This might a wrong venue to discuss this but these were the worst 3 days of my participation in Wikimedia movement, and that feeling is probably shared by my colleagues.
The consultation about the creation of new technical administrators group that just ended yesterday was an utter and total disaster for people with existing non-sysop groups for editing JS/CSS.
In Russian Wikipedia, for 300 Kb already [1], people are weaponising every reading of the consultation document (which they, for some reason, consider akin to global policy) against, uniting the same-minded groups (local ‘engineer’ group was created under a ‘Technical administrator group’ RfC) for an umbrella of reasons:
— 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).
— 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.
— 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.
I do not expect organisers of the consultation and MediaWiki developer community to intervene into a discussion that's happening in a foreign language, but 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. In the retrospective, I really wish that I did more push on this point on Phabricator [2] since this was a major point that I expected to backfire because of the vague wording of the document and that did backfire.
What I would like to have from the global community, though, is a clear documentation for people who are affected by this change, because right now, because of misinformation, misreadings and over-interpretations, it could go as far as losing all interface editing permissions for me and others because the document in question didn’t go far enough on the qualifications and left too much to community’s assumptions.
Oleg
[1]: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Википедия:Форум/Правила#Объеди <https://ru.wikipedia.org/wikiнение_флагов_инженера_и_техадм ина /%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0% >BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%8F:% D0%A4%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%83%D0%BC/ %D0%9F%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0% B8%D0%BB%D0%B0#%D0%9E%D0%B1% D1%8A%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B8%D0%BD% D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D1% 84%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B3%D0%BE%D0% B2_%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B6%D0%B5% D0%BD%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B0_%D0% B8_%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%85%D0%B0% D0%B4%D0%BC%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B0
[2]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T190015#4257719
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