Andrew Gray wrote:
Would it be useful at this point to have some idea of how other projects do it? I know some have a "normal" deadminning process, but I'm not sure how this works - do some have a request-based system, some have regular reconfirmation, what?
It's hardly going to be useful to adopt a "doesn't scale" type system - imagine reconfirming (or not) 1000 admins annually, and then ask what else could have been done with that investment of the community's time to improve the 'pedia. I think part of the answer lies here. The ArbCom culls around 1% of the admin body annually, and those decisions are seriously taken. enWP has a real, daily need of admins to do adminstrative work on what is a very large, very complex, and (crucially) very inhomogeneous site - there is huge diversity in terms of users and tasks. Desysopping shouldn't be about people fussing on about some limited number of admin actions they don't like, especially (given the grudge-bearing that happens) things that were years ago. Re-election cannot prevent that being what it all hinges on.
In other words if you're worried about the admin body as a whole, you wouldn't ask the question about "how can I get rid of X?" but "is there any control of the admins as a whole?" We currrently have desysopping that goes on a "worst-case" basis rather than an "average-case" basis, and if you change that you are likely to get more decisions taken, but for worse reasons. I don't think the actual quality of admins is anything like as low as the argument for mass reconfirmation would suggest.
Charles