MarkGallagher wrote:
I hadn't actually considered the scenario that SV puts in her post, but it strikes me that there are more ways for a Trojan admin to cause damage than simply going rogue and deleting the main page.
Oh, sure. But one of our alleged strengths, which can work precisely as well against admin malfeasance as against simple vandalism, is the vaunted thousands-of-eyes effect. If an admin does something squirrely, something far less blatant than blanking the main page, *someone* is going to notice, and likely complain. (Whether the complaint is taken seriously is of course another question.)
I'd also have to agree with her that, what with the CVU admin phenomenon, it is trivial for a bad user to rack up a lot of edits and bung his hand in, "Yep, I'll have me some extra buttons, please."
SOFIXIT. I mean, seriously. If we've got a dysfunctional admin approval process, we've got all sorts of problems. (Obviously. But no, I don't know how to fix it, either.)
A Trojan admin will have all of the disadvantages that made him a banned user in the first place: he'll be quarrelsome, rude, clueless, arrogant, and insensitive.
Well, no. We shouldn't be tolerating (or indeed promoting) quarrelsome, rude, clueless, arrogant or insensitive people as admins. So they'll have to work harder than that if they want to sneak in. (If RfA has become so myopic that it's routinely approving admins who score highly on its little pet metrics despite being quarrelsome, rude, clueless, arrogant and insensitive, it's worse than I thought.)
On the other hand, it's no worse a problem than what we see today with ordinary, non-Trojan, really, really bad admins.
And not that much worse than ordinary, non-Administrator, really, really bad editors, either.