RFA by year

I've approached a number of potential RFA candidates this year. Of those who bothered to reply by far the most common answer was that they didn't fancy the RFA process. The second most common answer was agreeing to run, - I've nominated four times in the last 12months and have two more who will probably run in the next two months. Other reasons have been as varied as wanting to stick to content work and being about to retire - but the empirical information I have is that fear of RFA difficulty is a serious problem on EN wiki. One concern I have is that this could be inbuilt in the system and that every project will hit this if and when they reach EN wiki's size.

Yeah, a lot of problems start to come after the honeymoon period is over and things "mature". At first it's wide open possibilities. But then once things crystalize, people start to fight for territory. It's like that for anything.

So yes, I think problems at RFA might be a symptom of a deeper problem: hostility, infighting, factionalism, politicking, crusading...

The wiki process is predicated on having very weak rules and organization. At first, there are a few people operating far enough away from each other that they never clash with one another, and the lack of rules actually inspires people to take initiative and express themselves. But as the population becomes larger, more people start interacting, and you have fights between people with different viewpoints. And with no official leader or policy to decide how those fights should be resolved, you create a power vacuum. The power vacuum is officially sanctioned too: ignore all rules, admins are not special, you must build consensus with everyone equally. So people who want power learn to create power by creating obstructions. They obstruct articles, they obstruct policies, and they obstruct RFAs.

There may be elements of that, though ignore all rules is not as widely used as it once was. Also the population isn't growing, it is either stable or gently declining - though not as fast as the admins are declining. However I agree that consensus is difficult at times and that RfA can be a battle ground between different factions - though oddly that may not be the snarkiest side to it. Opposing because a candidate lacks audited content or has been making errors at speedy deletion tends to be a "not yet" type of oppose that focusses on their contributions. The more personal opposes of the "I don't trust you" or "terrible contributions" variety are what I think poisons RFA and are very difficult to counter unless there is a diff that explains why someone has lost people's trust or made poor contributions.

Yeah, I wasn't really trying to focus on the officially sanctioned power vacuum, with ignore all rules or the way admins are described. I was just making the overall point that there's an unfortunate side effect to a community with no power structure. In theory, there is no power, and every decision is made purely on its own merits. But in practice, power comes from persistent obstruction. If you find a group of 5-10 stubborn editors, they can jam most articles, policies, every RFAs from moving forward. The rest of the community can't move on without their consent (consensus).

Which ties into your point... in an RFA, if someone just says "I don't trust this guy" or "his contributions aren't good enough", you're stuck. There is no consensus to be found there. People who are there to discuss have no power, because it's those fringe voters (in a culture that supposedly is against voting) who have a veto.

Well RFA is not blackballing. If one person says they don't like someone or their contributions but they don't say why or give examples it won't derail the RFA - but the resulting Drama can make the RFA look a little poisonous.

Where we really have contention is where they give reasons which 75% of the community deems weak.

I think we're talking about the same thing. It only takes 30% of people to derail an RFA. Sometimes less for other RFCs. The power to obstruct really is the only added power you can find on Wikipedia. If you can make two friends who will watch your contribution history and follow you to a discussion, you can pretty much obstruct and any discussion smaller than 10 people. (Same thing if you make three enemies.) It's a more fundamental issue. People have learned that gumming up Wikipedia helps them retain power.

I think you're right that drama is the real reason people shy away from RFAs. But I'm more trying to point out where the drama comes from. In an encyclopedia with no systematic decision making process or power structure, drama is power.

The people just say no without proposing alternative or remedy to the situation.

De-facto let's do "nothing" until something or someone outside Wikimedia create an incident big enough that we have to act.

ON EN wiki we've managed to get things going a bit by publicising the problem. August 2010 is now the best month so far in 2010, and one of the best months in the last two years. But we are still in drought and the recent admins have mostly been oldtimers - all 13 successful candidates in August have been editors for more than two years and 11 of 13 were from 2005/6 and 7.