Digital Addictions Software wrote:

I have been reading the discussion on freezing Ed Poor's Sysop status with much interest and I thought I'd weigh in a few thoughts. First of all I think it would be a mistake to freeze them as I believe Ed does an exceptional job at sysop stuff.

Yes, he does. And what's really important, and something that we could all learn from, is Ed's "willingness to serve". That is, he's very often ready to put aside his own opinion and follow what has been decided, while at the same time remaining an independent voice for his own opinion.

But in the event of an edit war that gets out of hand, what are you to do? Assuming that it has moved past the ability for discussion to fix anything, one option is to ban the person making the problems. Another solution is to protect a page. It seems to me that the latter solution is more reasonable as it is quite temporary and the person in the edit war may only be causing problems in that single area. I know people say it is an abuse to protect pages like that, but I've seen it used in other situations quite effectively to get people to talk about it in the talk page rather than an edit war.

I think that's right. The complaints came because Ed was perceived to be engaged in the page, and because his protection was perceived to be too-hasty. We can accept that there will often be little disagreements like this, but so long as we all approach this with rationality and good will, it's better to leave some policies open-ended and trusting, than to work out detailed rules and regulations.

But what do I know, I'm just a lowly wikipedian.

:-)

--Jimbo