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