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How can the RFA process be improved?
I propose that the answers to this question include the following:
- Making the voting process private, rather than in public view. This would be beneficial because it would shield candidates from having to not only see every negative thing anyone may want to write about them, but also having those things permanently preserved on one of the most viewed websites in the world (at least in most cases under the current system).
- Removing the ability of voters in RFAs to comment, and instead requiring them to simply submit "support" or "oppose" through an online form, similar to the way in which Arbitrators are elected. Why would I want to prevent voters from explaining why they want to vote the way that they do? The main answer is that it would, hopefully, limit the potential for individuals to be driven away, or to undermine their own reputation, by unnecessarily negative comments.
- Anyone who has passed an RFA should be able to have their admin status revoked. Currently, ArbCom has the power to do this, but they typically only do it either if someone has been inactive for long enough or is doing immediate and severe damage to the project (or as the result of an arbitration case). I propose that the same anonymous online voting process described above should be implemented to revoke someone's adminship if enough !votes are cast in favor of doing so.
- Unbundle the tools, so someone can be granted only some abilities (protecting pages, deleting pages, blocking users, etc.) but not others. This is obviously a major proposal, and one which would make the process much more piecemeal than it is now, as you wouldn't automatically get to do all of what are now known as "admin tasks" if your RFA succeeds. It has long been recognized that some RFA candidates don't want to do everything anyway, and I think that giving all the tools to one user at once creates an unnecessarily steep learning curve; doing it one tool at a time would help admins get used to how to perform these tasks as well as possible.
Among the ultimate goals in the above proposals are making the RFA process less hostile and negative. Arguments that it should be hostile and/or negative to prepare editors for the harsh, harassment-laden reality of being admin fail to withstand scrutiny.