User:Tigraan/Experience thresholds

Edit count and user rights

Many technical tools that are user-right-restricted require experience to be granted, for instance WP:ROLLBACK. This experience is often evaluated by the edit count. Although most people do understand that edit counts are indicative and should be taken with a grain of salt, the mere existence of an indicative count is dangerous.

"Experience" is supposed to demonstrate:

• Commitment: one is active in WP, and being granted feature XYZ will help to edit more / more easily;
• Maturity: one is not a vandal in sheep's clothes, waiting to be conferred great powers to cause havoc;
• Technical proficiency: one is not going to delete the main page because of one's poor mastering of the tools.

Edit count is a very poor proxy of the first two, and only a mediocre proxy of the third.

Commitment

People who have large edit counts spend a lot of time editing WP, and people who spend a lot of time editing have interest in WP.

However, people with relatively low edit counts might also have spent a lot of time editing. A major article rewriting can be done in one gigantic edit, whereas fixing ten typos can be done in ten edits. Reviewing new pages gives plenty of opportunities to tag articles for speedy deletion in the blink of an eye with the page curation tools. Searching through existing articles for unsourced information, tagging them and explaining the issue on the talk page is much longer.

In short, the tree of things to be done in WP is very tall, and people picking low-hanging fruit (even without automated tools) will score edits much faster than those who take care of the top branches. Low-hanging fruit has to be picked, but it should not give undue reputation compared with other areas.

It is much more important that the requested feature be matched with the areas in which the candidate is active; their contribution volume should be compared with expectations for that area. Ideally, the quality of contributions should be taken into account.

Maturity

A troll or vandal will usually not amass a large number of innocent edits before giving into his instincts. They are therefore eliminated by their predators before reaching adult age high edit counts. Well-intentioned but clueless editors who have their edits reverted because attitude is no substitute for competence will eventually quit, and die in young age as well.

Nonetheless, the average vandal is not going to ask for high-level tools, either; he will just pick whatever pointy rock can be found and start destroying everything. The bulk of disruptive editors will already be screened out of the process by the virtue of not asking the tools. Said otherwise, would-be vandals that ask for powerful tools probably have the patience to score enough edits.

A much better measure of maturity is the quality of exchanges with other editors on talk pages. Quantity, however, is not - some people are naturally more verbose than others, some have low proficiency in English, and some tasks on WP demand more interaction than others.

Technical proficiency

Mistakes are easy to make, especially when a computer is "helping". A user that has contributed a lot to WP has had more opportunities for mistakes, so if he avoided or survived them he probably is better qualified that someone who has not.

Many technical tools, however, are a whole new world. Mistakes with previous tools are useful only because they taught to be cautious, and candidates are not expected to be familiar with tools they could not use before.

In that case, candidates should show technical maturity rather than proficiency, that is the ability to understand a new technology and fix possible mistakes. Note that some can be very mature and civil with people but reckless, impatient, and dangerous with computers, or the other way around.