[WikiEN-l] Admin burnout

[Ray Saintonge]

Keitei wrote:

>In order to become an admin, one must have an impeccable track record  
>and have been aiming for adminship for quite some time. Then one must  
>jump through all sorts of flaming hoops while all the people one gets  
>along with the least gather to heckle. Then having become an admin,  
>one gets treated like shit by newcomers pissed that one has deleted  
>their page, trolls pissed that one has blocked them, POV pushers  
>pissed that one has protected their page, users insistent that one is  
>just the same as them and does not have any greater level of trust  
>and should never be given any level of slack, users convinced that  
>one is abusing one's powers, and "valued contributors" insistent that  
>one does not matter and should go to hell because they do so much  
>more and are so much more important to the encyclopedia.
>
Gee!  You make it sound so much like the real world. :-)

>And from my experience as an admin at other wikis, it's not the  
>newbies or the vandals that get you down. It's the bitter resentment  
>from invested users targeted at you over and over and over again. As  
>if because the admins have such unspeakable power, they have to be  
>abused to keep them down, so they won't take over in power-mad fits.  
>It just gets to the point where one is like, "Fine! If you don't want  
>me around so much, I'll leave. Have fun."
>
Absolutely.  Sometimes the best way to get your point across is to let 
it go.  One of the big failings of democratic and quasi-democratic 
systems is that they cannot reconcile the right of everyone to 
participate in the decisions with the expenditure of time needed to be 
fully and fairly involved in those decisions.  Participatory democracy 
sounds good in theory, but it requires that those who participate have a 
higher goal than winning debating points through persistence.

Ec