On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 3:33 PM Deryck Chan <deryckchan@gmail.com> wrote:

Well, the Interface Administrator right got rolled out and thousands of admins lost their rights to edit the MediaWiki namespace (…)

Administrators can still edit most pages in the MediaWiki namespace. They only can not edit pages containing JS or CSS code.

This has completely wreaked havoc on the English Wikipedia, to say the least. If this was rolled out in a way such that existing admins could've applied to get the Interface Administrator flag before the right to edit interface messages was stripped from the Sysop group, this mess could've been avoided.

Honestly this seems like a problem with English Wikipedia's processes. The change was announced beforehand and there was a transitional period. To add to Huji's example, on Polish Wikipedia we also had no problem defining a process to grant the new right and granting it to 9 people well ahead of the deadline.

Matma Rex