User:Lemuritus
I initially posted over at Wikisource_talk:Adminship#Obligations_2 but it seems that is a scarcely-viewed page, so I thought I'd post here. I'm looking over the project and it is, quite frankly, an absolute pigsty. There are works that have been tagged as needing clean-up for fourteen years (Category:Works with no header template), and there are 300 Category:Works with no license templates. Talk:Speech at the closing session of the 5th Meeting on Globalization and Development held in Havana, Cuba addressed the fact it's tagged as a copyvio back in 2010 but nothing's been done about it since then. If we hop in a time-machine back to December 31 2009, ten years ago, we’ll see that Wikisource:Requested texts is so ignored that the majority of texts requested ten years ago have still not been added. (And before you say "Great lemuritus, go do all that", I just added Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex which had been sitting there unfulfilled for the last 12 years.) Christiane Taubira Speech on the Same-Sex Marriage Bill had three different maintenance templates thrown on it five years ago but nothing happened, and Hail the Sign, the Sign of Jesus has been locked to prevent any editwarring since 2011, there are 956 Category:Pages containing deprecated templatess, despite having multiple Admins who list "Greek" among their languages Category:Pages with missing Greek characters has had the same page listed for nine years, Wikisource:Maintenance of the Month is obviously long since abandoned, and my personal favorite has to be that Category:Deletion requests/Unknown translators has had a {{backlog}} template for its 43 pages since 2006 :)
So basically I'm asking, why don’t we make a short checklist of tasks that every administrator must accomplish before their annual comfirmation (10 Xs, 10 Ys, 5 Zs), and a slightly longer one (25, 25, 10) for those aspiring to be an administrator to include along with their nomination? Because after 17 years, it’s a little silly to say we're just getting around to these things. Obviously the current policies are not working to keep up with the maintenance. Lemuritus (talk) 04:42, 2 January 2020 (UTC)
- Loud chorus of "No, no! Screw you!"
I have been here two weeks and have looked up authors who have missing initials or biographical details, gotten rid of "Orphan" templates, recategorized the "Missing character" templates, tackled "Requested texts", created about 300 authorpages for redlinked authors, created the eight countries that were missing from Portal:Texts by Country for the past twelve years, and it seems a little rich to just say "Yeah, there is a HUGE mess, 600,000 uncategorized works - no real method for somebody interested in Assyria to notice we have anything about it, and even the administrators are consistently adding authors and works without categorizing them…but keep up the good work lemuritus, if you see a problem you fix it, we’ll do what we like and no we will not spend thirty minutes a year on a directed task aimed at fixing the project". And to accuse me of virtue-signalling when literally all I have done here the past two weeks is try to tackle the mess, much of which I can't even figure out how to accomplish tasks or whether policies exist, is just bizarre. "I know you are, but what am I" is barely a functional taunt from playground bullies, but from WMF admins?
Time is much less likely to show "how much I care", and much more likely to show how little I care about investing more than thirty minutes a day into doing the thankless maintenance tasks that are long overdue because those who want to be administrators want to avoid having to clear ten items on a backlog every year, or asking self-nominations next year to include twenty items off the backlog. Wiktionary was a "pigsty" for a couple years before it got fixed, Wikiquote was a "pigsty" for probably five years…but here we see not only a pigsty, but an obstinate refusal to actually tackle the necessary cleaning to fix it. Little surprise Wikisource:Maintenance of the Month is dead in the water when the administrators themselves didn't support it. Lemuritus (talk) 17:16, 2 January 2020 (UTC)