On 10/7/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
I think what complicates this attempt to look at Wikipedia as a political system is because we have no neat separation of powers, or proper democracy, or anything which you could use to describe a typical constitutional democracy which many Westerners think of when they think about government or policy. If you want to talk about recalling admins, you see admins as members of the executive branch; if you want to talk about tenure, you think of them as members of the judiciary. This dichotomy is quite inaccurate since admins both enforce policy and interpret policy.
When admins "interpret policy", are they doing so as admins, or simply as community members? There's lots of interpretation of policy at ANI, but as it says on that page, "Any user of Wikipedia may post" there.
I've always seen Wikipedia admins as acting mainly in an executive role, basically they're the wiki-police.