On 2/19/07, Parker Peters <parkerpeters1002(a)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