Re "Not everyone wants to be a janitor policeman." Unlike on say commons there is no minimum requirement for admin activity level on the English Wikipedia. Also it isn't unheard of for someone to submit an RFA wanting the tools for a very specialist reason.
As for "Every system should be open to audit review by anyone who wishes to do so. " This may at first glance sound like an attractive slogan. But if my GP or my bank adopted such a policy I would immediately shift my business elsewhere. I rather hope that anyone who can access my NHS records or my PIN number has been through some sort of vetting. I don't consider that access to deleted contributions should be as tightly controlled as either of those scenarios. But I do believe that there should be some sort of vetting of users before they can access deleted contributions. If deleted merely meant blanked then kids creating attack pages on wikipedia would still be able to cyber bully their victims and circulate diffs of the attack pages that they'd posted.
There is a difference of views at RFA between those who want to hand out mops to as many trustworthy experienced editors as possible and those who use such arguments as "no need for the tools". I'm definitely in the latter group and wouldn't see not wanting to be a "janitor policeman" as necessarily grounds for an oppose.
WereSpielChequers
Message: 5 Date: Sat, 19 Sep 2009 15:13:38 EDT From: WJhonson@aol.com Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Newbie and not-so-newbie biting To: wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: cfb.620246c8.37e68762@aol.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
In a message dated 9/19/2009 12:05:37 PM Pacific Daylight Time, dgoodmanny@gmail.com writes:
The best practical way to audit admin actions is to become an admin oneself. Admins have just as many conflicts among them as any other active people here. There are people I watch, and people who watch me.>>
Not everyone wants to be a janitor policeman. Every system should be open to audit review by anyone who wishes to do so. Systems which are closed except to insiders are not part of my vision of a free society.
Will Johnson