I was going to post this as a reply to another posting, but my thoughts
have become somewhat general, and so I'm posting this as a new entry.
I have come to realise that our current process of requesting adminship
is at a sharp contrast to the wiki model in general. I have come to
believe that we are not following our own principles that we so highly
value.
Why do we let anyone edit? Because we believe that assuming good faith
is a good thing. We let people edit because they can't do any lasting
damage anyway; if they turn out to be editing in bad faith, we can still
revert their edits and block them later. No permanent damage done. We
also let people edit because we believe that they are innocent until
they show themselves guilty.
Incidentally, with admin powers, we handle it quite differently. Not
only does becoming an admin require majority support, but it is even the
case that many people vote "oppose" on the grounds of lack of
dedication, lack of a minimum number of edits, or lack of involvement in
community issues. They can apparently get away with an argument that
essentially amounts to saying "we can't really be sure they're innocent,
so we'll have to assume they're guilty for now". As a result, there are
people who are not admins even though they would never be doing anything
wrong if they were. Those people should be admins.
If we disregard for a moment that admins can delete images permanently,
which surely can be rectified in a future software update, admins cannot
do any lasting damage, just like editors. As such, their situation is a
quite close analogy to the case of the editors. If we applied the
current request-for-adminship philosophy to editing, we would have to
vote on everybody's right to edit before allowing them to edit!
Suppose for a moment that users were to start out as admins, and only
lose the admin powers when they abuse them. (No, I'm not suggesting
this, but let's explore this hypothetical scenario.) Suppose also that
if admin powers are removed from an account, all accounts that are
editing from the same IP also lose admin powers. Of course many of you
will object to this model, because users could just open a new account
from another IP to re-gain the administrative privileges. But if you
think about it, editors are in exactly the same position: If they're
blocked, they only need to edit from another IP to evade the block. We
already have the societal mechanics (policies and procedures) in place
to deal with this. The situation is exactly analogous.
However, I am not suggesting such a radical change.
As a first step, I would like to suggest to make it policy that "oppose"
votes must be accompanied by reasoning indicating the nominee's past
wrongdoing or potential for wrongdoing. It should not be permitted to
vote "oppose" just because someone has "only a few hundred edits", as
this is neither a crime nor a sign of bad faith. As a safeguard against
crackpots nominating themselves straight after their first edit,
however, I suggest that candidates must be nominated by an existing admin.
In the long-term, my suggestion is to abolish the requirement for
majority vote. Anyone who is already an admin is trusted; I think
someone nominated by an existing admin should therefore be given a
certain "initial trust" too. Thus, admins should be able to just appoint
other admins. As for removing adminship, ideally I would like to see the
process closely resemble that for blocking users. The things we have
collected at [[Wikipedia:Blocking policy]] have evolved over time; a
similar "deadminning policy", containing various behaviours that warrant
deadminning without a vote, is surely conceivable. In particular, I can
imagine the 3RR apply to page-protection, deletion/undeletion, or
blocking/unblocking other users. Having more admins, and therefore more
sensible admins ;-), makes this much easier to keep under control by the
community.
What if tens of people gang up, all become admins and then do lots of
bad stuff? Well, it is already possible for people to gang up -- and
indeed, gangs of web forum users have done so in the past.
Please discuss! :)
Timwi