-----Original Message----- From: wikipedia2006(a)dpbsmith.com [mailto:wikipedia2006@dpbsmith.com] Sent: Thursday, March 1, 2007 11:25 AM To: wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [WikiEN-l] Hypothetical question about how certain admin behavior would be handled on Wikipedia An... interesting... situation has arisen on another Wiki. (Yesyesyes some of you can guess but never mind). Mind you, it _is not Wikipedia_ and it is young, small, and its policies far from codified. It involves a sysop (they call them sysops there) who was given sysop privileges for the purposes of editing a protected page. (I told you, it's not Wikipedia!). The sysop is arguably aligned with the Wiki's official point of view (yes, it has one). The sysop is an active editor of a different page, one that is not protected. The page also has an active non-sysop editor who is arguably not as well aligned, perhaps detectably opposed, to the site's official point of view. But I don't think he is perceived as a problem editor by most users there. He is civil, his changes are well supported by sources, he adds a lot of uncontroversial content, etc. There was a lot of back-and-forth editing, but neither of them would have even been close to being violation of Wikipedia's 3RR. (This site doesn't have any such rule). In order to prevail in the dispute, the sysop blocked the non-sysop. For three months. (No, the non-sysop in question is _not_ me). What I want here is: which of our policies here would such an admin be violating, and what is people's best and most realistic judgement of what, in practice, would be the likely course of events if a Wikipedia admin did that. (I'm thinking: an RFC, an overwhelming yelling-at by other admins, and perhaps a warning. I'm thinking that a _pattern_ of such behavior really could get someone de-adminned eventually... but how many actual incidents do you think it would take for that to happen?)