QUOTE(Alex @ Tue 15th July 2008, 11:01am)
This page shows precisely what a joke RfA is. Why can't it just be a straight vote, with no comments? It would certainly remove a lot of the nastiness.
Because then, A would vote "oppose" on B's RFA, but without giving an explanation B would then come to A's talkpage to ask why, thus spreading the incoherent ramblings across multiple pages; at least this way it keeps all the bitching and backstabbing on a single page which is auto-archived after five days. I could make a case for a secret ballot of established editors (along the lines of the WMF election), although I suspect you'd get a lot of "opposes" for really lame reasons. At least forcing people to explain their actions prevents the cabal of 12 year olds, for instance, from blatantly block-voting their buddies through.
The RFA process is undoubtedly a mess – lest we forget, it used to look like
this – but nobody seems able to come up with a viable alternative. (I don't include "splitting the tools" as a viable alternative; even splitting off the relatively uncontroversial rollback function has caused huge amounts of idiocy and huge chunks of valid material "accidentaly" reverted. Once you get to the "high power" core admin functions, I can't imagine any grounds when I'd trust someone to block users but not to delete articles, for instance, so we'd still need an approval process for protect/block/delete.)
This post has been edited by Eva Destruction: 
Useful page for deciphering RfA !votes
