On Dec 7, 2007 10:00 AM, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
On Thu, 6 Dec 2007, Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
Admins make decisions which affect the whole Wikipedia. Replace
'contains
a Z' with 'contains a BADSITE' or 'has a spoiler warning' or any other global change.
Approximately 2 million articles contain a Z
Approximately five articles contained a link that was removed under BADSITES.
Perhaps the analogy is not quite as strong as you make out?
The fact that the rule doesn't affect many articles overall doesn't matter, if you happen to be one of the ones affected.
If you're objecting to admins arbitrarily imposing new policy, then there's no authority for them to do that. WP:BOLD has some rather stringent limits (any other admin says "no" firmly, for example).
Admins tend to be policymakers and visa versa, but that's because policymakers are usually people who've been around and care about it, and people nominated to adminship tend to be people who've been around and care about it and who were visible to someone who cares or knows to nominate, usually an admin... Any user can participate in the policy processes.
(Besides, spoiler warnings affected 45 *thousand* articles.)
Spoiler warnings wasn't an admin decision.
The people who took the action were admins, but they didn't do so under color of authority per se, as far as I am aware and the discussions here went recently.