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.
QUOTE
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)â€
“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 
Politics 101: Remedial or Virtual?
