On 3/31/06, charles matthews
<charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
"Steve Bennett" wrote
Personally I'm a bit puzzled that there seems
to be a bias in favour
of people who have edited high profile articles and thus have "handled
conflict" well.
Errr ... aren't those exactly the kind of people we are short of? Few are
natural diplomats, but part of being an admin is a willingness to intervene
in tense situations, where there is no personal gain at all in sight.
Admins normally shouldn't be entering content disputes. Theoretically
they shouldn't even care about content, in the same was as a football
referee theoretically doesn't care who's winning.
I may be forgetting some pertinant situations here, but being well
versed in getting a point of view across in a content dispute is not
necessarily a useful skill in adminship. No?
What undid Pete Rose was not simply gambling, but betting on baseball.
Admins will have opinions on different subjects, and hopefully many came
here in the first place because they felt they had something to say
about some encyclopedic topic. One way of reading what you say is that
admins should abandon normal editing though I doubt that that is your
intent. It is more immportant to avoid using admin status as a trump
card in a dispute. There are many more articles where an admin can act
as an honest broker.
Ec