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

Tue Jun 21 09:27:58 UTC 2005

On 6/21/05, Dan Grey <dangrey at gmail.com> wrote:
> Haven't people made attempts at formulating a policy for de-sysopping
> before now, and been shot down in flames?
> 
> This is a bit like the content-committee discussion - I'm not sure how
> much of a problem there really is. When have we ever truly needed to
> desysop someone? Can anyone point to an example?
> 
> Admins, by and large, behave perfectly well. I would hope that the
> community is selecting those who are trustworthy to be admins, and
> that peer-pressure from the responsible majority will keep the odd
> rouge in line.

As far as I remember, three users have been desysopped. It is a big
thing - and it so it should be, which is why it's dealt with the way
it is now. Our admins are generally our contributors that have been
here the longest and in almost all cases, have put in tireless amounts
of work to improve the encyclopedia (and anyone who isn't an admin,
unless they either don't want to be an admin, or are in some way a
dick, should be one in the future with a few more contributions).

I'm getting really damned sick of all this admin-bashing on wikien-l.
We seem to be getting a small clique of very loud users who seem to
contribute remarkably little to the project apart from persecuting
users who actually *do* (and loudly defending those that don't).
Wikipedia is not an experiment in anarchy. If you start punishing good
users without a very good reason, they will leave. This is a volunteer
project - we rely on the people who are prepared to put in hours and
hours of work. The people that are prepared to do this (without
causing scores of controversy), become admins. We've seen enough good
users leave because of people - and you know who are - who seem to get
some bizarre kick out of chasing good users away from the project.

-- ambi