Re Stephanie's point

"Rfa reform and attempts to streamline desysopping have been largely stonewalled by relatively few people. Thats just one area but one of the longest running ones."

Actually that's two very different areas, and one of the most common tactics to stonewall RFA reform is to switch the subject to deadminship.

I've been documenting the RFA drought for quite some time now at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/RFA_by_month and judging from the last few months, the drought that we've been in since rollback was unbundled in early 2008 has entered a new and drier phase. Yes we've had four admins get through in the last 48 hours, the best flurry since late October. But all four of our new admins have been editing for over three years. RFA may be be broken, but candidates with cleanblock logs, long tenure and lots of manual editing can still usually get through. The questions we need to ask ourselves include:

How can we persuade people who started editing 15 months to three years ago to run for adminship? How many more potential candidates are there who first registered three or more years ago? With total editing broadly stable, how long can we maintain a 1% monthly drop in the number of our active admins?

It shouldn't surprise anyone that the only admins we have who started editing in 2010 are bots, but only 13 editors who started editing in 2009 are now admins. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:ListUsers&dir=prev&...

But to get back to the gendergap issue, the good news is that two of our four new admins are female.

WereSpielChequers