[WikiEN-l] Rename admins to janitors

[Jeff Raymond]

Erik Moeller wrote:

> Why don't we do the same thing with administrators? No need to do a
> global search & replace, just change the key pages and MediaWiki
> messages and leave old mentions of "adminship" on talk pages and such
> around. But change it to something like "janitor". Or at least
> something less formidable than "administrator", like "trusted user."

The problem isn't what we call them, it's what the worst of them do.  We 
can't keep renaming things or trying to figure out a better way to 
identify people if it doesn't get to the root of the problem.

Seriously.  This has probably been the worst 4-6 weeks I've seen on this 
site since I started contributing, both on a personal and a social 
level.  I don't care to contribute anymore due to the culture, people 
are dropping the site left and right (admin Doug Bell is on a wikibreak 
now because of the Essjay situation (not that he's part of the 
solution), Doc glasgow's scaled back considerably following the 
Essjay/Peppers fiascos, Alkivar's gone, a number of lower level users 
are giving up, who knows who else that I DON'T know about).  And why? 
Because whatever you want to call them can't do their simple jobs 
properly (and who cares if they volunteer or not - if you can't do it 
right, don't do it), it gets nasty when they get called out on it, 
WP:IAR is being embraced like never before, causing massive internal 
strife, and ArbCom's only called upon to do something about it when 
there's a wheel war, ignoring the other issues.

I'm not sure how much more can be taken.  We're at a record level of 
contributing and of attention, and it feels like the damn project is 
imploding.  It needs to be fixed, and it needs a massive cleansing, not 
some cosmetic "hey, let's change the names of who runs the site" nonsense.

-Jeff


-- 
Name: Jeff Raymond
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