[WikiEN-l] I suppose we had to see this news story soon enough

[Anthony]

On 10/26/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Admins do make the deletion decisions, they just do so after "the
> > community" comments.
>
> Admins make determinations, not decisions. They determine is there is
> a consensus to delete, or if an article fits a CSD.

I find it hard to believe that you can really say that with a straight
face.  Neither "consensus to delete" nor "fits a CSD" is anywhere near
well-defined enough to say that admins do anything of the sort.  The
fact is that "consensus to delete" and "fits a CSD" aren't treated
consistently.  Admins determine whether or not there is a "consensus
to delete", but they also determine what constitutes a "consensus to
delete", and they are perfectly free to redefine what determines a
"consensus to delete" every single time they do so.  Likewise, with
what "fits a CSD", there are CSD criteria which get redefined for
every situation, and there are plenty of deletions which don't even
fit under the CSD criteria at all.

> Those aren't decisions, since there is no choice. With a decision, you can choose
> anything you like, with a determination, there is a right answer which
> you have to try and find.
>
In the case of admin deletion, the "determination" is almost never a
matter of fact, but a matter of opinion.  There quite clearly is a
choice in a large portion of deletion "determinations".

> > I think the more serious error in that paragraph is that it says that
> > this situation is a change stemming from "a series of incidents".
> > Adminship is nothing new, nor is deletion or page protection.  Even
> > deletion based on alleged lack of notability isn't all that new.  It's
> > been around at least since the deletion of the 9/11 victims.
>
> Adminship hasn't been around since the beginning, though. It was
> introduced to deal with the increasing number of issues requiring
> Jimbo (and a couple of developers) to intervene. The article is
> correct, just rather out of date.
>
It's only correct in some twisted wikilawyer sense of the term.  It
doesn't seem to me like "a series of incidents" was talking about
something that happened in 2001.

And if that was what the article was talking about, then it *was* a
small group of admins that were appointed by Jimbo.

Actually, considering the article says Jimbo appointed that small
group of admins, maybe that was what the author was talking about.
Who did appoint the first admins, Jimbo or Larry?