Board Thread:Support Requests - Community Management/@comment-24040319-20140907080203/@comment-4568327-20140911192105

In my opinion, being at a "higher level of authority" doesn't mean enjoyment for whoever's at the top. It means more work for them. If you were the Emperor of a massive empire, your job isn't easy at all - you have lots and lots of work to do. A riot in the western edge of your empire needs your attention to dispatch troops to settle the riot. Maybe the economy crashed in one of your cities and you need to help resolve the financial crisis. Or another empire has declared war on your empire, and there's no sleep for you and your citizens.

Being an administrator though, in my experience, doesn't grant you any sort of "feeling of authority". At the end of the day you're still human, just like everyone else on the wiki. All I have is a few extra tools, and that's it. If someone stabbed me, I'd still bleed like any other user on the wiki would if they got stabbed. In a true democracy, the government cannot break their own laws. I think the same should go here.

And last, but not least - this is a wiki. The idea of a wiki is that anyone can contribute, and everyone is able to be a part of a project. Working together, people can build something valuable. If a massive change needs to occur on the wiki, it's only fair that everyone knows about it and everyone has a chance to voice their opinions on the change, because it's the community as a whole that, working together, made the wiki. If all decisions were made by a small group of admins, with no community input, it could potentially drive away contributors when they see a change that they disagree with, and their comments were completely ignored.

One aspect of being an admin is that you are able to change certain aspects of the wiki, a tool that no other non-administrator can do by themselves. Examples include interface text and the site design. While an admin makes these changes, the community as a whole uses them, and even more readers will see and use them. It's only fair (and reasonable) that the people who use the website get a say in how it's going to be made, because they use it and they will know what works and what doesn't.

In the end, Discussion and Consensus win the admin battles. A disagreement between two users warrant a discussion, and the consensus that is formed between the two parties resolves the issue. If one or both users were simply blocked, that doesn't resolve the issue. You can't bury a problem in the ground and expect it to go away. Just like you can't bury a broken computer and expect it to be magically fixed. You gotta fix the problem so it can be shelved for good.