Closing statement: Wikipedia is a paradox; there are no business-school theories to account for its dominance, on a content-creation budget of roughly zero, as the world's busiest information site. (Google and a few other websites get more traffic, but only because a lot of people are using them to get to somewhere else ... like Wikipedia ... or to watch cat videos.) The Request for Adminship (RfA) process has played a role in making the English Wikipedia what it is, but the heavy investment of time there by voters and others is often unappreciated, and it's not hard to understand why. A process that used to "promote" (or demote, depending on your point of view) hundreds to adminship each year promoted just 28 last year. To some, the process seems juvenile ... sometimes it's as if, when you show up to take your driver's license test, people keep coming out of the back room to change the test and yell at you in some foreign language, when they're not busy fighting with each other. It doesn't seem to anyone like the best way for the world's top information site to make promotion decisions.
There will never be a perfect solution because the community is expecting RfA to do contradictory things. RfA functions as a place where anyone can walk in off the street, right into the boardroom, and have an equal voice in making the calls on who gets promoted. It's a place where people with grievances show up to "speak truth to power". It's where we argue over what RfA is. Arbitration Committee members are elected, and should be, but RfA voters will never be elected, even though their decisions are every bit as important as Arbcom decisions. (Bureaucrats make the final call in every RfA, but voters do most of the work.) RfA used to be too lenient, and we paid for that with drama down the line, so voters are now expected to work hard at sniffing out drama. Add to that the fact that in 10 years, no broad Request for Comment (RfC) has produced a single improvement to the process, ever, and it's easy to see why many people are pessimistic about what's possible at RfA, or in this RfC.
And yet, RfA is its own existence proof. It hardly seems possible that the process could function at all, but it's generally acknowledged that it usually works, for what it is, and we can (and should) thank the voters for that.
In Round One, the voters in this RfC decided to tackle some of these problems, and Round Two shows the results. Some proposals had overwhelming support, and these may make a lot of difference or not so much ... depending entirely on how much effort people put into making them work. Concerned editors start searching for quality candidates, Auto-prospecting and Project for nominators all got solid support, and have the potential to drum up many new candidates. Unbundling - some U1 and G7s is a proposal to let people delete some pages that only they have edited, and this one has already gone to the developers for action. Two other proposals, "Not unless" candidates and Unbundling - limited block/unblock, will get a final vote in Round Three.
We're disappointed that we have nothing to offer, at least in this RfC, to those looking for some form of recall or for a probationary period for (at least some) new admins; we know you guys put a lot of time into this. These two proposals got over 60% support, but the opposition was substantial, and more to the point: there weren't enough details for the voters to know what they were voting on. Follow-on discussion of Probation showed that supporters thought they were supporting very different things, and the Recall proposal had no details at all. We encourage the supporters to keep developing specific proposals and to keep working on finding common ground among yourselves and with the opposers. This RfC has demonstrated, we think, that you can expect success if you're open to taking opposers' views on board.
We want to acknowledge that people who might be looking for a complete solution to the "RfA problem" are not going to be happy here, because the voters in this RfC knew better than to try to fix everything at once or push too hard. We (Ed and Dan, the closers) expect to be available later on as part of a new team of closers, if another RfC is needed for course corrections, tweaks, and new ideas, and we expect that it will be. That RfC will also have a Round One to let the voters decide what the issues are going to be, so it ought to be able to handle anything that comes up, but we have no objection to anyone else starting up an RfC on any subject at any time.
We thank everyone for their participation. It's been a joy being a part of this.
- Dank (push to talk) 16:31, 26 March 2013 (UTC)
Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 16:37, 26 March 2013 (UTC)
This is Round Two of the 2013 request for comments on RfA. Please offer suggested solutions to any of the following four problems (as determined in round one), and discuss and vote on other suggested solutions as well. This round will end in 30 days, or possibly sooner. The closers will share their thoughts on what's coming in Round Three in the middle of this round. - Dank (push to talk) 02:41, 6 February 2013 (UTC)