On 1/18/06, Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:
You mischaracterize an ambiguous situation as being totally corrupt.
Fred
How so? I read over what I wrote and I don't think I imply corruption at all. I do believe there is some corruption, but I wouldn't even characterise the system as being totally corrupt if directly asked about it.
I guess you could take what I say about the arb com, that they choose cases which suit their POV, as a hint of corruption. I'm not sure I'd call that corruption, because I think it's true of any judicial or quasai-judicial entity.
Admins influence content with the admin actions they take. I consider that to be an accurate description of the way things are. It would be very hard to change this, you'd have to give someone (or some group) authority to make specific rules for the admins to follow, and then someone would have to enforce those rules strictly. That's not how things work in Wikipedia. It's probably not even a good idea.
But hiding your head in the sand and saying that admins exercise no authority over content is not a good idea either.
Anthony
On Jan 18, 2006, at 9:10 AM, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
On 1/18/06, Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:
Yes, it is somewhat outdated, but it remains true in a sense; administrators are on the same level as everyone else as far as content is concerned, pointing out that you are an administrator will not get you far in a content dispute, and carried far enough, will get you desysopped. There are occasional lapses and a few folks sneak around a bit, but those who think being an administrator gives them authority over the most important thing in Wikipedia, content, are mistaken.
Fred
I'm amazed sometimes at how often blatently untrue statements like this get made.
Admins decide which content gets deleted and which content gets undeleted. They decide when pages are protected and when they are unprotected. While those pages are protected they decide what those pages are going to say. They decide when to block someone for violating the three revert rule and when not to block someone for violating it.
On very rare occassion an admin does something so ridiculously outrageous and out of touch with the POV of the arbitration committee that they get reprimanded for it, but there are numerous occassions where they influence content and nothing happens at all.
It's very hard to separate power from authority, and in a flat (as opposed to hierarchical) system, it's probably impossible.
Anthony