Erik Moeller wrote:
Why don't we do the same thing with administrators? No need to do a global search & replace, just change the key pages and MediaWiki messages and leave old mentions of "adminship" on talk pages and such around. But change it to something like "janitor". Or at least something less formidable than "administrator", like "trusted user."
The problem isn't what we call them, it's what the worst of them do. We can't keep renaming things or trying to figure out a better way to identify people if it doesn't get to the root of the problem.
Seriously. This has probably been the worst 4-6 weeks I've seen on this site since I started contributing, both on a personal and a social level. I don't care to contribute anymore due to the culture, people are dropping the site left and right (admin Doug Bell is on a wikibreak now because of the Essjay situation (not that he's part of the solution), Doc glasgow's scaled back considerably following the Essjay/Peppers fiascos, Alkivar's gone, a number of lower level users are giving up, who knows who else that I DON'T know about). And why? Because whatever you want to call them can't do their simple jobs properly (and who cares if they volunteer or not - if you can't do it right, don't do it), it gets nasty when they get called out on it, WP:IAR is being embraced like never before, causing massive internal strife, and ArbCom's only called upon to do something about it when there's a wheel war, ignoring the other issues.
I'm not sure how much more can be taken. We're at a record level of contributing and of attention, and it feels like the damn project is imploding. It needs to be fixed, and it needs a massive cleansing, not some cosmetic "hey, let's change the names of who runs the site" nonsense.
-Jeff