On 4/23/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
With 800 administrators how can you possibly determine the level of trust that we can put in each.
To a degree I do this for every user.
And there have been arguments made that we need more admins. The mantra is that being an admin is no big deal. Once a person is an admin he has the technical ability to put the goatse.cx image on the main page, but we trust him not to do that.
More correctly I trust them to be able to figure out they will be reverted instantly and blocked for the rest of eternity.
An agent acts with the authority of Wikimedia in an external environment; is there any evidence that any ordinary admin is acting on behalf of Wikimedia when he is dealing with the real world? Agency is often linked with employment, but none of our admins are being paid to do that job. Nobody is required to sign an agreement saying that they won't give away secrets or even defining what would be a secret.
Yet. In practice I suspect most admins have a pretty good idea what they are not meant to talk about. -- geni