At 05:51 PM 5/31/2010, David Lindsey wrote:

The key is not making it easier to remove adminship. This proposal gets us closer to the real problem, but fails to fully perceive it as does the common call to separate the functions of adminship.

Generally, Mr. Lindsey has written a cogent examination of certain aspects of the problem. Let me reframe part of this. What is needed is not exactly "making it easier to remove adminship," but making it easier to regulate and restrain administrative action. His proposal is one approach to that, dividing actions into types. I suggested something *somewhat* similar in pointing out that bureaucrats were a group that might be trusted to make decisions about use of admin tools, i.e., to receive and judge, ad-hoc, complaints, and warn the admin when it was considered there was a problem, or, in the extreme, remove the tools.

Expanding the bureaucrat role is one fairly obvious and reasonable solution, and it seems to work like this, with bureaucrats or stewards, on the smaller wikis that don't have an ArbComm.

Given clear rules regarding recusal, when it's necessary, and when it's not, and what to do if there is any reasonable possibility of an appearance of bias, most admnistrators will quite properly restrain themselves voluntarily.

However, I'm not necessarily exercised if a long-time user is short-blocked, because a long-time user should understand it and see it as no big deal. It all depends on how it's done. If a long-time user engages in behavior that would cause a short-time user to be blocked, what, exactly, is the problem with being blocked? If there is a problem, if the user will go away mad, abandoning years of effort because of one possibly bad block, there is, right there, a sign of a serious problem, ownership of the project or of an article. Maybe its time for that user to do something else. If it was a short block, he or she can come back any time they want, after the block expires.

Short blocks are very different from longer blocks. Short blocks are true police actions, equivalent to a sergeant-at-arms conducting a disruptive member of an assembly from the room when they get too hot. It's no big deal, and nobody is sanctioned for it, unless they truly get violent in the process. If an admin blocks *any* user and abuses the user in the process, without necessity, that's a problem, and it's a problem even if the block was correct as a block.