Politics 101: Remedial or Virtual? Options

[Peter Damian]

Volunteer Marek (our Radek, I think) makes some great points at the current RfA talk. Read it for yourself. There should be a theme of the proposed book, which goes something like this: once upon a time, some IT geeks got together to build an encyclopedia. They knew a lot about bandwidth and html and networks and load balancing. They didn’t know much about stuff people learn in humanities departments but, hey, that didn’t matter, because the magic pixy-dust of technology would sort everything out, and all that humanities stuff was just the old way of doing things, and technology was the new way. What is a humanities department, anyway?

Ten years later they are faced with some pretty fundamental problems. And, er, these are the very problems that people who studied political science have known about for a long time. And there are some pretty straightforward answers. But no one asked, of course.

The thread also illustrates pretty well the famous stupidity of Wikipedians.

I am explaining this in detail here but honestly, this is like old school stuff. This is why almost pretty much every single position in the real world is subject to term limits. This is like Political Science 101. This is why I said that term limits are fundamental to any kind of meaningful RfA reform. You cannot even begin that conversation seriously without considering them. And these convoluted proposals for weird-ass term limits structures or what have you just distract folks - and hey, we all like to give our opinions about convoluted meaningless proposals - but let's keep it simple.
The only meaningful question here is actually how to deal with existing old-time administrators, given that we reasonably impose term limits on new ones. Do we keep the old guys? Do we make them go through it again? If so how? Etc. THAT is what the conversation should be about. Not this "if .0485 of voters express dissatisfaction then we move it to a committee which then decides whether to send it to an RfC for comment blah blah blah" crap.
There's no RfA reform without A-term limits.
Term limits first, details later. Volunteer Marek 06:15, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

“How can getting rid of all the admins (for their terms will all eventually expire) help the project? I think what you really mean is that wikipedia must move beyond volunteer editors. Hawkeye7 (talk) 05:46, 11 November 2011 (UTC)”

“Ok. Stop. Think. Stop. Think. ... are there any Senators in the US Senate? Do Senators terms expire? Yes? Are there still Senators in the US Senate? See what's wrong with what you just said? Volunteer Marek 06:18, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=460102419

This post has been edited by Peter Damian:

[radek]

Volunteer Marek (our Radek, I think) makes some great points at the current RfA talk. Read it for yourself. There should be a theme of the proposed book, which goes something like this: once upon a time, some IT geeks got together to build an encyclopedia. They knew a lot about bandwidth and html and networks and load balancing. They didn’t know much about stuff people learn in humanities departments but, hey, that didn’t matter, because the magic pixy-dust of technology would sort everything out, and all that humanities stuff was just the old way of doing things, and technology was the new way. What is a humanities department, anyway?

Ten years later they are faced with some pretty fundamental problems. And, er, these are the very problems that people who studied political science have known about for a long time. And there are some pretty straightforward answers. But no one asked, of course.

The thread also illustrates pretty well the famous stupidity of Wikipedians.

I am explaining this in detail here but honestly, this is like old school stuff. This is why almost pretty much every single position in the real world is subject to term limits. This is like Political Science 101. This is why I said that term limits are fundamental to any kind of meaningful RfA reform. You cannot even begin that conversation seriously without considering them. And these convoluted proposals for weird-ass term limits structures or what have you just distract folks - and hey, we all like to give our opinions about convoluted meaningless proposals - but let's keep it simple.
The only meaningful question here is actually how to deal with existing old-time administrators, given that we reasonably impose term limits on new ones. Do we keep the old guys? Do we make them go through it again? If so how? Etc. THAT is what the conversation should be about. Not this "if .0485 of voters express dissatisfaction then we move it to a committee which then decides whether to send it to an RfC for comment blah blah blah" crap.
There's no RfA reform without A-term limits.
Term limits first, details later. Volunteer Marek 06:15, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

“How can getting rid of all the admins (for their terms will all eventually expire) help the project? I think what you really mean is that wikipedia must move beyond volunteer editors. Hawkeye7 (talk) 05:46, 11 November 2011 (UTC)”

“Ok. Stop. Think. Stop. Think. ... are there any Senators in the US Senate? Do Senators terms expire? Yes? Are there still Senators in the US Senate? See what's wrong with what you just said? Volunteer Marek 06:18, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=460102419

It's actually insane how hard it is to convince some of these people of something so basic. (And it isn't just a humanities issue, though humanities like Philosophy and History definitely come into it. It's also basic social science).

Anyway, another meme/analogy that should be dragged outside, executed, buried and covered with lye is that somehow Wikipedia administrators are "volunteers" whereas, say, US Senators are not. US Senators are also volunteers! Nobody forces them to seek public office just like nobody forces anyone to run for adminship. Sure, Senators are paid a salary but even if you think that could potentially make a difference, then the fact that the salary is peanuts compared to the actual wealth/income of the people who become Senators makes the argument irrelevant. Just like Wikipedia admins, the Senators run for Senate because of the "perks" (power, ability to influence the development of society etc.) of the office. There is no practical difference here, except that Wikipedia admins tend to have a tendency to whine a lot about how they're unpaid or something, which says more about the mindset of a typical administrator than anything else (what was the last time that somebody like SandyGeorgia, who does a helluva lot more work than even the best 10% of admins, whined about not getting paid?)

Both should be public servants. Fixed terms are a tool for ensuring (albeit imperfectly) that that's primarily what they actually end up being.

This post has been edited by radek:

[Somey]

Anyway, another meme/analogy that should be dragged outside, executed, buried and covered with lye is that somehow Wikipedia administrators are "volunteers" whereas, say, US Senators are not. US Senators are also volunteers! Nobody forces them to seek public office just like nobody forces anyone to run for adminship. Sure, Senators are paid a salary but even if you think that could potentially make a difference, then the fact that the salary is peanuts compared to the actual wealth/income of the people who become Senators makes the argument irrelevant. Just like Wikipedia admins, the Senators run for Senate because of the "perks" (power, ability to influence the development of society etc.) of the office. There is no practical difference here, except that Wikipedia admins tend to have a tendency to whine a lot about how they're unpaid...

I believe you're overstating this point, and this may be what Mr. BeadGame is objecting to. It's true that most Senators are rich to begin with, and money isn't the reason they run for office... but there's a big difference between being paid less than you could make in the "private sector" and being paid nothing at all. And obviously the amount of actual power, the ability to influence people and events, is far greater for a Member of Congress, or a Member of Parliament, or what-have-you.

I might be willing to accept that Wikipedia as a whole might be more influential than any one, or even two, average US Senators... but compared to the whole schmeer, not even close. Besides, the fact that Wikipedia isn't supposed to influence people politically makes it much more difficult for any one administrator to direct or control the nature of that influence.

You can make a much better general-point argument that Wikipedia is more useful than a legislative body, or any particular politician, but obviously that's not saying much. Also, let me hasten to add that I'm not saying this as an argument against term limits. But the people who say that term limits would increase administrator attrition are probably right - and while I would say that's a good thing, I'm guessing they probably wouldn't.