Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Archive/Vote for your admins
Vote for your admins
Proposes a policy change rather than a technical feature
- Problem: Users often disagree about what is a good admin, and why they (you) should not support a specific admin. At various projects this has been solved (or sort of solved) in various ways, some vote their admins in and out without much rules, while other use fixed terms and extremely elaborate rules. No rules makes it easy to get rid of a non-functional admin, but it can be very scary to be an admin without rules. Fixed terms should on the other hand lead to rotation of admins, but often it does not. It also lead to rather harsh and unfriendly admins when they are not up for reelection – sorry for that admins! :)
- Who would benefit: All users would benefit from a more representative admin group, where it is easier to vote admins in and out, at any time. This could stop the continuous rant about admins protecting other admins, as it would be easy to withdraw a vote for a specific admin. It would also be better for the admins themselves to know more about their own standing in the community, as they would instantly know if they have support for their actions.
- Proposed solution: Create a special page where the admins, or any user group that needs clear support for their actions can be listed, and let a user "vote" for their admins by placing a tick mark by the admins name. Let the user give one vote in total, but spread it evenly on each checked admin. It should be possible to sort the admins on their total weights, and then let the bureaucrats remove the admins that does not get above a certain threshold. This is nearly the same as a w:borda count, and it scales quite well as the project community grows and shrinks.
- More comments:
- The threshold can be calculated as a fraction of the overall edit activity on the project.
- Bureaucrats should be given a notification when an admin drops below the threshold.
- There should be a visible note on the admins user page saying how they score.
- It is tempting to include some measure of the admins activity themselves, but that would be out of context.
- It should probably be possible to propose yourself as an admin candidate, given some limits, or ask the bureaucrat to ad someone.
- Phabricator tickets:
- Proposer: — Jeblad 20:47, 31 October 2018 (UTC)
Discussion
Unfortunately, I had to decline this proposal as it proposes a wiki policy change first and foremost, and this survey is a wrong venue to do that. We won't be able to work on technical aspects of this proposal until there's a policy in place. Thanks for participating in our survey. MaxSem (WMF) (talk) 22:46, 31 October 2018 (UTC)
- I have described a special page that a project may choose to use, I'm not even sure how it is possible to read it any other way? Using a tool like the special page could imply a policy change within a project, creating a tool does not. — Jeblad 23:27, 31 October 2018 (UTC)