A New Forum

Jake Wartenberg started a new forum a few weeks ago called WikiEN-l (http://www.wikien.net/) that serves as a vehicle for "meta-discussion of the English Wikipedia". In theory, it will avoid becoming a magnet for banned trolls, but there are only 14 members so far! Join up.

An Irrational Paranoia

A recent RfB candidate, Nihonjoe, has found his fourth RfB placed on-hold by a bureaucrat pending the outcome of a 'crat chat. At 82% support, it is at the extreme lower end of the discretionary range for RfBs, and most of the opposition appears to stem from a single concern: that Joe questioned a particularly controversial block unaware of previous ArbCom rulings.* A few of the opposers cited other issues, but thus far, there's very little evidence that the candidate did anything wrong aside from having an unpopular opinion. Really?

Speaking as a long-time admin on the English Wikipedia and a bureaucrat on another, smaller project, I can say that the sysop tools are a million times harder to use than the additional buttons available with the bureaucrat right. Seriously; admins are given the power to block anybody, delete (nearly) anything, protect any page from editing, edit the Main Page, and mass-rollback people, among other powerful features. Bureaucrats have expanded access to Special:UserRights and the ability to rename people. Yet the English Wikipedia has an astoundingly irrational paranoia of promoting new bureaucrats. Why is this? Why, if adminship is so much more complicated than bureaucratship, have the standards been set so much higher for RfB than RfA...?

I supported Joe, so I obviously have a bias, but I can't see any particular reason to deny the candidate this very insignificant promotion. Oh, well.

*I'm unsure of the specific circumstances, so this might not be an accurate evaluation of the situation.