[WikiEN-l] declining numbers of EN wiki admins - The theory that making it easier to get rid of admins is a solution to the decline in their active numbers

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 05:51 PM 5/31/2010, David Lindsey wrote:
>The key is not making it easier to remove adminship.  This proposal gets us
>closer to the real problem, but fails to fully perceive it as does the
>common call to separate the functions of adminship.

Generally, Mr. Lindsey has written a cogent examination of certain 
aspects of the problem. Let me reframe part of this. What is needed 
is not exactly "making it easier to remove adminship," but making it 
easier to regulate and restrain administrative action. His proposal 
is one approach to that, dividing actions into types. I suggested 
something *somewhat* similar in pointing out that bureaucrats were a 
group that might be trusted to make decisions about use of admin 
tools, i.e., to receive and judge, ad-hoc, complaints, and warn the 
admin when it was considered there was a problem, or, in the extreme, 
remove the tools.

Expanding the bureaucrat role is one fairly obvious and reasonable 
solution, and it seems to work like this, with bureaucrats or 
stewards, on the smaller wikis that don't have an ArbComm.

Given clear rules regarding recusal, when it's necessary, and when 
it's not, and what to do if there is any reasonable possibility of an 
appearance of bias, most admnistrators will quite properly restrain 
themselves voluntarily.

However, I'm not necessarily exercised if a long-time user is 
short-blocked, because a long-time user should understand it and see 
it as no big deal. It all depends on how it's done. If a long-time 
user engages in behavior that would cause a short-time user to be 
blocked, what, exactly, is the problem with being blocked? If there 
is a problem, if the user will go away mad, abandoning years of 
effort because of one possibly bad block, there is, right there, a 
sign of a serious problem, ownership of the project or of an article. 
Maybe its time for that user to do something else. If it was a short 
block, he or she can come back any time they want, after the block expires.

Short blocks are very different from longer blocks. Short blocks are 
true police actions, equivalent to a sergeant-at-arms conducting a 
disruptive member of an assembly from the room when they get too hot. 
It's no big deal, and nobody is sanctioned for it, unless they truly 
get violent in the process. If an admin blocks *any* user and abuses 
the user in the process, without necessity, that's a problem, and 
it's a problem even if the block was correct as a block.