[Wikipedia-l] 'old hand' status

[Daniel Mayer]

>maveric149 wrote in part:
>
>>Again I would like to restate my proposal 
>>to have an 'old hand' status that
>>would allow users that have been around 
>>a while and are generally trusted to
>>move pages and edit protected pages.
>
>I don't think that I've done this before,
>so I'd like to officially state my 
>agreement on this. 30 days/30 edits, 
>mentioned before, seems reasonable offhand. 
>Is there agreement that we do want to open 
>up these two functions, and that the only 
>thing left to discussion is the criteria?
>...
>-- Toby Bartels

There seems to be a growing consensus that these two
functions should be available to many more users than
they are now.

The 30 day AND 30 edit automatic promotion idea was
really an off hand suggestion of mine. The 30 day part
seems reasonable enough to me but I am now not sure
about the 30 edit part -- which may be a ridiculously
low number of edits for an entire month. What does
everyone else think? Would changing the criteria to 30
_pages_ edited AND 30 day old account seem more
reasonable? 

During my first month I averaged 10 edits a day --
most which were clustered around several different
pages per day. I still easily surpassed 30 pages
edited in a month. Heck, if we wanted to we could even
make it 30 pages edited in the article namespace in
order to promote editing of articles over chatter on
talk or user pages (which I know I am guiltily of --
sorry, I developed a bad habit in my early wiki
days..). At any rate I don’t think any harm will be
done to those that take two or three months to hit the
30 edit/pages edited/articles edited threshold -- we
are in fact giving users /extra/ features and not
holding back current ones.   

LDC -- would it be possible/easy to allow an 'old
hand' (or whatever we decide to call this – I never
liked "trusted hand" though) the ability to edit a
protected page /without/ being able to
protect/unprotect the page (which is a meta function
that should be limited to admins me thinks)? 

Also, if we do decide to reinstate the "vote for…"
convenience feature, should this also be something
only available to 'old hands' and above (newbies of
course being less familiar with NPOV and our deletion
policy)? There still would be nothing stopping newbies
from bookmarking, linking to or searching for the
various "vote for" pages and editing them manually (as
we all have to do now). This would be an added bonus
for users as they graduate to 'old hand' status.

If we do choose to have a 'old hand' status, then the
only special features admins would have available to
them would be meta functions: page deletion, page
protection/un-protection, blocking IPs and the ability
to promote/demote users to/from ‘old hand’ and admin
status (just as it was in phase two -- although
"trusted hand" was a clone of "user" then). Admins
could also be encouraged to promote newbies who
obviously understand our policies and guidelines
earlier than 30 days to 'old hand' status before they
are automatically promoted.   

--mav


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