[WikiEN-l] RickK leaving: adminship has become much more than "no big deal" and that's poisonous

Tue Jun 21 20:32:50 UTC 2005

On 6/21/05, michaelturley at myway.com 
> If we truly want to live up to the perception and ideal that adminship is "no big deal", it should be a matter of routine to revoke admin priviledges for a few hours for something as little as a single foul mouthed comment, even if provoked and egged on by peers.  If this is done, perhaps we will see less admins defending their actions at any cost, and more "shrugging it off" and proceeding with business.

I don't agree. Admins non-admin activities should be kept to the same
fairly low standard that user edits are usually held to.. we can't fit
human interaction into nice little boxes, so there isn't a good way to
define how people should behave for regular users or administrators. 
So an admin should be blocked in the same way we'd block any other
contributor, ... a fairly infrequent event for substantial
contributors as all admins are... only dished out when it's clear they
need to cool off.

Now, there are cases where adminship itself should be revoked. But
that should only happen in cases of specific abuse of those abilities.
 Administrators are just regular users, there is nothing wondrous and
mysterious that admin power grants.. only the ability to edit
protected pages, to protect pages, to block and unblock, to see
deleted content, restore deleted content, and delete content, and the
autorevert button. All of these activities leave a written record.

It would be nice if all users could have access to these abilities,
but due to the potential of  difficult to correct abuse we must limit
these abilities.  It is highly likely that after mediawiki 1.5 is in
use we may being to issue and remove admin powers in tiers as well.

There are some administrative actions which should be unacceptable and
result in quick deadminship with little judgement applied, for example
unblocking yourself.  There are other activities (admin action revert
wars) that should indicate administrative cool offs like 3rr, but it's
not easy to achieve that today due to technical limitations.  Standard
blocks might be acceptable in the same role.

I think we've complicated adminship by imposing additional unspoken
requirements on the position. Technical adminship should remain as it
was intended: will you use the admin functions to further the ends of
wikipedia rather than your own personal agenda? If so you should have
access to them.  We should have another class of users if we wish to
award kindness, respectability, community involvement.  The two groups
don't always map 1:1 and the requirements to keep the positions
shouldn't be the same.  We shouldn't remove admin functions for
someone who is a jerk but almost always uses the functions correctly
(i.e. avoids using them in their own disputes), but I don't want to
send new users to go talk to them.

In the case of RickK, not only did he cross the line we set for all
editors by excessive reverting of a disputed issue, but he abused his
admin powers by blocking the party that disagreed with him and then
protecting the page when additional editors engaged. A 24 hour cool of
was appropriate if not for the 3RR than for the sloppy use of admin
functions.