Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-03-14/Guanaco adminship

A request was made last Tuesday to restore the adminship of Guanaco, the only user so far to have lost adminship as the result of an arbitration case. Guanaco's nomination received considerable support, but with the one-week voting period coming to a close, it appears that it will not succeed on this occasion.

How Guanaco lost his adminship
Guanaco lost his adminship as the result of an arbitration case that arose when he blocked Cantus, who was subject to a revert parole from a previous arbitration case. Cantus tried to complain about the block on the Village pump and a number of admins' talk pages, but Guanaco reverted these edits because Cantus was circumventing the block.

The block turned out to be improper because there was no actual violation of the parole; the decision found that Cantus had "limited his reverts to a barely acceptable level." The ruling also noted that Guanaco's use of admin abilities had been controversial on several previous occasions, and the arbitrators decided to require Guanaco to reapply for adminship.

The ensuing vote on whether Guanaco should remain an admin ended almost in a dead heat, with supporters outnumbering opponents by one, and a number of people deciding to remain neutral on the question. As there was no consensus for his continued adminship, steward Angela removed his sysop status on 10 December.

The new request
With nearly three months having passed, Snowspinner nominated Guanaco for adminship again, calling the removal "a misguided debacle masquerading as a referendum." Guanaco accepted the nomination, saying, "I hope the community will forgive my past mistakes."

This time around, the vote was not quite as evenly split, as Guanaco received more support, including some from people who had opposed or remained neutral in the previous vote. Cyrius commented, "That Guanaco was able to accept the removal of his admin status speaks well of him."

However, some users felt that the intervening time was not enough to resolve their concerns and continued to oppose. Ruhrjung observed that on its own, Guanaco's editing history since losing his adminship "would hardly have motivated a candidacy."

Early in the voting, several people registered themselves as being neutral. As more information came out about Guanaco's recent removal of Willy on Wheels from the list of banned users (for semantic reasons), along with his use of bots, these users joined the ranks of those opposing adminship. This seemed to swing the balance, as before these revelations the nomination was somewhat above the 80% percent support threshold that usually signals a successful candidate. The shift left the request likely to fail, barring a significant turnout of additional supporters over the final day.