[Foundation-l] Term of service?

Wed May 24 05:09:34 UTC 2006

On 5/23/06, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
> Please not. I don't want to be an admin. I don't want to get into
> fights about admin policy again. When someone makes a mistake, I
> prefer being able to call admin abuse above getting into a
> blocking/deblocking war. It would be nice to have the rollback buttons
> again, but becoming an admin would be too high a price for that.

My view of admins as "trusted users" implies that adminship does not
automatically come with a responsibility to use it. If you don't want
to block because of the conflicts it may cause, you can still act like
a regular user -- while deleting spam when you see it.

The problem begins when people start arguing "User X hasn't done any
admin action on this project for months, he shouldn't be an admin".
That is a view of adminship as a "job" which I do not share. Adminship
should only indicate that you are a good faith contributor who can be
trusted to use certain software features responsibly. This seems to
work on en.wikinews, and on en.wp to a certain extent (RfA criteria
creep has gotten quite bad on en.wp).

I do not know if this is the case on nl: and if not, how difficult it
would be to reform it. Given how quickly people scream about "top
down" approaches to policy, my inclination is to believe that the best
way to fix broken admin policies in various language editions is
probably to come up with a completely new technical model of trust
that provides obvious advantages to the current one (e.g. higher rate
of vandalism clean-up), leading communities to adopt it.

Erik