On 10/7/07, K P <kpbotany(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Not being able to easily fire a judge (in this
example) is actually a
quite common thing. The concept is that it goes towards the whole
judicial independence thing where a judge don't have to worry about
being fired for a correct but unpopular decision with the politician
etc. i.e. Not making decision based on popular-ism, but rather whether
the decision is right or not.
One can use the same line of argument regarding adminship. Namely that
an admin shouldn't have to worry about axe-grinders when carrying out a
decision.
And in both instances it ignores a basic fact of human beings: we
don't judge each other very well, and to expect a judge to be capable
for the rest of his life on the bench is not too realistic. Do we
know before the appointment that he or she won't fall into senility at
a young age? Do we know he or she won't abuse his new powers? We
don't know.
The world is not perfect; neither are our solutions to life's problems. The
question is, what is least imperfect? I suspect the tenure system is least
imperfect, although some economic studies do suggest that tenure in academia
is a different story. (But that is for factors largely related to academia,
and not the subject of tenuring human beings in general.)
And we have processes to take care of these instances, processes
whereby the people have a say. Outside of the
processes for criminal
behaviour. Although I don't know about the Supreme Court.
We/they (I'm not American) do? Last time I checked the US Supreme Court
justices were not subject to recall.
At Wikipedia we don't have a process whereby the editors have a say in
the removal or recall of an administrator. Just
processes for
criminal behaviour.
We can file an arbitration case. It's tedious, but it's handled most cases
of admin abuse so far fine. The question is, would permitting deadminship by
vote lead to a more efficient outcome through a loosening of RfA standards
(which would in turn allow more editors in general - and thus hopefully more
good than bad editors)?
I think what complicates this attempt to look at Wikipedia as a political
system is because we have no neat separation of powers, or proper democracy,
or anything which you could use to describe a typical constitutional
democracy which many Westerners think of when they think about government or
policy. If you want to talk about recalling admins, you see admins as
members of the executive branch; if you want to talk about tenure, you think
of them as members of the judiciary. This dichotomy is quite inaccurate
since admins both enforce policy and interpret policy.
Johnleemk