On Fri, Jun 02, 2006 at 12:47:45AM +0100, Tony Sidaway wrote:
On 6/2/06, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
Your attitude that it's ok to move beyond that into actually pissing them off, and doing things like rejecting RfCs out of hand merely because they're silly, is a serious problem.
Obviously not. There comes a point at which one must simply recognise that a completely and utterly fatuous complaint is being made, and move on.
It almost seems as if you're proud to be irritating people. That you think that those people are beneath you, or unable to understand the rightness of your position ... and that the fact that they oppose you and criticize you, only further demonstrates your rightness.
But Wikipedia makes tough decisions by seeking consensus. If lots of people think you're doing the wrong thing, that means you are operating without the support of consensus. And that's a problem.
As an administrator, your authorization to use administrative tools such as deletion extends only insofar as you use them to implement and support consensus. You are not authorized to use them to pursue your own projects. You are trusted to *implement* consensus decisions, not to make up the rules for yourself. When there is a controversy rather than a consensus, you are not authorized to "settle" it by your own say-so. Wikipedia has dispute-resolution procedures for settling controversies. Administrative fiat is not one of them.
Now, I'm not saying that just because _anyone_ complains, that you have to stop. Obviously, if vandals complain about being blocked, that's not a bad thing. But when actual contributors raise objections and go to the effort of formalizing those objections, a respect for the community that is supposed to trust you, demands that you stop the objectionable conduct.
We've seen what happens when an administrator decides that he gets to make the rules. We've seen what happens when an administrator decides that the objections of those he doesn't respect don't count. That's how we lost Ed Poor.