Wikipedia:Adminship survey/G

(14/29/10) I am satisfied with the way de-adminship is currently being handled (i.e. Arbitration)

Points to think about :

Is ArbCom doing a good job in handling cases of admin abuse? Are they too stern? Too lenient?
Is the current method effective in dealing with problem admins? Will it still be in future?

Yes

By and large --Mcginnly | Natter 15:18, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
No better proposal yet offered. Note that disgruntled vandals far outnumber abusive admins. --AnonEMouse ^(squeak) 17:10, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
It's fine. Flagrant abuse gets handled quickly, and if there are admins guilty of "low level abuse", then they can be Rfarb'd. If they aren't, then it's because the people who feel they're doing wrong aren't taking the time to present a case with evidence. I'm sometimes left with the impression that some people are looking for a way to basically just press a button and 'zap' an admin they disagree with without needing to do anything else. If that's the end result folks are looking for, it's a terrible, terrible idea. Each person who is an admin has worked hard to improve the project in different areas, and has often invested months if not years of work in the project. For someone to casually strip them of the admin bit is not only a slap in their face, but more importantly it's an end-run around the community who both supported them in their RFA and who might disagree with the objector. De-adminship needs to be both A: Possible and B: Something that requires a bit of effort. - CHAIRBOY (☎) 17:33, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Agree; administrators are dealt with appropriately. I'd be open to another proposal, but I don't think you could protect it from tampering, and then there's the "looking over my shoulder" attitude that an admin might be prone to take. The one case I was involved with where an administrator overstepped their boundaries was Freestylefrappe, and he/she was de-adminned rather speedily, I thought. Ral315 (talk) 17:59, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Working fine. Demonstrable pattern of abuse leads to removal of rights, which is as it should be. Christopher Parham (talk) 18:42, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Yes. It takes a long time and a number of incidents for someone to be de-admined. That's as it should be. The difference between a mistake and abuse is the long-term pattern. Chick Bowen 18:44, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Yes seems fine, the recent trend of those who seem likely to be desysopped, doing so "voluntarily" before arbcom get to do so suggests there is a reasonable belief in arbcom showing it's teeth. --pgk 20:27, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
If an admin is chronically abusing his or her tools (and even constructing a false sense of superiority to facilitate abuse) after discussion occurs, then an ArbCom case might be needed. It's important, however, that de-sysopping loses some of the connotations that it shares with community bans; evidenced by de-admins leaving Wikipedia permanently. If wikidrama could be purposefully decreased by mediators, then ArbCom seems like a good route to go for such a (usually) drastic action. Gracenotes ^T § 20:54, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Qualification: total de-sysopping is being handled well, but admin probation (similar to regular probation, just including use of tools) should probably be implemented. Gracenotes ^T § 22:51, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
By and large, yes. Remember, the majority of admin "abuse" is defined highly subjectively and consists, at root, of doing something I don't like rather than something that's against policy. It should be easier to register an ArbCom case for abuse of admin privileges, given that RfCs on admins as with all editors who do anythign even remotely controversial tend to become a cesspit, and posts of rouge admin abuse are daily fare at the noticeboards; an impartial review and quick accept or strikeout would be useful, but in the end the genuinely abusive admins get desysopped and the ones who have a bad day do not, which is as it should be. The textbook case here is MONGO: ArbCom did the right thing both times, and for the right reasons. Guy (Help!) 23:21, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
By and large, yes. I do have some specific instances where I've had strong disagreement, but by and large, yes. —Doug Bell ^talk 23:43, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I just don't see a problem with too many evil admins running amok. It's a rare enough problem that desysopping doesn't need a specialized process aside from ArbCom and emergency desysopping, in my opinion, and "reconfirmation" is certainly the wrong way to go. Grand master ka 08:44, 19 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I trust ArbCom to make correct decisions as I agree with their rulings on various cases. Captain panda In vino veritas 23:48, 2 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Tony Sidaway 01:00, 7 April 2007 (UTC) The arbitration committee usually makes a good judgement.[reply]
I'm pretty happy with how it happens now. As AnonEMouse said (and we almost never agree) the disgruntled vandals far outnumber abusive admins. Any other process is open to abuse by them. The only alternative I see is CAT:AOR, which isn't for the faint at heart. -Royalguard11(Talk·Review Me!) 20:34, 21 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

No

No. It's too difficult to remove abusive admins, and the community has not shown the ability to accurately and neutrality judge those situations. --badlydrawnjeff talk 15:47, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I can think of a few abusive admins who really need to have their bit taken away. However, there are no processes by which one can nominate for deadminship - someone has to edit war for a very, very long time before ArbCom take it on, low level abuse is simply ignored. Dev920 (Have a nice day!) 15:52, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Current process is not scalable, which is my biggest concern with it. Current standards are too lenient. (But let's not fall off the other side of the horse either.) GRBerry 16:02, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
An incredibly difficult and slow, often frustrating and upsetting process for both sides. In my opinion all administrators should be open to recall. --Majorly _{(o rly?)} 16:09, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I can think of way too many abusive admins, thus the system is not working. thanks/Fenton, Matthew Lexic Dark 52278 Alpha 771 16:40, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Adminship standards should be high, uncompromising, and more rigorously enforced. I agree with Jeff on the neutrality issue. MLA 17:06, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The current process takes much too long, requires an Arbcom hearing. It further then suffers from the complaintants inability to locate others who may have had problems with the admin, without being cited for canvasing. An open transparent community discussion is more in line. The community appoints, the community should be able to take away. --Nuclear~~Zer0~~ 17:29, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
No. Process is too complicated. ST47Talk 18:15, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
It's too difficult to remove them, because it needs too great a consensus on persistent wrong behavior; the standard should be set somewhat lower, because we really have no subsequent appeal over most individual decisions. I agree that all admins should be open to recall, but I can easily see how this can be abused & it would need safeguards, such as not more than once a year. There should also be a way of encouraging inactive admins to give up the position--it should be a working position, not primarily a prestige position.DGG 19:07, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Per multiple voices above. It's a broken process once you get in, there seems to be no oversight of these people or consequences for their actions. Just H 20:00, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
No. De-adminship, besides the worst of the worst, is only possible when there is a wronged party who is extremely wiki-experienced, perserverent, and above all innocent of any past wrong-doing themselves. There should be an effort by neutral parties to ensure admins maintain high standards. Or at the least a neutral party should look into admin conduct when there is a complaint. Leaving inexperienced, confused complaintants to file RFC's against admins is a horrible way of doing things. The lack of people commenting on admin RFC's is disgraceful. Dispute resolution is in much worse shape than RFA (and in my opinion more important).--BirgitteSB 20:41, 16 February 2007 (UTC)
I agree with Dev920. Yuser31415 22:23, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
NO! Beyond what Birgitte says, part of the problem is structural, because admins have life tenure - if admins had limited terms, those who were abusive would be much less likely to be reconfirmed, which would solve the problem of low-level abusive admins, after a time. The current process too often turns legitimate complaints by users into character assassinations of the user, or exercises in stonewalling by a united front of admins protecting their own. Αργυριου (talk) 22:39, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
No, per Dev920. Adminship should be no big deal, and LOSING your adminship should be no big deal, if the situation warrents it. ^demon^{[omg plz]} 23:21, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
God no! The system isn't working right now. There are admins who abuse their rights every-so-often, but because the way it is set up, unless the abuse is very obvious, long-time members get 'get out of jail free' cards and sometimes ArbCom doesn't except the cases that really need to be reviewed. Thus system is broken. — Moe 23:51, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
No blame to ArbCom which is doing the best that it can, but there needs to be a way of remiing admins who have lost the trust of the community without all the time and difficulty of an arbitration preceeding. Someone can demonstrate that they are not an asset to the project as a sysop without the kind of flagrant policy violations that are currently required. Eluchil404 05:27, 17 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure I've seen a good decision on this matter yet. Opabinia regalis 05:42, 17 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The real problem area is not abuse - there are recent cases which prove that abuse is quickly dealt with - but negative net value as Eluchil404 says. Not simple to prove to arbcom, and requires extreme measures for something that ideally should be easy to deal with. The current system doesn't correspond with the idea that sysop rights are "not a big deal". I feel that most RfA problems are down to the perceived difficulty of removing incompetent, tendentious, and generally dimwitted admins. We have surprisingly few of these, but they do tend to stand out. Angus McLellan (Talk) 12:33, 17 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Adminship is not tenure. Simple. --- RockMFR 21:15, 17 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Definitely. I have nearly 30,000 edits and no blocks, but admin misconduct - against which in reality there is no recourse for non-admins who do not wish to undergo great stress in a nearly hopeless cause - drove me away for seven months. I would prefer to see non-renewable one year terms as an unacceptable proportion of admins become arrogant about their status. CalJW 00:25, 18 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Certainly not. It's not Arbcom's fault; in the cases they recieve, they do very well in this context; people are desysopped if they deserve to be, and are not if otherwise. The issue here is that you have to be insane to want to be involved in an Arbcom case, and an arbitration process is not friendly to the newcomers who are the most likely victims of bad admins. I'm sure there's at least one admin that should be desysopped, but we don't know about it because the only people affected, for some reason or another, will not initiate formal dispute resolution. -Amarkov moo! 16:25, 19 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
If its not a big deal, removing it should not involve the horrible length of processes it does now. If it is a big deal, there should be better ways to complain about abuse. --Cpt. Morgan (Reinoutr) 13:10, 21 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
This is a serious issue. It's also one of the criticisms of the Wikipedia system I hear most often. I see quite a bit of admin abuse (or at least, decorum not befitting an admin). .V. _[_Talk|Email] 14:41, 22 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
No, and that pushes RFA standards up as a result. Titoxd^(?!?) 23:36, 26 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Strongest possible "NO". While I fully respect most every arbitration ruling, it should not take dozens of people and weeks (if not months) of time to desysop someone who is clearly abusing the tools. The fact that there is no way to simply request deadminship via a !voting process similar to RfA is, in my opinion, a big mistake. I know there have been many policy proposals regarding deadminship in the past, and I'm disappointed that none of them have stuck. In short, it is far too difficult to remove adminship, and it is unfair to the community that there is no way to state displeasure with an admin's actions that will have any sort of impact. And then, of course, there are the cases of admins who have themselves been blocked multiple times for disruption or warring, yet still have the mop; this is criminal. I feel that perhaps the single biggest problem with WP is deadminship- that admins can sometimes get away with unchecked abuse, and that there's a fairly good process to allow the community to show approval, yet little if any way to show disapproval. -- Kicking222 00:10, 28 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
ArbComm is not a very good way to deal with this. Some other way of review would be better. Bucketsofg 00:20, 28 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Far too difficult to achieve anything like a just resolution. Most complainers are smeared as trolls, even when the admin in question is clearly in the wrong. This needs fixing; it's one of the most clearly broken community issues. Grace Note 09:26, 3 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Absolutely not! There are some very poor admins here who abuse their power and there seems to be no easy way to get rid of them. Crunch 12:41, 4 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
No, for laughing out loud. Even in my short time here I've seen more than one problematic admin and one who certainly harms Wikipedia. It has been said above: It's no fault of the ArbCom, but of the threshold at which policy and ArbCom become effective instruments. Constant low-level incivility, playing dumb on newbies, then blocking them when they understandably explode, is one of several disruptive patterns that seem to be the status quo among some admins. —KNcyu38 (talk • contribs) 22:28, 7 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
All admins should be open for recall. If getting an adminship is 'no big deal', having it questioned occasionaly shouldn't be, neither.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk} 07:12, 24 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Other

This "under a cloud" verbiage is nonsense. Stripped of bit, bit gone. Not stripped of bit, bit stays utill competent authority strips bit. No more, no less. Arbcom needs to step up and take a stand - not let people get harassed off the project and then sanction this behavior. How to get rid of an admin in two steps? 1. File RFAR. 2. Harass admin. The step 0, where "admin has a pattern of doing bad things" is not requred if user is good enough at step 2.Hipocrite - «Talk» 16:00, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
There needs to be a better way of deadminning admins who abuse the tools without having to drag it through arbcom, whilst still rejecting, quickly, any frivolous requests for desysopping. But that's always going to be a subjective call, and so perhaps leaving it with arbcom is the best way. Proto ► 16:13, 16 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
It's holding up at the moment, as far as I can tell, but I agree that it doesn't scale well and it's possible that it will collapse after a while with the increasing load. --ais523 17:23, 16 February 2007 (U T C)
ais523 states it well. I also happen to participate at Category:Administrators open to recall - which I think is a very good concept. Durova^Charge! 01:10, 17 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not 100% satisfied, but the current systems are better than any other proposal. Daniel.Bryant 04:13, 17 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The current system works, but the process needs to be streamlined. ChazBeckett 13:48, 17 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with Proto, we need an easier way of de-admining people that easily dismisses improper requests, Unfortunately, I can't think of a solution. Thus I don't think there should be a change until there's a better proposal. James086 ^Talk 14:59, 17 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The issue isn't so much that de-adminship is handled incorrectly. People who should be removed as admins are, eventually, and if they quit the project, I can't say that I would feel the loss of someone who warranted de-adminship that badly. I don't see any way to make the process faster while still maintaining good decisions. Similarly, I can only think of one case where I even suspect that someone might have been desysopped improperly, and that's borderline. The current Arbcom system doesn't scale, either, but that's easily solved by electing more arbitrators; it's not like there is a deficiency of people who would make good ones. My issue is the same as Hipocrite's; it is far too easy to use the process as a sword to harass an admin who's done nothing wrong. -Amarkov moo! 18:55, 17 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Like others, I am concerned that only the most severe of admin abuses are being picked up by ArbCom. Unfortunately I am not aware of a better system currently available to us: both the mooted admin recall, and request for de-adminship have serious pitfalls. It seems to me that this is just a case of having to make do with what we have until something better comes along. Rje 23:46, 17 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Not necessarily totally enamoured with the current process, but agree that most admins are good and that there's not any truly awful admins (that I know of) which haven't been picked up by ArbCom. I've not been swayed by any of the reform proposals, and particularly not the admins open to recall category. For now the status quo has to suffice. --kingboyk 17:06, 14 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]