[Foundation-l] retire the administrator privilege

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/1/16 Joseph Seddon <seddonwiki at gmail.com>
>
> I am going to be quite frank and say that it is pointless to have this
> discussion on this list. Only a fraction of the english wikipedia community
> are on it. If you are genuinely serious about this then propose it on the
> english wikipedia. This is not a foundation level issue nor will it ever
> become one so put it to the community.

That's the point - i do think that it's a Foundation-level issue, or
more precisely, movement-level issue. That's because "RFA is broken"
discussion are perennial in all Wikipedias which have functioning
communities of about 50 regular writers or more.

And in Wikipedias in small regional languages, which have only a
handful of writers i often see very confused discussions about
adminship which show that they misunderstand the concept - they think
that an admin is supposed to "administrate", or that they shouldn't
write articles until the Foundation appoints an admin, or that they
must draft a detailed voting process document to appoint admins - but
can't really vote until they have a quorum, etc. (This doesn't mean
that i know a lot of languages. These discussions are often held in
Russian or English.)

I believe that this confusion is caused by the heavy word
"administrator". Eliminating it and calling the permissions by their
actual names - "blocker", "deleter", "protector", "reviewer" - will
likely eliminate this confusion.