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

Andrew Lih andrew.lih at gmail.com
Mon Sep 11 03:18:13 UTC 2006


On 9/10/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/10/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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
> >
>
> There were previous simular cases.
>
> Day to day admins are regulated by other admins. I don't think en has
> a sysop-mailinglist.

Not only is there not an en:wp admin mailing list, the lack of one
speaks directly to what role admins play in en:wp. I believe both
Dutch and German have mailing lists for sysops, where admins
deliberate on decisions. At least in the case of de: the weight of all
admins is behind the action of anything endorsed by consensus on that
mailing list. This is quite a bit different than the "janitor" role
that en:wp tries to keep admins to. (But even in en: it's certainly
grown to be more than a janitor's role.)

I think it would be great to document community "norms" for each of
the 10-15 largest Wikipedias just to get a feel for what best
practices are out there.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)



More information about the foundation-l mailing list