Just to clarify, there are 40 sysops, about 400 regular contributors, 4000 registered contributors, and many thousands more readers. I was considering the 4000 registered contributors the userbase, not the 400 regular contributors. In that calculation, the sysops are 1% and Jimbo .025%. I don't consider the developers as having the power to ban anyone, since they really really shouldn't.

The "registered" list is pretty meaningless; it never gets cleaned up (another item on my ever growing agenda), so it has lots of folk who will never been seen again.

Also, the developers clearly have the "power" to block anyone or anything just as we have the power to make every page green and purple: having your hands on the code is about as much power as one can get. But we serve as checks to each other; if I did something stupid like that, Jimbo or Brion or Magnus would undo it, and vice versa. We should work to create explicit cultural norms and guidelines for us too, so that we have some idea what we really shouldn't do.

I think perhaps what Ed is arguing for, and what I support as well, is the idea that we should perhaps take the idea of freedom of action and the act-first-argue-later system that seems to make Wikipedia work pretty well most of the time and apply it at the meta-level as well; that is, let the sysops and developers do what they think is necessary, so long as it can be undone by others, and not freak out about it. That includes the drastic things like deleting articles and blocking users. In other words, let's agree to see them as less drastic because they're reversible, and accept that mistakes will be made now and then, but nonetheless give people power--and the cultural authority--to do them.