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Wikipedia:Requests for de-adminship

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Throughout the history of the project, there has been a policy that users may have their adminship removed only in cases of clear abuse. While some users have advocated some form of "quick and easy" de-adminship to ensure that admins have the continued support of the community, Jimbo Wales has stated that the presence of any process to remove adminship would result in a reduced motivation for all parties to work together to seek consensus. Through 2003, there had been only one case where adminship was revoked.

Starting in 2004, the arbitration committee has been dealing 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.

Cases

As of February 2006, there are eleven cases, involving fourteen users, where adminship has been removed involuntarily for more than a trivial length of time:

Removed by community decision or other circumstances:

  1. Isis was banned after making legal threats against another contributor. She had previously been an administrator, and is the only administrator to have been 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.
  2. Uwe Kils had his admin status removed by Eloquence in May 2003 as a result of his involvement in a campaign by Vikings to censor sexually explicit content on Wikipedia. Most of the discussion was on the Village pump and the mailing list.
  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 desysoped 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 no explanation was given for the deletions, the intervention was taken to prevent him going on an image deletion rampage, since deleted images often cannot 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.

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.
  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 self-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 had their admin status removed by Jimbo Wales on February 6, 2006, after a wheel war. The arbitration committee confirmed the decision. Three others were removed as admins at the same time, but were allowed to regain their admin status automatically.
  5. Freestylefrappe lost adminship on February 12, 2006 as a result of an arbitration ruling. He may reapply for adminship at any time.
  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.

Removed for lack of response to Arbitration case:

  1. 172 left Wikipedia in March 2005 while an arbitration case was underway. The Arbitration Committee decided that his admin status would be removed unless he returned to address the evidence in the case against him. Although 172 has returned to editing, his admin status has not been restored.

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 reapplications for adminship).

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 Wikipedia: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

Voluntary self-revocation of adminship can be requested at m:Requests for permissions.

Requests to revoke another user's adminship may be made using the dispute resolution process.

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