On 3/6/07, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
I'm sick and tired of people misunderstanding what an "administrator" of Wikipedia is.
Reminds me of the whole deal of being an "IRC Operator" back in the 90s. All the official docs said that being an ircop was no big deal and they were only there to maintain servers, not get involved in channel issues. The top opers and admins would parrot this line over and over again. However, the fact was that users did consider it a "big deal", ircops frequently tried to use their powers to "fix" and "protect" channels and ircops even got to have people see "[nick] is an IRC Operator" when they did a whois and ircops got a cute little * next to their nicks in channel user lists. Those ircops who actually took the policy seriously were constantly bombarded with "please help me get my channel back" and "so and so is harassing me" requests from users. In short, it was a "big deal".
In any "social system", if it's necessary to give some people "special powers", then those people will be seen to have a "special status" and ordinary users will desire that status and some will even hate people who have that status. The effect can be minimized but it will always be a "big deal" It's just the nature of the beast.