Originally, I planned to answer Parker Peters's email. I wanted to say something, at least, but I didn't want it to be trite. I didn't want to defend some admin actions while agreeing with him about others. There will be (have been?) plenty of people to do that. In the end, all of that is irrelevant, because it is his perception of the problem that really matters, not whether the problem is truly relevant in particular instance X or Z. It is a macro-issue, and it deserves macro-answers, or alternately, macro-changing in our thinking.
I think the real issue can be boiled down to a single statement: "Wikipedia is big ... really, really big." As of yesterday, Alexa ranks us the number 12 website in the world, and we are still climbing. In English alone, we have close to 1.5 million articles and 6 million total pages. We have over 2.4 million users and close to 600 thousand images. I don't know how many edits we are getting per day, per hour, per second, but I can only assume that it is a very substantial number.
No single person, or even small group of people, can tend to something this big, or even familiarize themselves with all its nooks and crannies. Yet we have to. That is the challenge.
There are 1,015 people with admin powers, and for various reasons it is assumed that the burden of responsibility lies with them (it really doesn't, since it should rest on the entire community, but that is a different story). Of these thousand or so people, some are more active than others. Some can be found patrolling the projects every hour of every day, while others pop in for a few minutes every few months, and still others are gone for good.
As such, the burden is overwhelming. There is so much to do, so much that needs tending, but we've grown faster than our admnistrative structure, and the fissures are beginning to show. By piling on the load, it is only natural that admins (and here I mean people who perform admin tasks, whether they are admins or not) begin to feel frustrated and burn out. It is especially onerous when every action is going to be viewed by people who will challenge it--and the admin--any way they can. Do you risk making all the rapid decisions that need to be made, one after the other, even if it means that some bad decisions will inevitably be made? Do you risk maintaining old procedures, which once worked quite well but are starting to buckle under the weight, or do you experiment with something new and untested? If there is to be change, what are the priorities? If there is to be discussion about change, at what point do we end the talking and decide to act?
These are some of the real issues that Parker Peters is raising. Note that they are dilemmas, and the nature of a dilemma is that there is no right answer, except perhaps from the safety of hindsight. And yet, decisions have to be made.
Danny