[WikiEN-l] Re: Recent goings-on

Fri Jun 3 19:22:44 UTC 2005

A Nony Mouse wrote: ... quite a lot.

Clearly, there's a huge thread following A Nony Mouse's first posting. I 
have not read it. I don't think I have the nerve. But I want to comment 
on something, and I apologise if this has been said elsewhere in the 
thread already.

A Nony Mouse is placing a lot of blame on admins, saying they are 
clearly misbehaving in one way or another. However, with 473 admins on 
the English Wikipedia, I think we are well beyond the point where we can 
place any blame for large-scale emergent behavioural patterns on any 
single admin or any particular set of admins.

You can't blame the admins for "feeling special", because they *are* -- 
they're admins, and non-admins aren't. That makes them special. You 
can't blame the admins for "believing that they are somehow better than 
others", because they have been elected, thereby clearly having gained 
trust in the community.

I am *NOT* saying that these behaviours are perfectly okay! But you are 
naïve if you don't expect them to occur more and more as the number of 
admins increases. These behaviours are within human nature, and a system 
that doesn't take this into account is to blame, not the admins.

To put it bluntly: Don't be surprised that admins "exceed their 
authority" if the system allows them to get away with it.

Timwi