I also agree that the WMF staff should NEVER have any privilege on public Wikimedia projects (including Meta-Wiki whcih is a cooperation of all Wikimedia projects), except in the closed Wikimedia Foundation wiki.

The WMF staff is there to **serve** the community and work with the Board directing them for the benefit of the community. They are also not much trained and many wikimedians do better jobs than them in many technical issues, or for helping maintaining the policy and doing most of the monitoring of projects for quality, and fighting spam.

The WMF staff is still helpful because of their commited (and paid) time to work on specific issues that need them. But they cannot/should not drive the projects themselves, and notably they should not protect pages on Wikimedia projects, except very specific ones (such as those exposing the official versions of approved policies, and specific pages related to legal isuses and communication by the WMF, such as budget and accounting reporting, public statements needed after a legal order, such as disclosing decisions to block some pages due to copyright violations... but in most cases the OTRS team was performing a good job with the community and if needed there were already contacts with the WMF Board and boards of Wikimedia affiliates).

If what you say about the German Wikiemdia is true, yes this is abusive. That should be reverted because it as not discussed and no policies was effective. If this is done because the XMF starts aving problem managing a large crowd of admins (especially in the English Wikipedia), this is the wrong method.

And this should have not been done during Wikimania when most active admins from various projects and chapters are not there to cast their opinion. There was no emergency to deploy this feature.