[WikiEN-l] Rename admins to janitors

[Ron Ritzman]

On 3/6/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> I'm sick and tired of people misunderstanding what an "administrator"
> of Wikipedia is.

Reminds me of the whole deal of being an "IRC Operator" back in the
90s. All the official docs said that being an ircop was no big deal
and they were only there to maintain servers, not get involved in
channel issues. The top opers and admins would parrot this line over
and over again. However, the fact was that users did consider it a
"big deal", ircops frequently tried to use their powers to "fix" and
"protect" channels and ircops even got to have people see "[nick] is
an IRC Operator" when they did a whois and ircops got a cute little *
next to their nicks in channel user lists. Those ircops who actually
took the policy seriously were constantly bombarded with "please help
me get my channel back" and "so and so is harassing me" requests from
users. In short, it was a "big deal".

In any "social system", if it's necessary to give some people "special
powers", then those people will be seen to have a "special status" and
ordinary users will desire that status and some will even hate people
who have that status. The effect can be minimized but it will always
be a "big deal" It's just the nature of the beast.