Cabal nature of long-term editors and admins

The problem with en.wp admins is simple: would you elect you president/MP/mayor for life? Treating adminship like academic tenure is patently absurd given the MMORPG way in which it is granted initially.

Uh, Admins are not the equivalent of president/MP/mayors. Not even the equivalent of cops. We're just average users with a few more privileges.

I honestly wish there was another way to acknowledge editors who are accepted as "established" or "trustworthy" than making them an Admin. But there isn't, & a lot of people who basically are trusted not to abuse these few privileges are expected to be cops -- only they have no training or even the expectation to be cops. So most Admins don't bother to do any Admin work -- even administrative trivia or protecting pages from obvious vandalism.

The Swedish language Wikipedia appoints administrators for one year at a time. It works great and everybody is happy.

Good for them. That might also make people more willing to serve - although overall, I wish we had far fewer admins on en.wikipedia. The vast majority are behaving like prefects, not janitors.

The ability to block indefinitely anyone who disagrees on Gdansk/Danzig, images of Muhammad ibn ‘Abdullāh or bombing civilians makes people with admin accounts rather different from cops. Cops can arrest innocent people, and the occasional death can be overlooked, but the survivors will be tried. Admins are like "coalition forces" who may murder civilians and disarmed POVs in Fallujah without any judge looking into their actions. --Erik Warmelink 20:16, 21 March 2011 (UTC)