On 6/17/06, Ben Yates bluephonic@gmail.com wrote:
Admins do excercise editorial control, mostly in their selection of articles for deletion (and especially speedy deletion). I've read a few irate bloggers talking about how the articles they added got deleted immediately -- and while of course it's possible to argue that those articles didn't belong in wikipedia, it's silly to say that making *and then enforcing* this argument isn't excercising editorial control.
But it's not an administrative decision to say what should get deleted. Presumably the articles were deleted according to deletion guidelines -- made up by the community, not just admins -- and anyone could have marked it for deletion; an admin simply avoided the middle step of tagging. (A large smelly trout and minus 500 points to anyone who hijacks the thread and makes it about rouge admins not following deletion policy. Does [[WP:BEANS]] apply to the mailing list?) It's not their status as admins that allows editors to decide what stays and what goes.
Even non-admins excercise editorial control, often /en mass/. It's just a more participatory form of control, and a more open one.
Right. Admins exercise editorial control as normal editors, not as admins. (Though sometimes they are empowered to enforce decisions.) The power belongs in the hands of the community -- which presumably admins are an active part of, maybe even the bulk of policy-related edits (this would be an interesting thing to get data on).
-Kat