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Revision as of 06:32, 14 January 2007

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Throughout the history of the project, there has been a convention that adminship may be removed only in cases of clear abuse. Users have proposed a variety of processes to ensure that admins have the continued support of the community, but none has gained widespread acceptance.

Through 2003, there had been only one case where adminship was revoked. Since 2004, the arbitration committee has dealt with cases involving abuse of adminship, both through review of de-adminships imposed in emergencies and through removal of adminship as a remedy in an arbitration proceeding.

There have also been cases where users have voluntarily relinquished adminship, and there have been cases where adminship has been suspended temporarily to enforce a cooling-off period in conflicts between admins. Throughout the history of the project, some purportedly voluntary de-adminships have taken place in the presence of a growing consensus that adminship may not be appropriate for the affected user. The arbitration committee has taken the view that users voluntarily resigning their adminship in such a circumstance may not automatically request it back and must go through the regular processes.


Cases

As of December 2006, there are 16 cases, involving 19 users, where adminship has been removed involuntarily for more than a trivial length of time:

Removed using ad hoc decisionmaking:

  1. Isis was banned after making legal threats against another contributor. She had previously been an administrator, and became the first administrator to be banned from the project. The ban was solely due to legal threats and was unrelated to her use of administrator-specific features of the wiki. The ban was issued by Jimbo and implemented manually by developers, since at that time there was no user interface available either for banning logged-in users or for removing adminship.
  2. Uwe Kils had his admin status removed temporarily by Eloquence in May 2003 after discussion on the Village pump (Note: the relevant Village Pump edits are now lost but are probably still in a deleted archive page somewhere). The removal was a result of his involvement in a campaign by the user Vikings to censor sexually explicit content on Misplaced Pages. Uwe Kils subsequently stated that he no longer wished to be an admin, and so adminship was never restored.
  3. 168... lost adminship in March 2004 as a result of edit warring on a protected page with multiple other admins, and then deleting accusations against him on relevant project pages. During the dispute resolution process, he was temporarily desysopped following a poll, had admin privileges briefly restored, then had them removed permanently after the dispute flared up again. Jimbo and the Arbitration Committee both reviewed the action and declined to reverse it. 168... then left the project.
  4. Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason had his admin status removed as an emergency measure by Tim Starling in May 2005, after he had deleted a number of images along with his user pages. As he had given no explanation for the deletions and appeared to have discontinued making useful contributions, the intervention was taken to prevent him going on an image deletion rampage, since at the time deleted images could not be recovered (some explanation was offered later). Subsequently, a new adminship nomination in October 2005 failed to reach a consensus to restore his admin status.
  5. Husnock had his admin status removed as an emergency measure by Steward Jon Harald Søby in December 2006, due to suspicions of a compromised account.

Removed by Arbitration Committee ruling:

  1. Guanaco lost adminship in December 2004 as a result of an arbitration ruling requiring him to re-apply for adminship. The stated rationale for the ruling was an ongoing pattern of controversial use of page protection and unblocks. Guanaco's first three re-applications failed, but his fourth re-application was successful. He was later desysopped (see below), and cannot currently re-apply for adminship. He remains an admin on Wikibooks.
  2. Stevertigo lost adminship in November 2005 as a result of an arbitration ruling. Initially, he was subjected to the same re-application process as Guanaco, but after widespread objections to this procedure, the Arbitration Committee chose instead to remove admin status and leave the possibility of renomination open for the future. Stevertigo nominated himself for re-adminship on December 22, 2005, and was turned down on a vote of 16-37-5.
  3. Ed Poor lost adminship in December 2005 as a result of an arbitration ruling. Ed Poor had previously been a bureaucrat, and had resigned those powers in September 2005 in response to a previous arbitration case involving him. He also had developer access until the position of steward was created to assume some responsibilities previously held by developers.
  4. Carnildo and Karmafist and three other admins had their admin status temporarily removed by Jimbo Wales on February 6, 2006, after a wheel war. The arbitration committee was directed to make the final decision in the case, which was that Carnildo and Karmafist were to remain desysopped while the three others were allowed to regain their admin status automatically. Karmafist was blocked indefinitely from Misplaced Pages on August 30, 2006 after violating rulings of a subsequent arbitration case (block log) and was later to be considered community-banned. Carnildo was resysopped on September 5, 2006 (RfA).
  5. Freestylefrappe lost adminship on February 12, 2006 as a result of an arbitration ruling. He later applied unsuccessfully for adminship as KI without revealing his previous identity. He has since been banned.
  6. Guanaco was desysopped again on April 12, 2006 after being granted adminship for a second time, as a result of a new arbitration ruling. The ruling also denies him the right to reapply for adminship.
  7. NSLE (now Chacor) was desysopped on June 10, 2006 after the arbitration committee found evidence of sockpuppet abuse.
  8. Dbiv (later renamed to Fys) was desysopped on August 21, 2006 by an arbitration ruling, although he had resigned a few hours earlier.
  9. Everyking was desysopped on September 3, 2006 after the arbitration committee found evidence of his willingness to misuse sysop privileges to reveal sensitive deleted information. This desysopping was considered controversial by some. Everyking is permitted to reapply for adminship through RfA, but an attempt to do so in September 2006 was unsuccessful.
  10. Marudubshinki was desysopped on October 19, 2006 due to the repeated use of an unauthorised bot and related admin actions. However, he had stated that he had quit the project on September 10, and has not edited since.
  11. MONGO and Seabhcan were desysopped on December 16, 2006 for misuse of administrative tools and other reasons by arbitration ruling.

Removed for lack of response to Arbitration case:

  1. 172 left Misplaced Pages in March 2005 while an arbitration case was underway. Although the case was characterized as a "spurious arbitration on relatively flimsy evidence" in a preliminary review, the Arbitration Committee decided that his admin status would be removed unless he returned to address the case against him. 172 returned to editing later in the year, but the case had been closed due to inactivity.

In general, users who have had their admin status removed are permitted to reapply for it through the RfA process. Such reapplications rarely succeed, however (see list of RfAs of desysopped administrators).

Former processes

As noted in the cases above, revocation of adminship was previously handled:

  1. On the mailing list.
  2. On the village pump.
  3. At Misplaced Pages:Requests for review of administrative actions

Proposed processes

While other processes have been set up or proposed for "de-adminship" in the past, none have ever actually resulted in adminship being revoked.

How to request someone's de-adminship

  • A small fraction of admins have added their names to Category:Administrators open to recall, stating their intent that if a certain quantity of users ask for them to be recalled, the administrator may choose to resign voluntarily, or to engage in a discussion of such resignation. There have been several such recall proposals initiated by users, and in at least one case, the administrator did voluntarily give up adminship.

See also

Category: