User:Swarm/The RfA collapse

By now it should be obvious to most that RfA is currently in a state, or is at least on the immediate verge of, complete collapse. From June 2005 to March 2008, with the exception of only two of those 34 months, RfA resulted in the promotion of at least 20 administrators per month; in the majority of these months at least 30 were promotions and in several instances at least 40 promotions occurred in a single month. However, since then, the number of RfAs&mdash;both successful and unsuccessful&mdash;have been steadily declining. After continual steady decline, August 2010 saw the last time at least 10 admins were promoted.

The last ditch efforts
By early 2011, spurred on by a comment from Jimmy Wales decrying RfA as "horrible and broken", an RfA reform project was founded by Kudpung. The project, coordinated by two admins and two non-admins (including myself), became massive in scope, collecting and centralizing vast amounts of data, generating enormous amounts of discussion regarding every type of RfA reform, and attempted to keep the notion of improving RfA relevant and current within the community.

The project attempted to stand out from previous failed initiatives by focusing on moderate proposals and realistic ways on implementing them. Focus was put on ways to improve RfA without having to go through dramatic, drawn out community debates. Small initiatives such as request an RfA nomination were put into place by our own volition, while we hoped to secure the support of the Foundation in implementing more significant changes. Meanwhile, proposals that we considered putting to the community were simple, streamlined and palatable.

The project seemed quite promising, garnering a task force of more than 40 users and the input of dozens more, culminating in the Foundation's endorsement of the project we originally sought. Unfortunately, while they offered to support our project with "research, stats, and building the case for a sensible alternative", they proved unwilling to directly implement any changes &mdash;a step we felt was necessary in order to bring about any real change. This blow, combined with gradual erosion of our active participants and the coordinators' inactivity on Wikipedia resulted in the stagnation of the project. Although it accomplished much during its time, the project's demise was hugely unfortunate in the efforts to save RfA.