[WikiEN-l] Thoughts on the process of requesting adminship

Thu Jun 30 23:42:43 UTC 2005

I was going to post this as a reply to another posting, but my thoughts 
have become somewhat general, and so I'm posting this as a new entry.

I have come to realise that our current process of requesting adminship 
is at a sharp contrast to the wiki model in general. I have come to 
believe that we are not following our own principles that we so highly 
value.

Why do we let anyone edit? Because we believe that assuming good faith 
is a good thing. We let people edit because they can't do any lasting 
damage anyway; if they turn out to be editing in bad faith, we can still 
revert their edits and block them later. No permanent damage done. We 
also let people edit because we believe that they are innocent until 
they show themselves guilty.

Incidentally, with admin powers, we handle it quite differently. Not 
only does becoming an admin require majority support, but it is even the 
case that many people vote "oppose" on the grounds of lack of 
dedication, lack of a minimum number of edits, or lack of involvement in 
community issues. They can apparently get away with an argument that 
essentially amounts to saying "we can't really be sure they're innocent, 
so we'll have to assume they're guilty for now". As a result, there are 
people who are not admins even though they would never be doing anything 
wrong if they were. Those people should be admins.

If we disregard for a moment that admins can delete images permanently, 
which surely can be rectified in a future software update, admins cannot 
do any lasting damage, just like editors. As such, their situation is a 
quite close analogy to the case of the editors. If we applied the 
current request-for-adminship philosophy to editing, we would have to 
vote on everybody's right to edit before allowing them to edit!

Suppose for a moment that users were to start out as admins, and only 
lose the admin powers when they abuse them. (No, I'm not suggesting 
this, but let's explore this hypothetical scenario.) Suppose also that 
if admin powers are removed from an account, all accounts that are 
editing from the same IP also lose admin powers. Of course many of you 
will object to this model, because users could just open a new account 
from another IP to re-gain the administrative privileges. But if you 
think about it, editors are in exactly the same position: If they're 
blocked, they only need to edit from another IP to evade the block. We 
already have the societal mechanics (policies and procedures) in place 
to deal with this. The situation is exactly analogous.

However, I am not suggesting such a radical change.

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.

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. 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.

What if tens of people gang up, all become admins and then do lots of 
bad stuff? Well, it is already possible for people to gang up -- and 
indeed, gangs of web forum users have done so in the past.

Please discuss! :)
Timwi