Wikipedia:WikiProject on Adminship/Goals of the adminship process
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The adminship process serves a variety of goals, many of them non-obvious. These can be grouped into several key areas:
- Discernment
- Motivation
- Fair process
- Ease of process
- Enculturation
Discernment
The goal of discernment is the most obvious goal of the adminship process. Simply stated, discernment means granting adminship to those who will use it most effectively to further the project's goals while withholding it from those who would use it in a counterproductive fashion. Key aspects of discernment for admins include:
- Ability to wheel warring" -- that is, repeatedly reversing the actions of other administrators without building consensus. They must build consensus and foster teamwork even when working with those they dislike.
- Respect for the Wikipedia way of doing things. Administrators have to understand and must have experienced firsthand the nature of the project. Part of this is understanding and respecting written policy, but a great deal of it has to do with respecting the encyclopedic goals of the project and the means by which they are achieved.
- A degree of literacy consistent with the project's editorial goals. One of the core values of Wikipedia as a community is that writing ability is held up as a positive character trait. Administrators must be able to further the project goals through their own contributions of prose.
- Trust. Wikipedia administrators must be trustworthy. While most editorial actions taken by administrators are reversible by other administrators, the social consequences of these actions are not. Blocks, applied indiscriminately, may lead contributors away from the project even if removed after the fact. Inappropriate dissemination of deleted page history may lead to real-world repercussions for the foundation or innocent third parties. The project must satisfy itself that administrators have the project's goals first rather than quietly serving the goals of another organization at Wikipedia's expense.
- Judgment. Any project that maintains Ignore All Rulesas one of its core principles necessarily requires thought, care, and judgement in the application of policy in day-to-day matters.
Fair process
The adminship process should be open, transparent, and fair, and should be widely perceived as such.
Motivation
Whether we like it or not, adminship has become one of the major ways in which Wikipedia recognizes contributors. Other recognition mechanisms at Wikipedia include
As such, many contributors have adminship as a personal goal, and focus their editing energies in ways that they believe will make that goal a reality.
Ease of process
The ideal adminship process would detract minimally if at all from the vital work of building an encyclopedia:
- Minimal candidate effort. The amount of time and effort the candidate puts into the adminship process itself would, ideally, be minimal (but we still want to motivate the candidates to put forth a great deal of effort that improves the encyclopedia in anticipation of being rewarded with adminship, see above).
- Minimal community effort. Ideally, the adminship process should not intrude excessively upon the work of Wikipedians other than the candidate.
- Minimal ill will. The process should be predictable. Candidates should know what to expect and be reasonably able to anticipate how the process will unfold. The adminship process should not serve as a means to rehash disputes over policy or article content (though obviously proper discernment will require a degree of review of past incidents). The relationship between the candidate and the community should not become more adversarial as a result of the adminship process.
Enculturation
The use of admin-specific capabilities is an area rife with unwritten rules. For example, an administrator encountering a badly-written page has many choices: (a) fix it, (b) redirect it, (c) stub it, (d) delete it, (e) tag it with a speedy tag, (f) list it on AFD, (g) list it on PROD, (h) mark it for cleanup, (i) etc. Some cases are obvious, and others may become so upon reading applicable policy (e.g.
Further, appreciation of the very nature and core values of the project is important in its own right. Unlike other contributors, most administrators remain with the project for an extended period of time. Many become active in policy discussions, and some will ultimately become successors in leadership roles in the project or the foundation. While new contributors (and by extension new admins) will form their own views, it is vital to the project that they do so in a fashion informed by the history of the project and experiences of others, lest the institutional memory of Wikipedia as a community become compromised.