Re Matthew Jacobs and the periodic reconfirmation idea http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/RFA_reform#Periodic_reco...
There's also the point that some of us don't like the idea of admins becoming a small elite group within the community. OK we are already quite a way from the "no big deal" idea of adminship, but one of the downsides of reducing the admin cadre to a small number of fixed term admins is that the vast majority of our current 1400 or so admins have insufficient activity to get through an RFA. Many of the rest are unlikely to want to put themselves through the RFA hoops again, especially if remaining an admin means taking on a significantly larger share of the admin workload.
We need to remember that admins are unpaid volunteers doing a bunch of essential chores on the site.
We also need to remember that the fewer admins there are the more their scarcity value increases. So fixed terms might be of interest to status seekers and those exhibitionists who rather enjoy the opportunity of an RFA to have a public confrontation with their critics. But we'd lose most of the quiet and uncontentious admins who are active editors who have the tools and use them as and when they come across a situation that requires them.
Of course periodic reconfirmation would work if we made adminship a salaried position. But I'm hoping that we can find other ways to fix the RFA problem long before that starts to look necessary.
That said RFA is continuing to decline, this year, maybe even this month, may well see the first month without a new admin since October 2002. With 20 new admins so far this year compared to 52 last year we will be doing very well in the rest of the year if we manage to kepp the year on year decline at only one third. There is a real risk that 2012 could see the rate of decline steepen and only half as many new admins be appointed as the previous year. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/RFA_stats
WSC