[Wikipedia-l] "adminship is no big deal"

[Anthony DiPierro]

On 1/18/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> You mischaracterize an ambiguous situation as being totally corrupt.
>
> Fred
>
How so?  I read over what I wrote and I don't think I imply corruption
at all.  I do believe there is some corruption, but I wouldn't even
characterise the system as being totally corrupt if directly asked
about it.

I guess you could take what I say about the arb com, that they choose
cases which suit their POV, as a hint of corruption.  I'm not sure I'd
call that corruption, because I think it's true of any judicial or
quasai-judicial entity.

Admins influence content with the admin actions they take.  I consider
that to be an accurate description of the way things are.  It would be
very hard to change this, you'd have to give someone (or some group)
authority to make specific rules for the admins to follow, and then
someone would have to enforce those rules strictly.  That's not how
things work in Wikipedia.  It's probably not even a good idea.

But hiding your head in the sand and saying that admins exercise no
authority over content is not a good idea either.

Anthony

> On Jan 18, 2006, at 9:10 AM, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
>
> > On 1/18/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> >
> >> Yes, it is somewhat outdated, but it remains true in a sense;
> >> administrators are on the same level as everyone else as far as
> >> content is concerned, pointing out that you are an administrator will
> >> not get you far in a content dispute, and carried far enough, will
> >> get you desysopped.  There are occasional lapses and a few folks
> >> sneak
> >> around a bit, but those who think being an administrator gives them
> >> authority over the most important thing in Wikipedia, content, are
> >> mistaken.
> >>
> >> Fred
> >>
> >
> > I'm amazed sometimes at how often blatently untrue statements like
> > this get made.
> >
> > Admins decide which content gets deleted and which content gets
> > undeleted.  They decide when pages are protected and when they are
> > unprotected.  While those pages are protected they decide what those
> > pages are going to say.  They decide when to block someone for
> > violating the three revert rule and when not to block someone for
> > violating it.
> >
> > On very rare occassion an admin does something so ridiculously
> > outrageous and out of touch with the POV of the arbitration committee
> > that they get reprimanded for it, but there are numerous occassions
> > where they influence content and nothing happens at all.
> >
> > It's very hard to separate power from authority, and in a flat (as
> > opposed to hierarchical) system, it's probably impossible.
> >
> > Anthony