A Nony Mouse wrote: ... quite a lot.
Clearly, there's a huge thread following A Nony Mouse's first posting. I have not read it. I don't think I have the nerve. But I want to comment on something, and I apologise if this has been said elsewhere in the thread already.
A Nony Mouse is placing a lot of blame on admins, saying they are clearly misbehaving in one way or another. However, with 473 admins on the English Wikipedia, I think we are well beyond the point where we can place any blame for large-scale emergent behavioural patterns on any single admin or any particular set of admins.
You can't blame the admins for "feeling special", because they *are* -- they're admins, and non-admins aren't. That makes them special. You can't blame the admins for "believing that they are somehow better than others", because they have been elected, thereby clearly having gained trust in the community.
I am *NOT* saying that these behaviours are perfectly okay! But you are naïve if you don't expect them to occur more and more as the number of admins increases. These behaviours are within human nature, and a system that doesn't take this into account is to blame, not the admins.
To put it bluntly: Don't be surprised that admins "exceed their authority" if the system allows them to get away with it.
Timwi