User:Demi/Admin guidelines

It shouldn't need saying but this page doesn't mean squat on Wikipedia. Its only use it clarify my current opinions (and, in some cases, half-drunk, feverish ravings) about the subject at hand.

Many people publish their "admin criteria," but I think it's more important to identify how we want admins to behave and what roles and duties they perform.

What an admin shouldn't do

Adminship doesn't confer any special authority to:

• Improve articles
• Fight vandalism
• Mediate conflicts between users
• Improve Wikipedia
• Develop policy

Additionally, it's well established that admin privileges can be abused, and in fact are probably counterproductive when applied to perform some of the above tasks. The heart and soul of activity on Wikipedia lies with the editors who write and improve articles, and, as a side effect, participate in a wiki community.

Although the ostensible role of admins is that of a janitor, this has become a tongue-in-cheek sop to humility. Instead, adminship is becoming seen more and more as a social ratification of the general goodness of a person. Additionally, admins and non-admin regulars are beginning to participate in a quasi-military attitude where they view Wikipedia as something to be "fought" for or "defended."

What an admin should do

Adminship is about having the increased privileges required to perform certain administrative tasks. It is not about being more capable than someone else of deciding whether performing those tasks is a good idea.

Consider a typical IT shop, big enough that people don't have dual roles. The lowly system administrator will have root privileges on the servers, and will be responsible for the actual performance of certain tasks such as the installation of software packages, adding user accounts, etc.

However, they will generally not be the ones making the decision, for example, of what software to install--that would be the job of the development team. Instead, they will merely be carrying out the instructions of others. Consider the consequences if a junior system administrator decided Ruby on Rails would be great for the company's website; installed it, and removed the PHP environment it's currently coded in. That would be disastrous, which is why someone else makes the decision.

In our wiki environment, that notion of "someone else" and of admins as a mere "pair of hands" that carries out the community's instructions are important ones. It means that an admin should not be substituting their judgment for others', and should always be willing to have their decisions ratified (preferably, in advance; if not, retroactively) by others.

Specific guidelines

How do we boil this idea down into specific guidelines for admins? Well, it's actually quite simple:

• Do not delete pages unless there is a valid {{db|reason}}, or unless there is a consensus to delete. Yes, this means waiting to speedy-delete articles until someone else has tagged them.
• Do not block new users until they have been warned with the appropriate {{test}} and reported. Urgent response to vandalbots and quickly-created socks are exceptional circumstances, not justifications for overreaction to typical cases of scrawling on articles.
• Never block a user indefinitely unless enforcing an already-established ban. If you are blocking a user because they are a sockpuppet of a banned user, you must do so only after someone else has identified them as such, and put the appropriate template and evidence on the user's page.
• Do not {{protect}} articles until asked, and never as part of a dispute in which you participate.

The usual counterargument to limits like this is that it takes too much time to do things "properly." In exceptional cases, this is true, and the urgency of preventing damage to Wikipedia might override process. However, nearly all cases are not examples of urgent problem response--especially for something like deleting articles, which can wait. Using this kind of urgency as a justification for doing something, when it's really convenience, is bogus.

Additionally, there's no reason these things can't be cleaned up after the fact. If a flood of new users is created by a vandalbot, then they may all be blocked on sight because that's what's needed as part of the problem response. However, admins should be held responsible for the blocks they make, including going to those users' pages and recording the correct evidence. They may even discover some collateral damage (non-righteous blocks) which can be undone.

The electric fence

It's worth considering the Three revert rule on its own. As it stands, it is specifically designed to offer little in the way of discretion to admins, and I think that's correct. It is designed to be an "electric fence"--an absolute limit. It's not a guideline--the "guideline" is not to edit war at all; by the time someone is popping four reverts, they're way past the gray area.

The exceptions to the 3RR are similarly narrow, and with good reason. Lots of people think they're doing a good thing when they revert to a better version, or a consensus version; but repeated reversions isn't the way to go about it. If there's nothing worthwhile of the other version to incorporate, it should be easy to have other editors help you in keeping the article in the better state. At least, if it's really better or there's really a consensus.

The 3RR should also be applied fairly, which means blocking anyone involved in a dispute who has reverted more than the limit for the prescribed periods. No one should be immune from the 3RR.

The guidelines above, for carrying out other tasks, apply, however, in that an admin should block someone for a 3RR violation only when they are not involved and the proper report is made.

Characteristics of a good admin

This doesn't mean that admins shouldn't exercise judgment. Quite the contrary, an admin needs to be skilled at recognizing consensus and have a good understanding of what policy is, how to apply it, and knowing that exceptional circumstances may require exceptional actions.

Additionally, admins should show some interest in actually being a janitor. Though I think RC patrol is somewhat overrated, keeping process pages tidy and reducing backlog are good interests for an admin to have.

Skills

An admin should display certain technical skills in order to perform certain tasks. Therefore, if they lack the right skill, they should refrain from the task.

• An admin blocking IP addresses should be familiar with the use of whois and other means of investigating the nature of an IP address. They should have sufficient knowledge of Internetworking to understand what an IP address is and how they are (variously) used by ISPs and others.
• An admin range-blocking networks or IP ranges should be familiar with CIDR notation and the use of masking schemes to identify the network portion of an address.
• An admin editing the MediaWiki interface should be roughly familiar with how mediawiki works.
• An admin deleting pages should be familiar with "What links here", how to check image links, etc.

Red flags

The following are a few red flags that show an admin doesn't share my view of how an admin should behave.

• User wants to become an admin to block users (especially if they express an interest in blocking particular users, such as those that "vandalize the pages I edit")
• User wants to become an admin to "fight vandalism", "defend the wiki" or do other things that create a perimeter around Wikipedia.
• When asked about conflict, user describes how unreasonable other people have been.
• User wants to become an admin to more effectively do things that don't require admin privileges, like improve articles, keep NPOV or mediate conflicts.
• User is too personally invested in the articles they've written, so that they own them or are blind to their faults.