Aryeh Gregor wrote:
We could also try to work out ways to make adminship less important. If protection, blocking, and deletion could be made less necessary and important in day-to-day editing, that would reduce the importance of admins and reduce the difference between established and new contributors. You could often make do with much "softer" versions of these three things, which could be given out much more liberally.
For instance, to replace blocking, you could have a system whereby any reasonably established editor (> X edits/Y days) can place another editor or IP address in moderation, so that their edits have to be approved before going live, in Flagged Revs style. As with blocking, any established editor could also reverse such a block. Abuse would thus be easily reversed and fairly harmless (since the edits could go through automatically when it's lifted, barring conflicts). Sysops would only be necessary if people with established accounts abuse their rights.
Likewise, most deletion doesn't really need to make anything private. Reasonably established editors could be given the right to soft-delete a page such that any other such editor could read or undelete it. This would be fine for the vast majority of deletions, like vanity pages and spam. Sysops would only have to get involved for copyright infringement, privacy issues, and so on.
As for protection, we already have Flagged Revs. Lower levels of flagging should be imposable by people other than sysops, and since those largely supersede semiprotection, sysops would again only be needed to adjudicate disputes between established editors (like full-protecting an edit-warred page). Obviously, all these rights would be revocable by sysops in the event of abuse.
There's an extension to 'delete' pages by blanking. I find that approach much more wiki. We should also work on allowing more protection levels. Fixing problems with the "if you can protect, you can edit anything" behavior and such.