Hi Gergő,
Immense thanks for this response. Other than the note about 4 engineers
(one was elected not long before, one is a bot that maintained user
JS/CSS before and just one with his bot doesn’t need such permissions at
all), you’ve confirmed everything I and others tried to convey in the
discussion.
Oleg
On 26/07/2018 03:40, Tisza Gergő wrote:
Hi Oleg,
I am sorry if the change or the way I communicated about it is
frustrating to you . I'm happy to provide more insight into the
motivation behind the change, if that helps.
On Tue, Jul 24, 2018 at 12:41 AM Saint Johann <ole.yves(a)gmail.com
<mailto:ole.yves@gmail.com>> wrote:
— Some tell that, apparently, after working for 2 years already and
doing more edits than all sysops combined in JS/CSS, engineers do not
have ‘at least as much trust as being an administrator’ since they
weren’t elected like administrators (we are electing sysops with a
vote
and engineers are being elected with a discussion, so people argue
that
engineers do not have trust because they weren’t subjected to a vote).
I think someone who had those rights for a while and did not abuse
them can be reasonably trusted with them (which is why I suggested
simple opt-in as the migration process).
From what I could understood with Google Translate, this seems to be
the current community consensus as well.
— Others claim that, because MediaWiki developer community decided to
unite those rights under one group, merging any groups with it is not
acceptable, and, moreover, the engineer group shouldn't be given
those
rights at all.
One goal with the change was to reduce the number of people with JS
editing permissions as much as possible without preventing them from
doing their work. If a group is primarily about JS editing, it might
makes sense to merge (that might be the case with interface-editor on
some wikis, although not all). If a group has a wider range of roles,
then merging would mean giving the permission to people who might not
be interested in JS editing, and avoiding that situation was the
entire point. I 'm not sure which of those applies to engineers - at
a glance, out of the 12 of them 4 have never edited CSS/JS and one
almost never [1], so probably it makes sense to separate
interface-admins from engineers?
— Moreover, some people claim that if a group would be too small,
like
engineers right now (12 accounts with 85 sysops), they could, in
opinion
of those people, usurp all editing of JS/CSS, decline to revert edits
that are deemed controversial by community, and this justifies giving
the permissions to all 85 existing sysops, even those that didn’t
edit
JS/CSS at all.
Again, as far as I can understand the discussion this was a fringe
opinion and the current consensus proposal requires admins to opt in.
I really think that it all comes down to focusing on
projects that didn’t have any technical administrators and not
explaining anything to projects that did.
For projects which do have some kind of non-admin JS editor role
(engineer, interface-editor, templateeditor, botadmin) there were two
"social" goals:
- Warn them against handing out JS editor too easily. With the current
structure, that does happen sometimes, and can you get things like the
fawiki incident. JS editing should only be given to people who can be
trusted not to abuse their privileges to attack the site.
- Do not completely discourage people from handing it out to
non-admins. Trust is important, but it's a somewhat different kind of
trust (admins need to be socially competent, level-headed, fair etc;
JS editors don't really need to be all those things, they just need to
not be malicious) and there are people who can absolutely be trusted
not to be malicious, but don't have the social skills or the good
judgement to be admins (or just don't want be one), and there is no
reason to prevent them from doing good work on JS pages.
[1]
https://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/28510
Hope that helps!
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