On 3/6/07, Ron Ritzman ritzman@gmail.com wrote:
If a user tries to edit a page and can't because he is blocked, whether he deserved it or not it's an insult to his intelligence to tell him it was "cleanup" by a "janitor". I came to this list a few years ago because I was blocked for a month, my whole ISP was because of one vandal with an army of sock puppets and a slew of throwaway ISP accounts. You are not going to get me to believe that drastic action was done by the guy who mops the server room floor.
I say continue to call them what they are, "Administrators".
I do think janitors is a problem, because it sort of implies normal users are the kind of people that are constantly making messes. I do spend a lot of time reading what people online say about wikipedia, and admins are nearly unanimously misunderstood. I do think a name change would be helpful. Custodian isn't too pretentious, and it implies caretaking, while at the same time not having too strong an implication that people need cleanup up after.
Another idea, how about Caretaker? That kinda makes me think of keeping a garden, which isn't a bad analogy at all.
Judson enwiki:cohesion