It also isn't very helpful to continually hang an axe over the head of good users, in regard to their adminship in this case.
I don't think my proposal is advocating anything of the sort, unless you would refer to the current threat of being blocked for inappropriate behaviour as "hanging an axe over their head" too.
She considers any threat to her adminship extreme, even if it's perfectly justified. If adminship really isn't that big of a deal, then a hanging axe shouldn't be a big deal either since they'd only be losing something that doesn't matter much. Her own logic works against her. Admins are a dime a dozen really and Wikipedia isn't going to fall apart even if Wikipedia suddenly lost half its admins.
I agree with the approach of making the admin position even less of a big deal, since that would make it less abuse prone due to the psychological aspect of having 'special powers' being lessened and it would allow for more accountability since being on equal grounding means people are more likely to report and follow through with abuse.
The Open Directory Project continually hung an axe over people - and they left as a result, in droves. Let us not make the same mistake.
I suppose we're doing the other extreme (high bar for entry to adminship and even higher bar for getting "axed out" of adminship) - and we have rather few good admins as a result (500 out of 25500, less than 2%, isn't very much for something that's supposedly "no big deal"). That's the mistake on the other side of the spectrum...
Yeah and the opposite action is horrible. The bar for getting removed most certainly should not be lower than what it took to get in and it shouldn't be held to a lower standard than users. It really doesn't make the slightest bit of sense to do that and only serves to remove accountability for admins.
I have to wonder, why does ambi think that admins are so valuable that it will matter if we lose some (aside from the obvious hidden motive)? No one will care and Wikipedia will continue functioning as normal because Wikipedia thrives mostly because of what non-admins do.
Her analogy to ODP is completely false. With ODP, you need special privileges just to edit. That was the issue, that the editors themselves were held to high standards. In this case, it's just the admins.
Even with admin status removed, you're still fully capable of edits, which is the primary purpose of Wikipedia. Really, if you're judging your importance in terms of being an admin instead of being a normal editor, then you really shouldn't be on Wikipedia as you're obviously viewing it in terms of power [tripping] rather than useful contributions. What's worse is that they'll try to rack up tons of minor edits in attempt to make themselves seem valuable, when it's really more of an image thing than anything else.
And yeah, being only 2% does make it a big deal.
Remove the importantance and emphasis on the power aspect of being an admin and you can only help Wikipedia.
---------------------------------------------- Nathan J. Yoder http://www.gummibears.nu/ http://www.gummibears.nu/files/njyoder_pgp.key ----------------------------------------------