| >1- Separation of powers between rulemakers and judges. In practice many Administrators who have the power to enforce rules and bans are actually editing articles themselves! Separation of judge and party is enforced pretty consistently, it is official policy that people shouldn't participate in a decision if they were involved in the kerfuffle in any way. You can edit articles and enforce rules, as long as these are separate. And then, rules can be proposed by anyone, but they're not just created on the fly because it's convenient. That would obviously be objectionable. In fact this isn't limited to admins, regular users have the power to decide on a ban. An administrator is only needed to close and enact the decision, and this is what happened to Larry Sanger here. >The only exception are protected articles, in which case administrators can emit an official ruling on what the article content should be. Admins don't have a special power to decide what should be in important protected articles. It is not like a government where people are elected, and then citizens don't have any say until the next election. The community tries to reach a consensus, and admins are part of the community. They get an input like everyone else plus special powers to enact decisions. But any "ruling" better reflect consensus, or you better bet you will wake up to the Noticeboards on fire with about 50,000 words of heated complaints and discussion. |