"WP:RAR" redirects here. For the venue for requesting new articles, see Wikipedia:Requested articles.
- For information on individual cases of removal of administrator rights, see Wikipedia:Requests for de-adminship.
The Wikipedia community grants administrator permissions to contributors via the requests for adminship process. The community also has the power to remove administrator access from any contributor.
Established processes for removal of administrator access include:
- Resignation: An administrator may voluntarily resign for any reason. In particular, the outcome of a process such as a request for comment may persuade an administrator that this might be a good idea. Administrators may request this at Wikipedia:Bureaucrats' noticeboard or at Meta:Steward requests/Permissions#Removal of access.
- Inactivity: An administrator will have his or her permissions procedurally revoked if he or she has not made any edits or performed any log actions in the last year, following a series of courtesy notifications.
- Administrators open to recall: Some administrators will ask for their permissions to be revoked if certain conditions are met. Some of them may be found in Category:Wikipedia administrators open to recall.
- Arbitration requests: The Arbitration Committee can ask for an administrator's permissions to be removed. However, they will generally not accept a case unless other methods of dispute resolution have been attempted.
- Emergency: In emergency situations, such as cases where an administrator improperly blocks established users or deletes important pages without explanation, stewards remove administrator permissions. Jimbo Wales can also remove administrator access at his discretion.
There have been proposals to implement other means of doing this, such as a process mirroring the adminship request process. See Wikipedia:Requests for de-adminship and Wikipedia:Removing administrator rights/Proposal.