On 3/6/07, Ron Ritzman <ritzman(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
If a user tries to edit a page and can't
because he is blocked,
whether he deserved it or not it's an insult to his intelligence to
tell him it was "cleanup" by a "janitor". I came to this list a few
years ago because I was blocked for a month, my whole ISP was because
of one vandal with an army of sock puppets and a slew of throwaway ISP
accounts. You are not going to get me to believe that drastic action
was done by the guy who mops the server room floor.
I say continue to call them what they are, "Administrators".
This is exactly right, they are administrators in all of the classical
computer science senses of the word. But I would also argue that they
are in a way "part of the administration", since they are trusted with
making some tough administrative decisions, such as AfDs. I don't
think that the word "administrator" implies any sort of extra
editorial power though. since they only administer (wow, I've bent
that word backwards and forwards for this post, huh) the site. Plus,
"janitors" would sound really stupid, especially in newspaper
articles.
"Janitors" is somewhat self-deprecating; "administrators" can
seem
pompous. If we are able to laugh at ourselves, that can be a very
attractive feature.
Ec