User:Paine Ellsworth/Proposal

First became acquainted with this kind of situation while I was in Ethiopia in 1974, when Haile Selassie was ousted by his military establishment. The general in charge declared the government to be a "one-party socialist regime". Essentially that is what adminship is, a one-party regime. So the problem we face is that we say admins are "vetted by the community" and thereby they gain the community's trust. But who exactly is the community? A fairly big RfA would involve perhaps 200 or so editors at week's end, but is that really the "community"? I could be wrong, but I think the enwiki community is the editors who are active, and even the large turnouts at RfA constitute only a small fraction of the total "community". Some might say that the silent majority acquiesces, which justifies the "vetted by" thing. Others might say that the silent majority just doesn't care one way or another, which makes the "vetted by" thing just a false security. Either way, this is probably the only place that we will find voting in a one-party regime. Who normally chooses new members in such a regime? New members are not voted in by the community, they are accepted and appointed by older members of the regime. This leads me to think that new admins ought to be accepted and appointed by experienced admins. So that is my proposal. Toss the very thing that nobody really likes anyway, the thing that has caused so much discussion and contention for so many years: Toss out the RfA. Give admins the go-ahead to devise a plausible system whereby they seek out and choose editors they consider good candidates, find out if the editors would be interested in becoming admins, and so on. There is no reason to give the so-called community a say in the matter. The vast majority of the community doesn't participate anyway. Admins are best suited to choose who should have the mop.