not, is to get them started contributing. All rules that might discourage new contributors needs to be reworked, and the priority for admin is to carry out their tasks to remove only the trolls, with the action when undecided always being to encourage anyone who seems like a potentially positive contributor. We need to give new people every opportunity to improve their articles, rather than the current tendency to our taking advantage of every opportunity to remove it. David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
