Board Thread:Wiki Running/@comment-3225604-20150619060400/@comment-4189499-20150701150224

I personally find that the people who become the best leaders are the sorts of people who don't ask for the position. I think it is absolutely insane to say that a person must ask to be promoted! If an admin, or even another user, sees that a person has been doing an exceptionally good job around the wiki, they should be able to nominate the user for admin on their behalf. Of course, the user would have to accept the nomination before further support can be given by others, but there are many brilliant editors out there who would make brilliant admins who are simply too humble to ever nominate themselves for the role.

People who ask for admin rights are more likely to see the role of admin as a role of power, power which they want to gain for themselves. A person who is nominated for the position, as opposed to somebody who seeks out the position, is more likely to see the position of leader of this community from the perspective of the responsibilities required to maintain the wiki. There are of course exceptions to this generalisation, I remember Wildoneshelper's nomination quite clearly and he was definitely nominating himself for the responsibilities and not the power, but it holds true in a wide variety of cases. I actually think your example of government is ideal in this situation, especially the government of one global superpower that will remain nameless, as many, many of the decisions made by people who wanted to join the political sphere for the power it gave them end up making really stupid decisions for the sake of holding onto that power which the average person who did not seek that power would not have made.

In short, while I do think that people should definitely be allowed to nominate themselves and have their achievements examined for the role of administrator, I believe that it would be a really dumb idea to prevent people from nominating other users they see as good candidates for the job.