Wikiversity

Should Wiktionary administrators be removable by one third superminority?

This resource is a wikidebate, a collaborative effort to gather and organize all arguments on a given issue. It is a tool of argument analysis or pro-and-con analysis. This is not a place to defend your preferred points of view, but original arguments are allowed and welcome. See the Wikidebate guidelines for more.

The English Wiktionary administrators are not removable one by third superminority; plain 50% majority is required. Should they be so removable?

Wiktionary administrators should be removable by one third superminority

edit

Arguments for

edit
  •   Pro It would mean that a person can continue being an administrator only if there is a consensus for that, for some value of "consensus". It would greatly increase accountability, which is currently missing probably in part since administrator groups tend to behave like cliques or priestly classes, and protect their group or class interests, showing group solidarity. Experience shows overt misconduct including out of process deletions and untrue reasons for deletions as well as overt incivility by administrators go unpunished and the administrators guilty of these obtain remarkable support.

Arguments against

edit
  •   Con It would make administrators too vulnerable by problematic editors and malcontents, and reduce administrator ability to effectively limit harmful conduct for the fear of making too many enemies by blocking them.
    •   Objection A policy similar to the proposed one is implemented in Czech Wikipedia (since 2007) and Czech Wiktionary (since 2016), and it has proved to work reasonably well. The above is a mere speculation not based on any empirical evidence.
      •   Objection It is not obvious that it has proved to work reasonably well without having a careful look at how these projects operate and whether it caused actual problems. In Czech Wiktionary, the policy lead to a great reduction of administrator force, and one would have to carefully verify that the loss was a result of bad administration rather than opposition by disgruntled problematic malcontents.
        •   Objection Fair enough as for Czech Wiktionary; one has to look closely and if one is not a Czech native speaker, one may find it hard to make a proper determination. However, no such thing happened in Czech Wikipedia, which is a much larger project in terms of editors, and the English Wiktionary is much larger than the Czech Wiktionary in those terms.
  •   Con 50% is very easy to reach.
    •   Objection This is not borne out by experience in the English Wiktionary. In votes attempting to desysop administrators for misconduct, none of the votes reached 50%; most have not reached even 1/3 for desysopping.

Further reading

edit

Miscellaneous:

Votes attempting to desysop for misconduct to substantiate the no-50-percent-reached claim:

Retrieved from "https://en.wikiversity.org/w/index.php?title=Should_Wiktionary_administrators_be_removable_by_one_third_superminority%3F&oldid=2543828"