Re: How to Select Administrators

I agree with everything that Brion says, but in the meantime, can
Tomos just give us a list of people who should be sysops, so we can
releive the immediate problems that they might be having.

Brion Vibber wrote:

> 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)