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David_Gerard comments on META: application for adminship on the wiki - Less Wrong
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Comments (32)
The main role for a bureaucrat is social: deciding who gets to be an admin (after whatever process, if any).
In the model I propose, where basically everyone becomes an admin unless there's good reason not to, a bureaucrat's job would be to judge that and swoop on people and bless/curse them with the mop. So admin freely, 'crat a little less freely.
(On RW, almost everyone is an admin, but admins have somewhat less powers than on WP, e.g. RW admins can't edit the interface, only 'crats can do that. I would suggest only doing such things on LW if and as needed - KEEP THINGS AS WIDE OPEN AS POSSIBLE TO MAKE A WIKI WORK.)
People worry about admin status lots and lots on Wikipedia. This is because humans obsess about social status, not because it does any good toward writing an encyclopedia - it's an anti-pattern and really shouldn't be imitated.
I don't think not enough people being admins was ever an actual problem that prevented people from doing useful stuff on LW wiki. There's just too little interest. If giving admin status can incite interest, that's good, but I'm skeptical.
To keep things clear, I (as opposed to David_Gerard perhaps) never meant to suggest that adding some admins & vandalfighting capability would make the wiki take off. (I'm not too clear on what the wiki's function is, in general.)
I just wanted the admin bit so I could deal with the vandalism that routinely passed through my RSS feed - I'm willing to contribute to that extent but not much more.
My main reason for the suggestion is not a positive effect in wiki writing, but to avoid a negative effect from social reasons: it avoids the failure mode on Wikipedia, where adminship is such a HUGE DEAL that they're actually having trouble finding people who want to subject themselves to the trial by ordeal required. Making adminship easy also increases personal social buy-in, and particularly if they're familiar with how awful the process is on Wikipedia.
It's not a "huge deal" here, the fact that there is a failure mode somewhere else doesn't automatically translate here.
But it doesn't automatically mean it doesn't. Note that WP, like LW, is largely populated by huge nerds who like detail and getting things right. I suspect there's more for LW wiki to learn from WP than most wikis would have to learn from it. I could be wrong, of course., this is personal surmise rather than experience.
Comparison with Wikipedia is difficult, as there is a crucial difference that Wikipedia has a huge number of contributors, as the world's Schelling point for collecting facts.