[WikiEN-l] Policy is done by administrators without consultation!

[Thomas Dalton]

On 01/06/07, K P <kpbotany at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/31/07, William Pietri <william at scissor.com> wrote:
> >
> > Slim Virgin wrote:
> > > Risker, the situation was that a bunch of admins had been removing
> > > links to attack sites for about 18 months. Not in any kind of
> > > systematic way (i.e. not hunting them down so far as I know), but just
> > > removing them if they noticed one. That was the de facto policy.
> > > *That's how policy develops, by admins doing things.* It just wasn't
> > > written down anywhere.
> > >
> >
> > I think that's generally how policy develops. But I think this policy is
> > fundamentally different, because it makes itself nearly invisible. How
> > can the rest of us fairly judge or properly adopt an unwritten policy
> > that we can't see the effects of?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > William
>
>
>
> Wow, being an admin is even more of a big deal than I thought.  For some
> lame reason I though ordinary peons, er editors, had some say in policy.  I
> stand corrected.  (Not really, I didn't think editors had any say in policy
> unless and until they became admins, but it's nice to have it so obviously
> pointed out now and then when anyone who says that being an admin is a big
> deal just gets slammed.)

Well, policy develops by respected editors doing things. "Respected
editors" is often equated to "admins" for convenience, although pretty
much every knows that is an over generalisation. Whenever you see
"admin" mentioned in respect to something which doesn't actually
require admin tools, it's probably best to read it as an abbreviation
of "admin or other respected editor". Or, you could think of it as an
abbrev. of "admin or editor that could become an admin if they wanted
to" - in theory (and in the vast majority of cases, in practice) any
respected editor will pass RfA (of course, some editors that probably
deserve respect aren't respected, but that's another problem
entirely).