User:WereSpielChequers/RFA reform

This is an essay/shopping list/analysis of of RFA from the perspective of one longtime participant and observer of the process.

RFA has been discussed at interminable length for most of the history of the project. It is widely but not universally considered to be broken for various reasons. I'm one of those that regards it as broken for all of the following reasons:

1. It is unnecessarily harsh in the way it treats candidates, even those who pass don't always come through unscathed.
2. It appoints insufficient admins to:

   Maintain the number of active admins

   Keep the community a healthy self governing one.

   Keep the site running efficiently (I'm not convinced on this one yet, I suspect that the site has sufficient admins that it could continue for several years before the problem becomes a crisis, but we don't know how big that safety margin is)

3. It doesn't always exclude the unsuitable candidates, as evidenced by the fact that over eighty admins have subsequently been desysopped or resigned under a cloud.
4. It is seen by some as exempt from our normal policies on civility, personal attacks and on some occasions even outing.
5. Many of the best potential admins are unwilling to run at RFA.^[1]
6. The Consensus process of weighted majority voting causes unnecessary and arbitrary inflation of standards, because instead of the minority "losing" a vote and thereby being tempted to re-evaluate their position, it is often a majority that "lose". So the psychological pressure is for the arbitrary inflation of standards rather than for convergence to a consensus standard criteria for adminship.
7. It is vulnerable to canvassing

It has also been described as:

1. "Corrupt" (though I'm not aware of evidence to support this accusation).
2. A popularity contest, though considering how many RFA regulars assess all or most RFAs that run the full 7 days, and how many supporters a successful candidate gets who they have never heard of before, this description is at best misleading.

RFA is the process by which Wikipedia appoints administrators, it also serves as a de-facto initiation ceremony which sometimes degenerates into a hazing ceremony. Which begs the questions:

1. What are the qualifications needed for administrators?
2. How many admins do we need?
3. Does the process work effectively at sorting good candidates from bad?
4. If we need an initiation ceremony can we decouple it from the adminship process?
5. Can we divert the hazing ceremony elements to Editors for Deletion?

Candidates get opposed for many diverse reasons, some make more sense to me than others. As the pass mark is 70/75% a candidate only needs to show weakness in one area or marginal weakness in multiple areas to fail. RFA is a cross between an online interview and an openbook exam, but unlike most exams or interviews the examiners/interviewers have not agreed in advance the criteria that they are judging the candidates against. These are some of the main criteria and my perception of our divergence in weighting them.

1. Tenure. Candidates with less than 3 months edits are likely to be summarily opposed per wp:Notnow Personally I'm unlikely to support a candidate who has been here for less than 6 months, but there are a few editors who will oppose a candidate who has 12 - 15 months tenure,
2. Edits. Candidates with fewer than 2,000 edits are likely to be summarily opposed per NotNow. It has been some time since a candidate has passed with less than 3,500 edits and some !voters will oppose below 6,000 edits.^[2]
3. High percentage of manual edits. For reasons that mystify me, a significant minority of RFA !voters will oppose candidates who have a high percentage of automated edits. Personally I think that we should value our vandalfighters and that we need them to be able to block vandals, but I know at least one editor who won't run because he has done to much huggling to get through RFA.
4. "Maturity" editors who admit to being legally minors, or who are suspected of this usually attract some opposes for lack of "maturity".
5. "Consistency of commitment" one of our few sources of recent new admins are the remaining non-admins among the editors who joined us before 2008. However some of these editors have spread their contributions over more months than is fashionable or had recent wikibreaks. Personally I'm quite relaxed about this, though I do expect to see few hundred recent edits.
6. Article contributions. Opinions at RFA range from admins not needing to have contributed to the building of Wikipedia just to the protection of it, to admins needing to have contributed audited content - in the past RFAs have been opposed for candidate's who lack FAs. Personally I think that adding reliably sourced content is a basic skill that all admins should have.
7. Deletion tagging. Possibly the most contentious area in recent RFAs. Admins have the deletion button and many RFA !voters will oppose candidates with a record of overhasty or incorrect tags. Views seem to vary from requiring perfection to "it doesn't matter what the tag was if an admin deleted it". In recent months I've drifted from expecting near perfection to tolerating a small proportion of mistags, especially if the candidate responds positively to feedback.
8. Blocking. One of the most contentious things that an admin can do is to block fellow editors, especially vested contributors. Candidates at RFA can be assessed as to whether their AIV reports indicate that they know which newbies and IPs to block, and occasionally as to what positions they have taken at AN/I re the blocking of vested contributors. I'm hoping that some RFA !voters check candidate's AIV reports and the reason why no-one ever seems to get an oppose for poor AIV tagging is that the people who are active there give good guidance and address errors long before the individuals run at RFA. But I worry that everyone else may be making the same assumption as me. Block duration and to a large extent the blocking of established editors are not areas where RFA can effectively test new candidates.
9. Evaluating consensus. One of the most important roles that an admin has is the judging of consensus, though I'm not seeing much sign of the ability to do this being evaluated at RFA.

The community does not agree as to whether we should be a selfgoverning community and that adminship involves some useful editing tools which should be given to all longterm, civil, clueful editors; Or that adminship should be restricted to a small group of very active editors who have "a need for the tools". I'm very much in the former group, but with active admins dwindling by 1% a month and liable to fall this year to late 2005 levels, the pressing issue we face is that at some point in the next few months or years we will have insufficient admins to keep the vandals in check.

In recent years there has been an increasing emphasis on RFA as an open book exam, and an accompanying decline in scrutiny of the candidate's edits. In my view this makes it a less effective screen at sifting good candidates from bad.

Unless we reform RFA then if current trends continue at some point we will hit problems. Looking at other wikis that have hit similar issues, the default solution to a lack of active admins is to appoint a batch of minimally screened candidates. I consider this to be the worst of the workable solutions.

Currently crats have discretion within a 70-75% zone, possible reforms would be:

1. Widen the zone of discretion
2. Encourage crats to discount or strike !Votes that have rationales outside of an agreed criteria for adminship.
3. Have crats appoint admins in the same way that admins appoint Rollbackers or Autopatrollers. So the community would set the criteria for adminship, and crats would then assess candidates against the criteria. This would be one of the simplest ways to fix RFA, but might require a separate user group than the crats, or a crat plus process whereby existing crats would only gain this extra role if they underwent a reconfirmation.