User talk:Maxim/Administrator inactivity

Thoughts

Just found this essay today. Thanks for writing it. You raise some really good points and are making me think. What I don't think you resolve is the issues of when a largely inactive admin attempts to perform an administrative action for which they don't have the political capital to successfully pull off. Those parts of the essay feel disconnected from each other for me. As to the idea of having general removal parameters, rather than strict criteria, like we do at some of the PERMs is an interesting one.

One issue for me is that I feel that some crats are reluctant to say no to a restoration request. I was particularly dispirited by the discussion around Jackmcbarn's resysop request. After what I consider to be some pretty egregious cases where the crats said "sorry our hands are tied by policy, we have no choice but to resysop. It would take an RfC to change this" the community went ahead and did a two stage RfC. And then, in the very first edge case, you had crats who seemed to just not care about statements that came out of that RfC and looked for a way, within policy and guideline, to still restore the bit. This is why I wanted Jack to go through RfA again as quickly as he did and felt fortunate that he was up for doing it. I think if the community shows that it will welcome back good admin through a community process, that opens up all sorts of possibilities for the inactivity policy. Jack's RfA is not enough to mean anything but I think it's a step in the right direction. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 22:08, 4 November 2020 (UTC)

I suppose the crats aren't really a monolith. I've seen the comparison of arbcom to a herd of cats pulling in 15 different directions, and that comparison is really apt for the bureaucrats as well. With consideration to crats not being a committee in the sense the arbitrators are, you're probably seeing more of the cat-herd phenomenon in crats than you see in a modern iteration of the committee. The crat role really has changed a lot since the old days. Originally the job was closing the hundreds of RfAs (and an odd RfB) a year (because you don't want every admin to be able to make more admins), changing usernames (used to be heavy on the servers, restricted access was desired) and flagging bots (because administrators didn't change rights pre-rollback). Nowadays, renaming is off the menu; we flag a bot once in a blue moon (see Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Approved; we're as likely to veto a bot as the Governor General is to refuse Royal Assent); and perhaps slightly more often than flagging a bot we flag a new administrator. There's also inactivity and resignation desysops, and what probably attracts the most attention: bureaucrat discussions. Maybe there's a discussion to be had about re-imagining the crat role because more of it now is done collectively than individually. Among current bureaucrats, I'm 12/19 in order of appointment. When I started, the role was still that of the "old days"—we couldn't desysop and we were a month out from an inactivity policy. Maxim_(talk) 13:06, 5 November 2020 (UTC)