At 10:34 AM 5/31/2010, AGK wrote:
On 31 May 2010, at 00:39, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
<abd(a)lomaxdesign.com>
wrote:
(1) most legitimate admin work is not
controversial to any degree
that would affect an admin's status in the active community, which is
what counts. Blocking an IP vandal isn't going to harm that, and it
will only help it. If the IP vandal then registers an account and
goes after the admin, sure. But, then, as to proposals that those who
supported an RfA might retract that, or cause adminiship to be
suspended pending examination, are concerned, this would be useless.
Legitimate administration is indeed like janitorial work. Can we
imagine a good janitor getting into an argument with other employees
of a school or office as to what should be thrown away? Adminship was
supposed to be "no big deal." When an administrator is asserting
personal power over an editor, something has gone awry. Police have
no power to punish, they may arrest on probable cause, but they then
step aside and let the community make decisions on sanctions or
release. A police officer who has become personally involved and
insists on pursuing an individual might well be removed or ordered to
work in other areas.
Thomas may be referring to any administrator work that is at all not
purely technical in nature. This work usually involves policing the
conduct of established accounts (and often long-term editors) in
contentious subject areas, and will almost always cause the
administrator to gain enemies.
Sure. However, administrators are, indeed, police and not judges.
But, too often, they become judges and make conclusions about
sanctions. An adminstrative sanction is, by design, temporary and
reversible, and "policing" a particular user should never become a
crusade for an administrator; if it does, and if it's allowed, then
adminship has become the "big deal," giving the admin power over the user.
A police officer may arrest me, but cannot keep me in jail (the
equivalent of an indef block with opposed unblock). Administrators
who do the police work well will, in fact, not generally "gain
enemies," that will be the exception rather than the rule. But AGK is
an administrator, and if he expects that "police" work will "almost
always cause the administrator to gain enemies," I rather suspect
that some of his work is less than optimal.
If I become an enemy of an administrator if the admin blocked me with
anything like good faith, because I was engaged in bad conduct at an
article, or other inappropriate conduct, I've got a problem, and I
will surely have this problem with other administrators as well. One
of the biggest errors I've seen on the WikiMedia wikis is admins to
decline unblock requests when they also blocked the editor. They
should make sure that the reasons for the block are documented, and
then leave it alone. When they don't, they very possibly create an
editor who now thinks of them as an enemy.
Another common error is to gratuitously insult the editor as part of
the block, or to otherwise behave as if the administrator is in
charge, owns the wiki. No, an administrator is properly acting in
expectation of consensus; for admins to act otherwise creates
disruption for no good reason. Thus an admin, blocking, will always,
for an inexperienced user, point to appeal process, and will be
unfailingly polite. Or should be!
And who polices the police?
I've thought, sometimes, that there should be many more bureaucrats,
and that bureaucrats should not have the ability to block or delete
articles. But they would have the ability to, ad-hoc, remove admin
privileges. Police for the police, independent of them. Chosen for
general trustworthiness. Perhaps they would only *add* tool usage as
a restoration of what they or another bureaucrat took away, or, even,
it's possible, the whole RfA process could consist of convincing a
bureaucrat that you'd be decent as an admin. That's much closer to
the rest of the way that the wiki operates, routinely. (Bureaucrats
do this on some of the other wikis. Wikiversity has "probabionary
adminship," which is apparently easy to get, it just takes another
admin to declare and accept mentorship, and there is a discussion
just to see if there are objections.