Re: How to Select Administrators

On Sat, 2003-03-01 at 19:47, Tomos at Wikipedia wrote:
> Im working on Japanese Wiki, and the Japanese site might need some more 
> administrators sooner or later. The Japanese wiki is still young, truly 
> active only for one month, but already has 3200 pages and 160 registered 
> users. Currently, Brion is the only admin. In my opinion, he's been prompt 
> when we made requests ( - thanks Brion :-), but many knows that his ability 
> to understand Japanese language is limited,

Very limited, yes...

>  and he is mostly not involved in 
> the day-to-day activities happening at the site.

If I ever get back to learning Japanese, I would love to hang out there
more, but alas for now I have trouble keeping up with just English,
Esperanto, and French. And I can read those without a dictionary at
hand. :)

> I am personally thinking that we (wikipedians in the Japanese site) will 
> have some discussion and possibly voting when someone express interest for 
> being an admin., and make a page where people sign to express their support, 
> objection, or neither.
> That way, non-native speakers who might want to confirm that the candidate 
> is widely supported can get a quick answer, and feel comfortable to give the 
> admin status.

Sounds great to me.

> I would like to know how other non-English sites handled this issue.
> Any other related advises, tips, pointers to the past discussions, etc. are 
> appreciated.

There is a serious need to smooth out this and other processes and make
the language sections more self-sufficient.

The Enciclopedia Libre remains a separate project in large part over
this kind of stuff; while there may be an element of anti-American
prejudice involved, there are certainly very legitimate concerns with
being a "colony" site, dependent on a few foreign admins for software
fixes, sysop assignments, and interface translation updates.

For sysops, in general a better system is needed which is less dependent
on high-level intervention from people like Jimbo and myself who are
generally not familiar with the language or the user community except
perhaps for one or two polyglot users with whom we've interacted before.
More generally, as long as the server is running okay, the communities
should be able to operate on their own even if everyone on the English
wiki is hit by a bus. :)

Possibilities include, but are not limited to:

* Sysops could have the ability to make other users sysops; assign one,
and the local community can take care of its needs from there. (What
about taking sysop status away in case of abuse? What about conflict
between two sysops, who can mediate?)

* Devolution of more sysop abilities to the general user population.
(How to prevent abuse? Reversibility and tracking for a start.
SoftSecurity, delayed action...)

* Users could be automatically made sysops on some basis, like 'trusted
users' on Kuro5hin. (But how to measure the mojo? We have no ratings
system, and no computational way to measure a billion grammar
corrections vs a billion graffitti runs vs a billion pulitzer-winning
write-ups. And adding ratings would be difficult and controversial.)

These things have been talked about a little before, but no real
decisions have been made.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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