michaelturley@myway.com:
Part of the more general problem I see here that causes this is that granting administratorship at Wikipedia is meant to be "no big deal", yet anything that even hints at removing such, even for an hour or two, is the seen as end of the world as we know it.
If adminship is meant to be no big deal, there are a number of things that should be changed, I think.
* Rename adminship to "trusted users" and greatly relax the criteria for becoming a TU (certainly in terms of minimum number of edits, which is getting excessive) * Make all TU actions reversible, and possibly require quorums for some * Make privileges individually revokable (banning, deleting, protecting etc.) in case of policy violations * Decrease technical dependency on admins for tasks like deletion and protection - see http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?DevolvePower * Have fast procedures in place for revocation of privileges, but only in cases of proven repeated and persistent violations of policy.
Getting adminship is like an initiation rite, and that makes it special to anyone who goes through it. Some even go through it repeatedly. It's a judgment call on the contributor's "worth" as much as on whether they are trusted. "Not enough edits!" "Writes insufficient summaries!" "Doesn't use preview enough!" It's also a big deal because "administrator of Wikipedia" is a nice title. I think the name "bureaucrats" is very clever in comparison.
Someone who goes through the RFA process is often likely to feel that they *deserve* to be treated specially. They are now part of the core group, after all. If you slap them repeatedly, that's not going to make things better -- it will only generate friction between the slapper and the slappee. :-)
Let's not limit ourselves to thinking with a fixed set of parameters, especially those related to punishment. Hurting some people in order to help others may sometimes be necessary, but if you feel the need to do this frequently, step back and analyze the system itself. I believe that the way to make adminship "not a big deal" is to flatten the power structure of Wikipedia tecnically and socially and to atomize privileges.
Erik