QUOTE(Neil @ Mon 14th July 2008, 2:17pm)
What's in a name? (etc, etc). I would say "administrator" is no more staus-laden a term than "custodian"; the term "administrator/admin" on Wikipedia, though, is a secondary, Wikipedia-specific meaning that has nothing to do with administration.
If sysops were called "custodians", then you could simply replace every mention of the term "admin" with the term "custodian", and nothing substantive would have changed, except everyone would be complaining about "custodians", rather than "admins".
The problem is that "administrator" has picked up a 'status' meaning on the internet at large outside of wikipedia, and it often means someone with
more substantive power over the site than an "admin" on Wikipedia - on forums and other sites it traditionally means "the people who own the server / pay the bills".