 | This user subpage is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference. If you want to revive discussion regarding the subject, you might try contacting the user in question or seeking broader input via a forum such as the village pump. |
 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
Update, 17 August 2023: it's worth noting that after a 2022 RfC, an inactivity desysop can now be done based an administrator making fewer than 100 edits over 60 months, which covers a lot of the case studies in this essay.
In a recent bureaucrats' noticeboard thread, I made a comment on the current state of our administrator inactivity rules. In brief: if an admin goes 12 or months without a single edit or logged action, the +sysop flag is removed. While the original policy in 2011 allowed for restoration at any time by request to WP:BN, it has since been amended a few times to provide for cases where the flag cannot be restored via a simple noticeboard request. I think the crux of my comment at the time (while buried in a bunch of text) is that our current inactivity policy and their attendant rules, are a demonstration of the legal maxim that hard cases make bad law. What I hope to demonstrate (in this, a greatly expanded comment) is that as a community, we have inadvertently made a series of mistakes over the past decade when trying to quantify administrator inactivity, and that perhaps we have not had the discussion over what role administrators ought to have on the project.