On 6/21/05, michaelturley@myway.com
If we truly want to live up to the perception and ideal that adminship is "no big deal", it should be a matter of routine to revoke admin priviledges for a few hours for something as little as a single foul mouthed comment, even if provoked and egged on by peers. If this is done, perhaps we will see less admins defending their actions at any cost, and more "shrugging it off" and proceeding with business.
I don't agree. Admins non-admin activities should be kept to the same fairly low standard that user edits are usually held to.. we can't fit human interaction into nice little boxes, so there isn't a good way to define how people should behave for regular users or administrators. So an admin should be blocked in the same way we'd block any other contributor, ... a fairly infrequent event for substantial contributors as all admins are... only dished out when it's clear they need to cool off.
Now, there are cases where adminship itself should be revoked. But that should only happen in cases of specific abuse of those abilities. Administrators are just regular users, there is nothing wondrous and mysterious that admin power grants.. only the ability to edit protected pages, to protect pages, to block and unblock, to see deleted content, restore deleted content, and delete content, and the autorevert button. All of these activities leave a written record.
It would be nice if all users could have access to these abilities, but due to the potential of difficult to correct abuse we must limit these abilities. It is highly likely that after mediawiki 1.5 is in use we may being to issue and remove admin powers in tiers as well.
There are some administrative actions which should be unacceptable and result in quick deadminship with little judgement applied, for example unblocking yourself. There are other activities (admin action revert wars) that should indicate administrative cool offs like 3rr, but it's not easy to achieve that today due to technical limitations. Standard blocks might be acceptable in the same role.
I think we've complicated adminship by imposing additional unspoken requirements on the position. Technical adminship should remain as it was intended: will you use the admin functions to further the ends of wikipedia rather than your own personal agenda? If so you should have access to them. We should have another class of users if we wish to award kindness, respectability, community involvement. The two groups don't always map 1:1 and the requirements to keep the positions shouldn't be the same. We shouldn't remove admin functions for someone who is a jerk but almost always uses the functions correctly (i.e. avoids using them in their own disputes), but I don't want to send new users to go talk to them.
In the case of RickK, not only did he cross the line we set for all editors by excessive reverting of a disputed issue, but he abused his admin powers by blocking the party that disagreed with him and then protecting the page when additional editors engaged. A 24 hour cool of was appropriate if not for the 3RR than for the sloppy use of admin functions.