On 1/18/06, Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:
A lot of it is poker. Folks without a decent hand, raising and bluffing. I suggest courteous calling: asking for sources, negotiating, patience, using the dispute resolution process effectively.
Fred
I suggest that, even if one is willing to go through all the trouble of learning and following the dispute resolution process, 9 times out of 10 nothing will happen anyway, because the arbitration committee is grossly ineffective at handling any but the most obvious of disputes.
There are many RFCs started against admins who have clearly exceeded the bounds of their authority, and that ultimately amount to nothing. Quite often the reasoning behind this is that the ultimate result justifies the means. Less often but still sometimes the excuse is more along the lines that the admin *thought* the ultimate result would justify the means. It's really not such a bad argument, but it makes any argument that admins don't have any authority pretty obviously false.
Some clear examples which illustrate my point would be wrt speedy deletion. Excuses for admins exceeding their authority under the speedy deletion policy (which in itself was created in some ways under threats of page protection and banning) include that the content would have been deleted anyway and even that the admin was "being bold" and doing something which she thought was right.
It seems absolutely clear to me that admins, collectively at least, have a significant amount of de-facto authority in Wikipedia. They have powers, and there are essentially no hard rules over how they are permitted to use it (let alone *enforced* rules).
Anthony