Jimmy Wales wrote:

I think it would be reasonable to have some sort of process other than ArbCom whereby admins are from time to time or upon particular circumstances renominated for adminship. The danger, of course, is that such a process could be used by trolls as a hammer against some of our more active admins.

This is right in both parts. It is very easy for an admin (I speak as one myself) to feel somewhat special and elevated. Admins are, after all, only human like everyone else. And human beings are an intensely hierarchical species - I speak as a Brit, the most hierarchical of all subgroups of Homo Sapiens in the western hemisphere.

And, of course, that feeling of being "somewhat special" will have its effects. We dislike WP:OWN of articles, but admins and long-term users all suffer from "ownership" of the project as a whole. As a general rule, this is a Very Good Thing. Without people feeling ownership of Wikipedia, the project would be doomed.

But the same problems that exist in editors owning articles exist in editors owning Wikipedia. We don't. The public, the users, the readers - they own Wikipedia. The person who drops in, reads a single article and goes away better informed, or with something to put in her high school essay or something new to add to his mate's point of view... they own Wikipedia. They are the customers. We - the editors and admins - are the burger-flippers, serving the customers what they want when they want it. We know more about how the burgers are made and what goes into the making of them than do the customers on the other side of the window. But that doesn't mean we have any authority over the customers. That's not what we're (not) paid for.

(BTW, the Wikipedia critics forget that point more than the real editors and admins do - as a hint to them: that ol' interweb thing, it doesn't exist just for you. Honestly.)

However (and there had to be one), however: the first call for me to be desysoped was just 12 hours after I was given the admin buttons. I deleted an article that someone else had tagged CSD-A7; it was a recreation of a CSD-A7, which was a recreation of a CSD-A7. Three editors, two admins and me all agreed that this chap's high school career didn't need to be in an encyclopedia.

The chap in question contacted my talk page, emailed me and even emailed someone else asking them to contact me, all with the same message: I had been wrongly "promoted" and should go immediately.

A day later, a similar thing happened. Since then, a week on Wikipedia isn't complete without someone somewhere telling me that I should be desysoped for enforcing Wikipedia rules... or writing to a talk page asking someone for their opinion on a rule(!)

Any method of evaluating admins needs to remove these people from the process. They have nothing to add to it. If they could create a de-admin process with a single click, they would. And once created that process would attract every nutjob, troll and person who skim-reads a page into voting an admin out of the extra buttons. QED: no more admins in about 12 days.

Nevertheless, there should be a way of allowing comment on admin actions and behaviour. Writing to admins' talk pages and email doesn't satisfy the critics, even if they even bother. They tend to go to Esperanza or AIV first. Or to RfA to try to become an admin. Or even directly to the Anti-Wikipedia Forum for Obsessive Nutters or whatever it's called.

A route where they could vent would be useful to the complainant, the community and even the admin themselves. We can rely on the community to spot a malicious or ill-informed editor making a complaint, as a rule, and thus reject them (although the critics say *all* complaints are valid... mind you, they're busy ringing people up at work, writing to employers and calling the police over *interweb content disputes*, so they've already somewhat blotted their copybooks in the scale and sanity departments).

There's a clear, easy and unabusable "Request for Comment on Administration Actions" system that must exist somewhere. Soemthing that would give everyone useful feedback, help decide policy and would be non-judgmental unless an admin had gone mad with her/his buttons and a 'crat hadn't spotted it.

What this system is, I don't know. But there must be one. Simple, easy to use, hard to abuse... surely the internet allows for that somewhere? A system that could recognise that admins are human and therefore are not perfect, but that there's a difference between falability and maliciousness? Above all, a system that ensures that mistakes are learnt from, rather than punished (Lar, MSK, do you hear me? Enough with the punishment fetish, please...) and thus that we grow and develop from it.

But I'm at a loss as to what that system is. There *must* be one. Somewhere.

-> REDVERS

___________________________________________________________ Try the all-new Yahoo! Mail. "The New Version is radically easier to use" – The Wall Street Journal http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html