Wikipedia:Requests for de-adminship

This is an information page. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines; rather, its purpose is to explain certain aspects of Wikipedia's norms, customs, technicalities, or practices. It may reflect differing levels of consensus and vetting.

Shortcuts WP:RFDA WP:DES WP:DESYS WP:FIRED

This page in a nutshell: A community-based process for removing adminship has been a perennial proposal.

Administrator status may be revoked (a desysopping or de-adminning) by the Arbitration Committee, as well as (in theory although almost never in practice) by the Wikimedia Foundation office, MediaWiki developers, and, in emergency cases, Wikimedia stewards. As of 2024^[update], the only way for the community to directly remove an adminstrator's rights is to indefinitely ban them sitewide; also as of 2024, this power has never been exercised. Some administrators will voluntarily stand for reconfirmation under certain circumstances.

Through 2003, there had been only one case where adminship was revoked. Since 2004, the Arbitration Committee has dealt 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.

Throughout the history of the project, there has been a convention that adminship may be removed involuntarily only in cases of clear abuse. Users have proposed a variety of processes to ensure that admins have the continued support of the community, but none has gained widespread acceptance.

Many users have voluntarily relinquished adminship, and historically there were cases where adminship was suspended temporarily to enforce a cooling-off period in conflicts between admins. Some nominally voluntary de-adminships have taken place in the presence of a growing consensus that adminship may not be appropriate for the affected user. The Arbitration Committee has taken the view that users voluntarily resigning their adminship in such a circumstance may not automatically request it back and must go through the regular processes, or are subject to bureaucrat discretion, depending on the timing of the resignation.

With very rare, explicitly noted exceptions, users are free to reapply at WP:RFA at any time. Some desysops by the Arbitration Committee have also included a right of appeal to the Committee. Prior to May 2023 there was also a right of appeal to Jimbo Wales.

For information about how de-adminship is handled on other projects, see Wikipedia:Adminship in other languages. For a list of past desysops, see Wikipedia:Former administrators. For a list of restorations of adminship, see Wikipedia:List of resysopped users.