[Foundation-l] Hi, Jimmy Wales, Is there inspectors to investigate admins?

[David Gerard]

On 10/09/06, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:

> Admins are not controlled on the Dutch Wikipedia. At best there is room for
> censuring them. Control means that the community enforces behaviour of
> admins. When people insist that people do things in a certain way, they have
> to appreciate that admins are volunteers. When this urge of control becomes
> too much people can and do decide not to be an admin anymore and
> consequently all the control the community thought it had is lost.


For comparison, on en:wp -

On en:wp, there was a perception for a long time that admins were
impossible to remove even if they were widely thought to have gone off
the rails. Then in early 2006 a bunch of admins got de-adminned by the
Arbitration Committee after Jimbo asked the AC to look into the matter
in question:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Pedophilia_userbox_wheel_war

So on en:wp, you can get de-adminned if the Arbitration Committee
considers you have gone off the rails in a way that will be damaging
to the encyclopedia project (encyclopedia or community).

The most recent case was someone who'd been in lots of trouble but had
kept their sysop bit because they'd never abused their admin powers as
such; but when they said elsewhere they would, their admin status was
taken away immediately. So upsetting people and being a [[m:dick]]
won't get your sysop powers taken away; abusing the powers is the only
likely cause.

This may change later if it needs to. But it seems workable for now.


- d.