The history of administrators Options

[Peter Damian]

In 2001 Larry wrote here http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikip...May/000123.html in a reply to Crocker, who had written:

There is no such thing as an "administrator" in Wikipedia in the sense of someone responsible for its content, nor should there be. Nupedia has those (and should); Wikipedia just has us, and we are just as responsible for its content as anyone else. It does have a few folks to set policy, but even they have been very respectful of the community process of content creation and not tried to subvert it by establishing "control" or "ownership". Further, it is obviously impractical to have an infintely scalable content-creation method with non-scalable editing and expect to keep up. Wikipedia CANNOT work unless EVERYONE is an editor and administrator as well as an author. "

Larry replied:

Notice, there is no one claiming to be editor-in-chief or even editor of Wikipedia. A wiki, by its design, doesn't need one. Wikipedia needs people to act as "gardeners" (in Jimbo's metaphor). The reason Wikipedia is so successful at creating content is that there aren't any editors standing in the way of content creation. This means there's a lot of garbage that needs cleaning up, and the whole thing is a work-in-progress, but a lot work *is* done, and we *do* have a lot of very good articles and many that are improving.

It was a little like that when I started contributing in 2003. Quite a friendly place, even.

(1) When was the concept of 'administrator' devised? It seems to be built into the concept of the MediaWiki. Was it part of the original Ward-Cunningham design? Is it related to the administrator concept in computer systems design?

(2) When did the role become important, and when did the divide between editors and admins begin to get bitter?

(3) Who was the first editor to be banned? My research suggests an eccentric IP beginning with '24', who they called '24'.

(4) Who were the first rogue admins?

[Kelly Martin]

The original wikis did not have administrators within the software; everyone was equal in the eyes of the web app. There were no users, and if you wanted to make a change anonymously you just didn't sign your edit.

Of course, the web app itself had maintainers who installed and ran the software on hardware they controlled, and those people could, by virtue of their direct control of the app and its database, arbitrarily and nontraceably remove or alter content, at will. Doing so, however, is fairly tedious, and doesn't scale well.

[Rufus]

The original wikis did not have administrators within the software; everyone was equal in the eyes of the web app. There were no users, and if you wanted to make a change anonymously you just didn't sign your edit.

Yeah. Correct me if my memory fails, but the administrator role was fairly quickly devolved to a cadre of people nominated by Jimbo and quickly vetted over the mailing list (~2002). At first they could only delete, then they acquired the power to block. As the nominating process via Jimbo grew overly slow, Ed Poor (as a developer only for the purpose of promotions) took over most of the work of promoting new admins via RfA. Eventually, a little before Ed got in hot water (2004) and flamed out, that role was in turn devolved to the broader group of bureaucrats and taken away from the devs. And, in turn, the bureaucrats developed their own election process and thick encrusted shell of procedure.

I guess the surprise is that it stopped there--in 2007 or so I would have guessed that the stewards would seize the crown and power would keep evolving upwards along that same track, but instead it moved laterally into new permissions like CU and oversight. You never can tell!