User:BlankVerse/adminship3

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 * Note: This is an old essay from my User page (orginally started on 20 August 2005 and archived 17 March 2006). Unfortunately, too much of it is still true at the time that I am writing this (4 January 2007).

On misbehaving administrators

Why is this page black? Just one part of the solution: There are some editors who don't necessarily need to be banned, but just need a  time out , which is why the Wikipedia has a temporary blocking process. Well admins are editors too, and they also occasionally step over the bounds of appropriate behavior for editors. What is worse is that they can use their admin tools to do their misbehavior.
 * 1) Because I am mourning the loss of  civility  and and the  loss  of too many good editors from the Wikipedia.
 * 2) Because the Wikipedia has become a victim of its own success and its internal mechanisms for helping maintain civility have not scaled well.
 * 3)  Requests for comments  now generates more heat than light.
 * 4) Even some members of the  Mediation Committee  admit that it is not working and skip  Requests for mediation  and go on to the next step.
 * 5) Finally there is  Requests for arbitration , which takes forever to make decisions, and seemingly refuses to take on the bad behavior of some administrators unless the admin's behavior is so egregious that it can't ignore it.
 * 6) I will not even attempt to enumerate the other dysfunctional areas of the Wikipedia, such as  Articles for deletion .

Right now there is no quick and effective way to punish a misbehaving administrator or even stop their misbehavior. If another admin blocks them, they can unblock themself. If an article is protected, they can edit it anyway. If they are in a revert war, they can continually use their rollback tool. And they can do all of this basically with impunity.

Because admins are trusted members of the Wikipedia community I feel that their misbehavior must be taken more seriously than those actions of other editors. There needs to be a small group of trusted supervisor administrators who have the ability to temporarily block misbehaving admins from doing any editing for periods of time up to a week and removal of admin powers for at least a month based upon the severity of the misbehavior. Any further misbehavior would be grounds for permanent removal as an administrator and they would have to reapply at Requests for adminship.


 * (Also, the number of admins is growing so large, and the Wikipedia is growing so complex, that it would be a very good idea to have volunteer "mentor" admins to help show the newbie admins the lay of the land.)

Look at the  Requests for adminship  page. It says, " Admins...are held to high standards, as they are perceived by some users as the "official face" of Wikipedia. " Unfortunately the first part of that statement is not true. Instead, because they are admins, they can do practically anything they want without facing any consequences in almost all cases of admin misbehavior. Because they are admins they are given much more slack than other Wikipedia editors for any of their misbehavior. This needs to be changed.