On 2/19/07, Parker Peters parkerpeters1002@gmail.com wrote:
What is the difference between these two? The editor who is not an administrator has to live in daily fear that at any point, especially should they edit on any remotely controversial subject without the protection of another "friend" who is an administrator, they can be accosted by any administrator, their rights to edit terminated.
I would hardly consider myself to be living in fear. While most of my editing has been in fairly uncontroversial areas, I have edited more controversial ones as well. I've been around for almost 3 years, am nearing 20k edits, and had one problem with one administrator once. And by problem, I mean she was a bit rude. Very far from abuse of power or anything of the like. And I didn't exactly smell like roses during that affair either - not one of my best moments.
Meanwhile, the Admin is growing an ever larger ego, based solely on his
ability to do just this. Rather than acting within policy, Administrators on Wikipedia are the equivalent of Judge Dredd - they are judge, jury, and executioner all in one package, screaming "I am the law" and doing whatever they want, confident that the other Judge Dredds will back them up if any questions of their abuses are ever raised.
Completely not the way my experience has been. Whenever I've taken issue with an admin's action and attempted to bring it to others' attention, I've been able to get proper explanation and analysis, usually pointing to policy pages that completely support what the admin did.
A noble concept, but completely inadequate with today's crop of admins; the
goal of the vast majority of the administrators is not to build bridges or even an encyclopedia, but to consolidate their power and ensure that they have the power to be as abusive, mean, incivil as they wish to be. The rules to an admin are for the "little people", not for them.
The only people I've ever seen be abusive or mean are the ones who scream "admin abuse". Whenever I've seen incivility on the part of admins, it's gone both ways and never has it been some big mean abusive admin picking on a poor defenseless little person.
-- Jonel