[WikiEN-l] Your comments on wikien-l regarding adminship

[Thomas Dalton]

> Nice. You appear to be going in the same direction as me, but I want it
> even more radical. :) In particular, your system still requires people
> to _ask_ for adminship (which, again, would be analogous to requiring
> them to apply for editing privileges instead of just letting people
> register freely), and I find one month a bit excessive. Other than that,
> I think you hit the nail on the head :)

Basically, you are suggest removing the concept of administrators
entirely, giving everyone access to all the tools, and then
introducing a new kind of block that take some tools away from users
that do something wrong.

The system we use for editing pages (the one you think should be
extended to admin powers) results in an enormous amount of vandalism,
which takes a lot of effort to clean up. It's considered worth it, so
we just shut up and get on with it. Using the same system with admin
powers would result in an equal amount of admin vandalism, which takes
more effort to clean up, does more damage, and is not at all worth it.

Also, if adminship is opened up that much, we would have to introduce
a new level of admin anyway to handle blocks (which would actually be
desysopings, as everyone would be able to unblock themselves), and
then all the problems of RfA just get moved to Requests for
Super-adminship, so we have absolutely no gain at all.