Timwi (timwi@gmx.net) [050701 09:43]:
Indeed. The present RFA procedure is horribly topheavy and instruction-crept.
As a first step, I would like to suggest to make it policy that "oppose" votes must be accompanied by reasoning indicating the nominee's past wrongdoing or potential for wrongdoing. It should not be permitted to vote "oppose" just because someone has "only a few hundred edits", as this is neither a crime nor a sign of bad faith. As a safeguard against crackpots nominating themselves straight after their first edit, however, I suggest that candidates must be nominated by an existing admin.
Sounds good to me.
In the long-term, my suggestion is to abolish the requirement for majority vote. Anyone who is already an admin is trusted; I think someone nominated by an existing admin should therefore be given a certain "initial trust" too. Thus, admins should be able to just appoint other admins.
I'd like to work our way to that stage slowly ;-)
As for removing adminship, ideally I would like to see the process closely resemble that for blocking users. The things we have collected at [[Wikipedia:Blocking policy]] have evolved over time; a similar "deadminning policy", containing various behaviours that warrant deadminning without a vote, is surely conceivable. In particular, I can imagine the 3RR apply to page-protection, deletion/undeletion, or blocking/unblocking other users. Having more admins, and therefore more sensible admins ;-), makes this much easier to keep under control by the community.
Temp deadminning in the software? Hmm ...
- d.