So I was made an editor sometime in early-to-mid February. Ironically, I'd been busy enough with school at that point that I didn't even log in for several days, which meant that when I did so one Sunday morning, I had no idea why the screen looked different. At first I figured that my ekw stylesheet hadn't downloaded, until I realized that there was some big new nodelet on top of all the others. So, yeah, for some reason they decided to make me an editor.
So here's all the new powers I've discovered. There may be a couple other miscellaneous things I'm forgetting or haven't found yet. First, I can nuke writeups (or insta-nuke, meaning they die right away instead of waiting until Node Row gets purged). I can edit them as well. I can see into people's Node Heavens. I have infinite votes and chings, and I can ed-cool nodes. And, uh, that's about it. I have access to the sooper-sekrit Content Editors' usergroup, and the little forum thingy where we debate E2 policy without actually coming to any decisions. Also, we can attach comments to nodes (including homenodes). And there's some kind of "node test" dealie that can search for (for instance) writeups with no hardlinks, or nodes with no softlinks, and ostensibly editors can then correct those things. But I haven't figured out how that thing even works. So essentially, an editor has the ability to edit writeups, to nuke writeups, and to ed-cool nodes. That's pretty much the limits of an editor's ability to reshape E2. In case you were wondering. (If you want anything major done, in other words, talk to a god.) Beyond that, we have whatever moral authority our $s give us, and we're happy to offer advice and stuff. But it's not really a whole lot of power. I can't even see the ultra-top-secret stuff that (I assume) is hiding out in monkeys.
Pulling an Asamoth
Here we come to the reason I posted this — specifically, since kthejoker recommended I turn some comments to the Content Editors usergroup into an Editor Log. (Apparently I am "clearly opinionated about many of the editorial aspects here (that's not a bad thing)" — something that's been said about me in other aspects of my life as well.)
There's actually no writeup by this title anymore, but Asamoth was the original huffy exit from E2. He didn't just ask the admins to delete his writeups — instead he blanked them and thus caused considerably more consternation amongst the admins. Generally the phrase "pulling an Asamoth" refers to stalking out of E2 and taking your writeups with you, either by having the admins nuke them or by blanking them all.
I hadn't realized how common this actually is. So far, after about three weeks of being an editor, I've seen it twice. One long-time user requested (under a sockpuppet account) that all his writeups be deleted; when I told him that it would take some time and that I'd have to pass it up to the gods, he brought up lawyers and told me our conversation was being recorded. I'm pretty sure he was drunk at the time, and I suspect he changed his mind, because I passed the request up to the gods and nothing ever came of it. But in the other incident, sometime around the beginning of February mat catastrophe requested all his stuff be deleted, and it actually happened.
As it is, we have to comply with such requests; the writer holds the copyright to their writing and nothing in E2's terms requires users to grant E2 the right to distribute it in perpetuity. And legal issues aside, I think the admins would generally be pretty loathe to hang onto someone's work if they requested it be removed.
The trouble here is that people sometimes request their writeups be deleted and change their minds later; one of my favorite noders did so at one point quite awhile ago, while in the grip of a manic episode. When that noder returned and requested that their writeups be reinstated, the request was denied. I don't know how many people who request complete deletion regret it later, but my own experience has been that people tend to change their minds about it. And that's not really much of a shock — one of the curses of humanity is our tendency to say things we don't really mean. Losing all of that noder's writeups was not just a bad thing for them, but for E2 as a whole, because their work contained a lot of brilliance that it didn't benefit the database to lose. To my knowledge, the user reposted it from their node heaven, which is fortunate for the rest of us.
Beyond the problems of people changing their minds, when you remove someone's entire œuvre from the database, it leaves gaps. E2 is self-organizing and heavily linked; writeups tend to refer to other writeups, and pulling out everything you've ever written is going to leave hardlinks with no destination and empty spaces where there ought to be content. There's no reason you have to erase every record of your existence here if you decide to leave, especially since lots of people leave and come back later. The admins could actually decide to amend E2's copyright policy so that if you post something, we reserve the right to keep it until we decide we don't want it anymore, though this would simply create an incentive for people to blank their writeups and make things more difficult for all of us. Plus it seems like a rather hostile way to treat E2's writers. There's no easy answer, but permitting people to pull everything they've written out of the database creates problems for the rest of E2's users and in some cases for the users themselves.
At very least, think long and hard if you decide you want to leave E2 and take your toys with you. There's good reasons to delete things — circumstances may change, and if your writeups contain information that might be used to identify you, that might be a problem. But E2 is not just a place for self-expression: it's about contributing as part of a large group to a project bigger than any of us. You don't have to continue contributing, but the classy move would be not to demand that all your previous contributions be removed.
Nukings
Between being made editor and the end of February, near as I can figure (I'm sure I forgot to note a couple of 'em) I nuked 68 writeups. Which is, admittedly, a lot. My personal belief is that E2 has some of the best writing to be found anywhere — but if you can't find it because the signal-to-noise ratio is too low, then it might as well not exist. Every below par writeup means that the amazing things are harder to find. And it means that people happening upon the site are less likely to find them.
19 February 2006: One writeup in debug - it was essentially about the debug.exe program from DOS, but it didn't actually describe it. One writeup each in DHTML and Javascript. Too many outside links, too little content. The only non-Webby writeup in Script. Too much opinion, too little support, no actual description of the item in question. One writeup in doohickey. Didn't really say what a doohickey was. Also misspelled.
20 February 2006: Big day for the killin'. Killed four writeups in I'm fucking addicted, OK?. Some of it didn't relate to the actual topic, and a lot of it was GTKY. Also killed a whole node: Thou shalt not kill unless sanctioned by the church. It was mostly back-and-forth (you know how writeup does not mean reply?) and the conversation was interesting - but it was a bit light on real fact and analysis. Killed Institute for Official Cheer because it was little more than a link (even if the Institute for Official Cheer rocks. Which it does.)
21 February 2006: Murdered two writeups in Technology that gets lost between now and Star Trek that didn't focus on the topic.
23 February 2006: Killed both writeups in sentient, since they didn't reflect enough knowledge of the research done in the area. Killed The Chinese Room since it was in the wrong node (firmlinked it to Searle's Chinese room) and it was rather incomplete and short when compared to the writeups there. Killed I'm being enveloped by a lust I cannot identify. Did in Intelligence makes people unhappy. I think I think I think too much was a bit too GTKY. Firmlinked Luxembourgian and Luxembourgish to Lėtzebuergesch, and deleted the one-line in Luxembourgian that merely explained that the English name is "Luxembourgish". Killed a writeup in chaos for not representing the quality of writing and thought in the rest of the node. One of the writeups in intentionality badly misrepresented the views of John Searle in his famous formulation of the Chinese Room. All five writeups in Why C++ sucks seemed to be simple whining, rather than (say) a thoughtful analysis of the problems with this extremely popular programming language. Deleted everything in 13-year-olds who think 100 lines is a lot of code and its two brethren because they seemed to contain nothing but responses to a snarky nodeshell. Writeup does not mean reply, folks. Ten altogether. Squished a writeup in calculus because it was nothing but an unsupported assertion that everyone, everywhere is using the word wrong (it ought to have "the" in front of it, you see) and the author wanted to correct all of us. Killed an old writeup in Focus that was vastly out of date. Killed off two writeups in Colorless green ideas sleep furiously because they had been superceded and misstated the argument Chomsky was making with the sentence. Killed two things in nigger.
24 February 2006: Axed the writeup in emergence for being a much less thorough discussion of what's going on in emergent behavior; softlocked emergence and firmlinked it to emergent behavior.
26 February 2006: The first, superceded writeup in search with a fine toothed comb. Beauty is beyond physics. Something in you get what you pay for for being a GTKY about the author's religious beliefs. Nuked three things in ± for being a bit too light on content. .ca vs. ca. and .cc. Killed all six writeups in Why one doesn't equal point nine repeating. Arguing about something that's a simple matter of fact is not useful. Killed infinity by a new user — my first time killing someone's first contribution. That's not a happy moment. Killed vanilla-lameness and tragically hip lesbians. In my humble opinion, E2 doesn't really need a bunch of straight guys feeling all sorry for themselves because they're not edgy enough.
28 February 2006: Both things in CD store amnesia, since they weren't nearly as funny as the writeup addressing the topic in Record Shop Amnesia syndrome.