"John Lee" wrote

The question is, would permitting deadminship by vote lead to a more efficient outcome through a loosening of RfA standards (which would in turn allow more editors in general - and thus hopefully more good than bad editors)?

Which precise problem are we trying to solve, today? Too many bad admins, who are never dealt with? Too many good people turned down at RfA? Any radical change (say, discarding our very flat hierarchy) ought to be solving something very specific.

I think what complicates this attempt to look at Wikipedia as a political system is because we have no neat separation of powers, or proper democracy, or anything which you could use to describe a typical constitutional democracy which many Westerners think of when they think about government or policy. If you want to talk about recalling admins, you see admins as members of the executive branch; if you want to talk about tenure, you think of them as members of the judiciary. This dichotomy is quite inaccurate since admins both enforce policy and interpret policy.

Yes, one problem with politicising everything is that teh kind of politics you get is crude, to a fault. I recommend the Bernard Crick take - his defence of politics as horsetrading.

Charles

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