--- "steven l. rubenstein" rubenste@ohiou.edu wrote:
This is a reasonable concern. I remember some time ago -- several months or a year -- when there was an edit war on a particular page and an administrator joined in with a message like this: "What's the trouble here? I am a sysop -- let's sort this out." Indeed, this was a very inappropriate use of the position. However, a number of other sysops pretty quickly chastised the person in question for projecting power in this way.
I think the only reasonable solution to this problem -- and my response to your concern -- is that sysops should act as "police" in one particular regard: we have a responsibility to police ourselves against this kind of abuse of power.
New contributors need to learn all sorts of stuff when they come to wikipedia -- from the ~~~ trick to the sometimes subtle NPOV policy. I think their learning what a sysop is and isn't is just one more of those things.
Steven
I'm not saying intimidating non-sysops is a good thing, I just think it is a potential use of power and should not be ignored when discussing the power of sysops. I still don't think that sysops should be policemen. Something less violent. On cops (not to say that those events aren't staged), they take drug addicts, misrepresent the law to them ("if you tell me where the drugs are now, you'll get a lesser punishment" or something like that, when really (correct me if I'm wrong, alex) he didn't turn himself in and probably won't get any less punishment (there was no plea bargain or anything like that)), and arrest them, using excessive violence towards blacks in particular. We don't want to be like that. We're better than that. --LittleDan --LittleDan
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