Forum:Retiring the Inactive Administrator Policy

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I know it looks like I'm taking a gamble by even bringing this up, especially as we're trying to ready ourselves for TS4, but I'd appreciate if everybody took a read and voiced their opinion on this, regardless of whether you agree or not.

As I'm sure you all know, we have a policy known as the Inactive Administrator Policy, which is used to enforce activity amongst admins and bureaucrats and those who are inactive for a prolonged period of time, usually 3 months, are desysopped and they can regain their rights without penalty within 6 months. There are pros and cons to having this policy, of which I will list below:

Pros

• Encourages activity amongst the administration.
• Makes it easier for users to know which admins are active.

Cons

• "Activity" can be seen as a vague term. While our current policy doesn't rely on arbitrary figures, defining activity can be difficult for a user who makes only a few edits a month.
• Enforcing the policy on bureaucrats requires Wikia Staff intervention to remove their rights. This is rarely upheld due to the administrative burden this places on the active bureaucrats. I personally don't like how bureaucrats basically get a "get out of jail free card" with this, especially if we're making the point that the differences between administrators and bureaucrats are few and minor.
• It's common belief that desysopping/decratting a user should be done the same way they were sysopped/cratted - by a community discussion - the policy doesn't allow for that.

While having the policy in place does indeed have its fair share of positives and negatives, the same can be said for retiring it:

Pros

• Less administrative burden.
• Allows the community to focus more on the active administrators rather than the inactive.
• Users - admins and bureaucrats included - come and go all the time. Dropping the policy would adhere to reality.

Cons

• One could argue that admins who are "out of touch" with the community shouldn't be enforcing policies and such.
• Could possibly result in some users leaving completely, seeing as they wouldn't need to do anything to keep their rights.
• Next to no encouragement of activity.

The reason I'm proposing this is because after some thought it seems that having this policy does carry with it some curious flaws, some of which are admittedly unavoidable. It's a reality that users will always come and go and the process of removing their rights - especially for bureaucrats - does place burden on determining activity, as well as the unfair advantage that bureaucrats have over administrators when it comes to this rule. We can always promote more administrators and bureaucrats if need be without worrying who's inactive and ensuring that we have enough staff to get by.

As a compromise, I'd support removing inactive administrators from {{Administrators}}, like what was done a little while back. This would make clear who is actually active.

I'd like to say from the offset that I don't mind keeping the Inactive Administrator Policy nor do I mind retiring it. Having noticed a few things across numerous wikis, this one included, I think this proposal is worth thinking about into whether or not this policy is ultimately beneficial for the wiki or not.

What's everybody's stance on this? Lost Labyrinth • (c) • (b) 12:45, August 30, 2013 (UTC)

Discussion

The idea of demoting admins was always much simpler than the actual practice of doing so. For one, it's deceptively difficult to define when someone is 'active' versus 'inactive'; does one edit after three months of no edits make that administrator 'active' again? And what if that edit is only a spelling change on a single article, or some other very minor edit? Ultimately, the rule as it's written is a bit too black-or-white about it, when it really is an abstract issue. However, what ultimately kills this policy is the fact that Bureaucrats are for all intents and purposes exempted from it. When the policy was first enacted, Staff was approached about demoting the inactive bureaucrats on the wiki at the time, and they declined to do so. They basically stated that a bureaucrat won't be demoted unless they do something to warrant demotion; simply being inactive isn't enough.

With all this in mind, I support the retirement of this policy. However, I would like to suggest that we adopt a replacement policy which governs, among other things, administrator retirement, removing inactive administrators/bureaucrats from templates like {{Administrators}}, etc. However, the substance of that policy would be different from the one up for removal, so I'll propose it separately. -- LostInRiverview ^{talk ~ blog} 17:58, August 30, 2013 (UTC)