On 03/03/2008, WJhonson@aol.com WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
That's right. For any action presented, there are knee-jerk reactions from both sides. Both the "He was just doing his job" crowd, and the "admins are all jerks anyway" crowd.
Even ones just doing their job can be, um, pretty crap admins. And we do have many crappy admins.
The arbcom is quite happy to remove the admin bit from *bad* admins as needed, sometimes in a sudden midnight swoop. I'd say there's not a problem in practice removing the bit from actually bad admins (as opposed to, e.g., momentarily unpopular ones).
The problem IMO is the sorta crappy ones. Which gets subjective. And it would obviously be better to lure them encouragingly toward non-crapness rather than just saying "Fail. *bang*"
I mean, ideally adminship really shouldn't be a big deal - any experienced non-insane Wikipedian should be able to pass RFA okay. That that isn't how things are is a self-feeding problem. But this has been discussed ad nauseam both here and on WT:RFA.
- d.