QUOTE(Malleus @ Fri 13th November 2009, 9:43pm)
QUOTE(Happy drinker @ Fri 13th November 2009, 4:46pm)
QUOTE(Kelly Martin @ Fri 13th November 2009, 2:53am)
I leave it to the observer to decide which of these arguments is being offered by Happy Drunkard.
My argument is that when I !vote on an RfA, I am considering whether to trust that person with the full spectrum of tools. Were it possible to !vote for someone to have only a few of them, say only the right to grant rollback, I might well support someone whom I would oppose for the full spectrum. Would others agree?
Partly, because it seems clear as day that the tools ought to be unbundled.
However, I don't recall there being any RfA vote on whether the present lot of admins ought to be able to edit abuse filters, for instance. Your argument only makes sense if there's a static set of tools, which there isn't.
Unbundling the tools is dumb. What people really want to do is unbundle the tasks, something that can not be accomplished technically. The basic tools are the block/unblock button and the delete/undelete button and protecting/unprotecting/editing protected pages. The other stuff (view deleted, history merge, granting rollback/ip-block exempt, etc.) is peripheral. These same basic tools are used in totally different tasks.
An admin who wants to focus on vandalism, for example, needs block/unblock just like some one who is planning to deal with serious disputes and delete (for speedies, primarily) just like someone who wants to close AfDs. There are plenty of people that I would trust to play countervandalism who I would not trust to close a contentious BLP AfD or wade into an intense content dispute, but the technical tools involved are exactly the same.