On 06/10/06, Stephen Streater sbstreater@mac.com wrote:
On 6 Oct 2006, at 19:59, David Gerard wrote:
In practice I don't think this is such a problem. I can think of a couple of people who are now admins who I had pretty much this qualm over, but who both shaped up fine after a slightly rocky start. And deadminning is a much bigger deal than adminning by its nature.
Isn't it better to try to improve an Admin rather than just deadmin them, at least to start with? Deadmin should be a much rarer process. Even Admins respond to feedback.
Well, yes!
I mean, there's more than one way to do it. On Meta, adminship is for a year at a time, for example. On sr:, admins aren't just janitors but have editorial decision powers. Etc.
People still complain that it's impossible to get rid of a bad admin when that's manifestly false. The ArbCom is *not* happy with cases of clear abuse of admin powers and does act when such are brought to its attention.
I think it's far better and simpler to make it relatively easy to become an admin, then remove the bad ones as and when they show it, than to require a process with ever-escalating requirements for adminship most of which have nothing to do with the powers in question in the hope that this will stop the problem before it occurs.
As I said, I've yet to hear a convincing reason why we wouldn't want most editors to have admin powers once they've got enough experience to know their way around. Admin powers are just more ability to do nuts'n'bolts things around the wiki.
- d.