QUOTE(Malleus @ Wed 11th November 2009, 9:24pm)
QUOTE(Newyorkbrad @ Thu 12th November 2009, 2:17am)
QUOTE(Malleus @ Wed 11th November 2009, 8:55pm)
QUOTE(A Horse With No Name @ Thu 12th November 2009, 1:44am)
Shalom and Kurt running for Arbcom? When does DougsTech throw his hat into the ring? (IMG:
smilys0b23ax56/default/laugh.gif)
I don't keep track of these things, but have there ever been any arbitrators who weren't administrators?
A couple in the very early days. See [[User:NoSeptember/Functionaries#Arbitration Committee members (former)]] for the particulars, if you're curious.
If a non-administrator were ever elected as an arbitrator (which I don't especially favor but is not against policy), I think we'd have to confer adminship for the duration of his or her term. It would be very difficult for an arbitrator to review some cases without the ability to review deleted revisions, for example.
(If someone objected that we shouldn't make someone an admin who hadn't passed RfA, we could require the person to use the administrator buttons only for the purpose of his or her arbitration work, not for performing the usual roles of adminship.)
I can understand that it would present practical difficulties for a non-administrator to be elected as an arbitrator, I was just curious.
It seems to me that a similar objection might be raised in the case of non-administrators commenting at AN/I though, where they may equally well not have all of the relevant information available to them. Isn't it about time this ever-increasing mish-mash of admin tools was debundled, so that you could grant only the right to view deleted revisions, for instance?
Yeah, i know it'll never happen, but just as a reference point, when you, Newyorkbrad, passed RfA, rights like abuse filters and flagged revisions didn't exist. Don't you think that it's slightly dishonest for administrators to claim a mandate for the use of tools that didn't even exist when they were "promoted", yet to deny access to them to others?
Personally, I think we approve people for adminship based on overall trust in their level of experience and cluefulness rather than with respect to the particular toolset that existed as of the moment of their RfA, so the answer to your question is no.
As I understand it, though, we don't deny use of those particular tools to qualified others. In particular, my understanding is that there would be lots more users approved as "revision flaggers" (or whatever it will be called) than just the administator corps. (And no, I have no more information than anyone else about the timing of flagged revisions.)
FWIW, following up on your earlier question, the last person seriously asked to run for ArbCom who wasn't an administrator yet was probably me. (There was a campaign to "draft" me for arbitrator in December 2006, when I'd been seriously editing for about five months or so, and which was before my RfA in January 2007. I told everyone that I was too new and was waiting a year, and got experience in '07 as a Clerk instead.)