Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:05:24 UTC
By popular demand, I am posting a request to allow administrators to sacrifice their sysop bit in order to take away one other administrator's sysop bit. There are many reasons for this. First, a few administrators, like Wonderfool on Wiktionary and Robdurbar on Wikipedia, become vandals and must be taken down ASAP. Second, some public terminals are zombies with keyloggers on them. Administrators who uses such terminals could get their accounts compromised by a vandal. Third, the steep price of losing one's sysop status will keep most administrators from abusing this. Fourth, by pointing the business end of this ability at oneself, it makes an easy way to resign without asking for a steward's help, which might have prevented Robdurbar from needing to go on a vandalism spree. Fifth, someone suggested that this would be a way for wheel warriors to stop wheel wars by themselves. If this ability is implemented, a log for this type of action must be implemented. It cannot be a standard log, because stewards must be able to process and mark incidents in the log. When the ability is used, a new case is generated. These cases must be differentiated from other cases. The possible statuses (which should only be changed by stewards for reasons below) should be New, Assigned to a steward (which should indicate the steward's name), Forwarded to ArbCom (which would apply only to wikis with Arbitration Committees), and Closed. If the case is a resignation, it should automatically be entered as Closed instead of New in the sacrifice log. Whenever this ability is used, a log entry must be generated for a steward to look at. The reason that only a steward should process this is that stewards are trusted enough to make final decisions on who should stay desysoped. If it is a resignation, no action needs to be taken. If it is an obvious case like the Robdurbar or Wonderfool cases, the steward can simply repromote the hero who stopped the rogue administrator. If it is a wheel war, the steward will have to investigate the case if it is on a small wiki and decide what to do. If it is on a wiki with an ArbCom, the case should be forwarded to the ArbCom for investigation. After the appropriate actions have been taken (e.g. the ArbCom closes the case or the steward who takes the case makes a decision), the steward needs to mark the incident as closed in the log. If it is decided that later on that bureaucrats should be able to desysop others, then the ability of handling sacrifice log entries should also be granted to them as well. Of course, attempts to take away a steward's sysop bit should fail and result in no action whatsoever besides an error page explaining that stewards are immune to this, because stewards are required to be able to promote and demote other users.
Please develop a consensus on a particular wiki for this, and link to the discussion that indicates the consensus for enabling it on that wiki. It should not be difficult to write an extension to do what you request, but it's not useful if no one wants it. This will almost certainly not be added as a feature in the core software.
(In reply to comment #1) > Please develop a consensus on a particular wiki for this, and link to the discussion that indicates the consensus for enabling it on that wiki. It should not be difficult to write an extension to do what you request, but it's not useful if no one wants it. This will almost certainly not be added as a feature in the core software. This is the first time I have made such a proposal, and I had to go with my best guess at where to post this. I am not sure where it should be posted, and the guidelines at the English Wikipedia's village pump said that this kind of thing should go here, because this requires a software modification. I was getting much praise for my idea on my talk page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jesse_Viviano#Sacrificing_sysop_bits. Which section of the Village Pump should I send this to, then?
Such a far-reaching change would probably, according to enwiki convention, require a few weeks to a few months of discussion followed by a lengthy poll publicized on the Recentchanges page. See [[Wikipedia:How to create policy]]. This is a major change and the sysadmins will not enable it until there's clear agreement within the wiki concerned.
