On 3/6/07, cohesion cohesion@sleepyhead.org wrote:
I have always liked the name "custodian". It's a little like janitor, but implies that you are doing your job in order to protect and help wikipedia rather than solely cleaning up after (messy) people. I think that term fits much better with the others as well (Bureaucrats etc). Thoughts?
We thought through the title of "admin"/"sysop" when we set up Wikiversity - and we named it "custodian" http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Custodianship. We also organised the system by which people become custodians (or lose that status) specifically so that it would be seen as having a learning curve, and that new custodians would be peer-monitored - similar to the system of apprenticeship. It's also something that is "easy come, easy go" - it should be "no big deal" to 1) be a custodian, 2) to become a custodian, and 3) to lose your custodianship (though we haven't yet had to face the latter situation).
My general thoughts are that - no matter what we call it - "adminship" should be seen as simply a willingness to help out with the maintenance of a wiki - but that it should *not* be fetishised as an object of status, which it clearly is by many people. And yes, we're here to write an encyclopedia, as John Lee says above - but in a way it is and in a way it isn't that simple. As well as writing an encyclopedia, we're also here to create the *culture* within which to do so - and culture doesn't just exist in policy documents, nor materialise out of thin air - culture is something that we all actively construct as an inherent part of writing this encyclopedia.
Cheers, Cormac
http://cormaggio.org http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User:Cormaggio