Forum:Adminship request process

To date administrators have simply been users chosen by bureaucrats to have the extra access. Very seldom has there been any discussion with anyone else involved in the selection. I think that method is good for wikis starting out or wikis with less of an established community. Considering we are a much larger wiki and have been doing stuff through community discussion in this part of the forum, I think it's time we set-up a more formal process. I'd like it if people could comment here and say if they agree or not.

I'd also like if people could suggest on how they think it should be done. One thing I must insist on is that it can't be too lenient. I have seen one wiki where I think editors only needed >100 mainspace edits and a >50% community vote to become an admin. Despite being a small wiki, they wound up with ~40 admins, including many immature ones, resulting in months of chaos. I don't think this site will end up that bad, but would like to steer clear of that general direction.

Some suggestions/things to think about:
 * It should not be purely a vote. Someone giving a reason they believe the nominee should or shouldn't be an admin should be worth more than someone simply saying in favour or against. A count of people in favour and against can be used to give some general idea, but just barely passing 50% shouldn't be enough. On Wikipedia, I think, they say most who get >80% approval pass. Most who get <70% approval don't. Anything in between is left to the bureaucrat's better judgement.
 * How long should a request be up before a decision is made. On a number of larger wikis, they give it one week. Shorten if it's an obvious fail and lengthen if it needs more time. Given that we don't have as many editors who comment on decisions like these and not all of them check the community discussion forum (or wherever this would be set-up) on a regular basis, we may need more time.
 * How do people feel about self-nominations?
 * Don't think of being an admin as having a higher rank or influence over other editors. Administrators have extra access they can use to enforce established rules or what the community has agreed on, not to get what they want.
 * If we do end-up giving out lots of admin access in a short period of time, the process probably isn't strict enough. Please don't support users just because you get along with them. Support them if you think giving them access will help the site. Don't support yourself because you want to be an admin, support yourself if the site can benefit from having you as an admin.
 * You do not have to be in favour of introducing this process. If you think it will damage the site more than help it, please let us know and say why you feel that way.

-- Deltaneos (talk) 20:12, September 25, 2010 (UTC)