User blog comment:Mira Laime/How to Deal With a Bad Bureaucrat/@comment-961279-20160226054912/@comment-961279-20160306155047

Utkar22, the age of the person creating a wiki isn't always an issue. There are young kids who are more mature and responsible than some adults. In the cases I was referencing, I saw indications that the people involved were probably young teenagers who were giving admin and bureaucrat rights to their friends. And then it quickly turned into a game of "musical user rights" where those rights were given and removed almost daily. Or even blocks were placed and removed just as frequently.

In some cases, this turns into abuse of administrator rights, and in extreme cases, it turns into cronyism. In other situations, it's like what Vanilladazzle said, where the novelty of being an admin wears off and the wiki pretty much fades away when they start leaving.

I also just remembered another reason why bureaucrat rights should never be automatically given when someone is promoted to admin: there have been cases where people made a request to become an admin with the intent of vandalizing the wiki and because they were also made a 'crat, they were able to promote other accounts to assist them with the vandalism.

Having a formal procedure for requesting advanced user rights with prerequisites goes a long ways towards heading off these kinds of problems. Things like "you can't nominate yourself" or saying you must have 250 edits across 3 months (or 500 edits across 6 months) before you can request to be an admin, and "here's how we'll select a new bureaucrat from our active administrators".