Surreptitiousness wrote: > I'd offer the view that an admin who gets involved as one party in a > long series of trolling may not be suited to the role either. It could > be taken to suggest the admin has an issue with knowing when to step > back, or possibly even too much self-belief in their own righteousness > to be bordering on arrogance. Both of these would indicate an > unsuitability to the role. I'd agree to the extent that there is a point at which any admin should be looking for the right kind of help (outside admin assistance, from people who are clearly uninvolved neutrals). It is not a good sign if an admin ploughs on unaided, in a difficult situation.
<snip> > Any admin who thinks their > solution is the only way is wrong, and any arbitration committee that > thinks Wikipedia would be worse off losing an admin is wrong. We all > live in the real world, we all acknowledge there are times we get chewed > out even though we did everything right, just because sometimes that's > the way the cookie crumbles. Sometimes you take one on the chin to keep > up appearances. Life is full of hard decisions, and Wikipedia isn't > going to be any different. We need people on the arbitration committee > who are aware that justice can't only be done, it needs to be seen to be > done. The last part is the harder part, and the committee has to my mind > often failed in that sense by being, as you say, sympathetic with > admins. I can't go into private discussions I know about, obviously. I've several times made public my view that we should give admins plenty of discretion, and balance that by a small number of de-sysops. So I agree pretty much with what you say. "Sympathy" needs to be in the way of a full understanding of the job description, not in continuing admins who really don't match that description. The counter-argument, though, is that the "community" will not accept certain tough decisions; in other words there will be some adverse comment. Sometimes there is much more to these situations than meets the eye. Charles Charles _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l