[Theforum] the future of admin

Emily Christensen em at members.evolt.org
Fri Oct 26 07:27:53 CDT 2001


Hi all,

I had two midterms this week so I had lots of catching up to do this
morning. I wanted to comment on some tangential things that have been
brought up over the last few days.

*On approving/denying articles and open admin archives:

isaac said:
> of those lists/groups, admin has had closed archives. that has been due to
> sensitivity issues regarding discussion of incoming articles, etc. would
you
> make all of that open, or keep it isolated somewhat? (if open, then people
> will be seeing: "this article is quite poor. deny?")

Dan responded:
>>well if it *is* a quite poor article, it is. nothing you can do about it i
guess. that shows up by the fact that it got denied. what it would also do
is ensure people don't deny aticles because, "M$ bl0wz! d3ny the @rt12cl1
j00 f00!" but rather, "Poor content, no relevant info added to an obvious
press release". <<

Later, isaac said:
>>the future admin archives can be opened (older ones can't for reasons
expressed by adrian and javier so far). we'll just have to use tact when
discussing things like that. it'll also mean that conversation regarding
potential RichGibson's will also be open.<<

I don't think discussions about denied articles or suspending people from
thelist should be public. Of course some articles we deny are spam, but
others are written by evolt members who are genuinely trying to contribute
something but their article was denied for some valid reason (very badly
written, factual errors, etc.). I know that if I wrote up something for the
site that was denied, and I could check the admin archive and read, "this
isn't high enough quality" or whatever, I'd be upset. It wouldn't be fair.
It's one thing for me to receive an email from an admin that says (in
effect), "thanks, but no thanks." It's another for that email to be copied
to every single evolt member.

I would also be concerned that articles that are merely so-so would be
published just to avoid hurting feelings or drawing criticism.

*On the size of admin:

isaac wrote:
>>2 issues have faced most potential entries to admin in the past. 1 of
those
has been "it's chaotic enough as it is, do we need any more?". with a
concise voting application and process, i think that would be taken care of.
then the size of the group will not effect entry of further members.
(isaac)<<

I think size would still matter (so to speak). As it is, we sometimes get
confused about who's working on what -- who is editing this article, who
reponded to that email, etc.

There are also problems with consistency here. Should there really be 50
people with the ability to edit articles? Eeek!

Maybe this would work okay if there were different groups of people who did
different things -- a dozen who answer emails, another dozen who edit
articles. I dunno, but I do think having an admin group of an unlimited size
could be trouble. I'd much rather see a smaller group. Maybe rotation is the
answer.

For the record, for the moment I'm with isaac on merging theforum and admin.
It doesn't make sense to me.

Emily







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