On 6/21/05, Dan Grey dangrey@gmail.com wrote:
Haven't people made attempts at formulating a policy for de-sysopping before now, and been shot down in flames?
This is a bit like the content-committee discussion - I'm not sure how much of a problem there really is. When have we ever truly needed to desysop someone? Can anyone point to an example?
Admins, by and large, behave perfectly well. I would hope that the community is selecting those who are trustworthy to be admins, and that peer-pressure from the responsible majority will keep the odd rouge in line.
As far as I remember, three users have been desysopped. It is a big thing - and it so it should be, which is why it's dealt with the way it is now. Our admins are generally our contributors that have been here the longest and in almost all cases, have put in tireless amounts of work to improve the encyclopedia (and anyone who isn't an admin, unless they either don't want to be an admin, or are in some way a dick, should be one in the future with a few more contributions).
I'm getting really damned sick of all this admin-bashing on wikien-l. We seem to be getting a small clique of very loud users who seem to contribute remarkably little to the project apart from persecuting users who actually *do* (and loudly defending those that don't). Wikipedia is not an experiment in anarchy. If you start punishing good users without a very good reason, they will leave. This is a volunteer project - we rely on the people who are prepared to put in hours and hours of work. The people that are prepared to do this (without causing scores of controversy), become admins. We've seen enough good users leave because of people - and you know who are - who seem to get some bizarre kick out of chasing good users away from the project.
-- ambi