User:9cfilorux/Nature of adminship

Warning: This essay is totally wacko and has a high concentration of magic mushrooms. Read it at your own risk. Do not sue me if your ears turn purple and fall off.

Adminship is one of the uglier products of human nature. It is at once degrading and exalted, disgusting and admirable, advantageous and burdensome, an honour and a punishment. It is ugly not only because of the cold greyness of its necessity, but because there is nothing beautiful about it.

Humans are naturally chaotic; it is hard for them to understand each other fully, if they can at all, which I doubt. This frequently results in their rising up against each other, each mocking or destroying what the other tries to create. If a group of them decides to work toward a single goal, it must put precautions in place against those who would not respect it. These may be generally referred to as rules. Those humans who would not respect the group's goals have a similar disregard for rules, however, so they must be enforced, generally by certain trusted members of the group. In the real world, there are several names for these people, among them police officers; on wikis, they are called administrators.

Administrators are supposed to be those whose natural chaotic tendencies have been sufficiently tamed that they can deal effectively with those who are so untamed that they would threaten the wiki if they were not prevented from editing it. However, it is not as simple as that; it cannot be. There is a contradiction within it.

A block is the result of a failure to communicate, often a failure brought about in part by unwillingness. The blocked user does not understand the rule he has violated, the importance of the rule, or the reason he should not have violated it; the blocking admin has no time or space to understand the blocked user, only to do as he thinks necessary. And if by some miracle, accident, or great effort, they do understand each other, they do not agree about why or how something should happen. They have no motivation to learn to agree. They are separate, unconcerned with each other, leading their own lives, preferring the quick, easy injustices they inflict on each other to an alternative that is unimaginable and most likely impossible.

I used the word 'injustice'. I expect - I know - it is not the right word, but I desire to convey a sense of wrongness, of chaos, because a block is merely and precisely an expression of chaos. The contradiction I mentioned two paragraphs ago is that the admin, supposed to be rational and tame, must perpetrate an outgrowth of that which he is employed to squash. Furthermore, this contradiction is unstable, and tends to try to become something less contradictory, often with suboptimal results.

Those who are certain they are right have given up on striving to know more, and tend to know far less and far fewer truths than they would if they had not settled on an opinion. Those who are uncertain are open to growing and learning to their full capacity and tend to be those who know more and are wiser. The truth is in the questions; there is an answer to every question, but the answers are all blind, lost, unverifiable, changeable as a pattern in the sand. Those who believe they deserve positions of power are those who are too certain to truly understand things; those who believe they do not deserve power are those who are uncertain, open to the truth, and thus truly deserving. This is why we deny adminship to those who ask for it: they have proven themselves to be too certain to be right. However, it does not protect against those who believe they deserve adminship but do not admit to it; who else would accept the job?

It is easy for humans to harden themselves to the idea of denying a fellow human the chance to do what he wants. A necessity it may be, but the motives of the blocking admin and the blocked user are two sides of the same coin: they are each intent on doing what they want at the expense of what the other wants; one only happens to be in the position to make his desire final. If an admin is not careful, he may lose sight of what a block really is and appropriate it for his own purposes. In the early stages, he will make blocks without warning, where warning is intended to be a chance to avoid the block; then he may progress to blocking those who disagree with him purely because they disagree. This is what results when the precarious contradiction collapses, coupled with the other contradiction of those who believe they deserve power not in fact deserving it.

This is where the idea of a blocking policy comes in. However, those who wish to abuse it - consciously or unconsciously - often put their minds to finding a way, particularly easy when there are gaping holes in it (which there are not here, but there are on some other wikis). A rule has a letter and a spirit; the letter is easy to follow, but the spirit is open to interpretation because anything we cannot see is impossible to entirely comprehend.

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Adminship is a burden no one should have to bear, but that someone must. It is the burden of fighting one kind of chaos with different kinds that at times seem to serve mainly to create more chaos rather than peace; of taking the weight of human flaws on one's own shoulders rather than sitting back and letting them burst into uncontrolled flames; of taking the blame in those situations where nothing one does is right and not enough can be done; of staring reality and human nature in the face in all its harsh, grey, naked intractability. We may say that adminship is no big deal, but in fact it is as big a deal as any other position of responsibility in any other group of humans. This is a group of humans like any other, small but not insignificant, because it is no less real than anything else. For some of us, it is our life. I have heard - thought, even, at times - that anyone who felt real emotional pain from being blocked, or believed such a thing was normal, was wrong and silly; but this is not true. When our reality is disturbed in such a manner, a piece of it cut off from us for a reason we refuse to understand, we have a right to believe that it is wrong and react accordingly - because it is wrong.

These words may not match your beliefs, and your beliefs are likely to be right even in that case, as there is no one way of describing anything; but there is one thing I am certain adminship is not, and should not be: shiny. That is, there is nothing fun, beautiful or enjoyable about it, save the relief of being able to do things oneself rather than beg impatiently for them to be done, if one is that sort of person. Deleting pages is not fun; it is akin to throwing out a piece of trash that no one is willing to fix and some may not consider in need of fixing. Blocking users is not fun, unless one enjoys crushing those who one believes to be doing wrong, and this kind of depravity should not exist in an admin. Protecting pages, featuring articles, clearing out backlogs... these are little more than work; routine, lifeless tasks. Having the privilege to do these things, therefore, should not be looked upon as anything to be striven after or envied, unless it is for the sake of lightening the load of others who are already bent under its weight.