* Kat Walsh wrote:
On 6/17/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
since when have admins had "authority to exercise editorial control"?
I'm particularly disappointed by that statement, considering I spent a fair bit of effort in the interview explaining how and why they don't.
In my opinion this is slowly becoming little more than a fiction we tell ourselves. Recently an admin labeled a user changing his wording of, "Some conspiracy theorists disagree..." to "Some disagree..." as "vandalism" and placed a 48 hour block after edit warring with the user (and others) over this phrase.
To me that looks like the >admin< was violating NPOV by trying to write the article from the 'most popular point of view' rather than the NEUTRAL point of view... but in any case it certainly wasn't "vandalism" and admins aren't supposed to block over content disputes. Particularly content disputes they are involved in.
So what do you suppose came of it?
When the user put the 'unblock' template on their page it was denied by another admin who was involved in the same edit war and then the user's talk page was protected by yet another admin to prevent them from requesting unblock again. And when his objection was raised at AN/I? Yet more admins lined up to say that the action was entirely proper. All this against a user who has been on Wikipedia for nine months (~350 edits) and never been blocked or cited as a 'troublemaker' before.
We SAY that admins do not have authority to exercise editorial control, but, given the fact that we don't enforce it, the reality is quite different.
I think the blocking admin's message to the user illustrates how far lost the 'no editorial control' concept has become;
"If unblocked and you revert me one more time, I'm going to block you for a week."
Those are words that NO admin would ever be able to utter if the principle you cite above had ANY meaning. But the fact is that a dozen other admins looked on and said that it was just fine.