Christopher Mahan wrote:
--- Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote: I would support any move to reduce the number of
sysops.
Likewise.
I don't think I would, though I do think sysops should be sparing in using their powers, especially more controversial powers, and we should have some way to police this.
Having fewer sysops tends to make it more cabal-like, while the original intention was basically "anyone that is halfway trustworthy gets to be a sysop." Also, some sysop powers, like being able to delete a page whose only history is a string of redirects in order to make way for a page move, are very useful for day-to-day wiki maintenance tasks.
I think some sort of structural change is needed on the protected-page front to make that particular sysop power less frequently necessary though. Some have been proposed, although I'm not sure if anyone has fleshed out any particular details. I think that, similar to what some people have proposed, there needs to be some sort of "soft protection" for controversial articles. While "be bold" is in general the Wiki philosophy, some articles, like [[Gdansk]], [[Israel]], and [[Jew]], have been painstakingly crafted over a period of months (sometimes years) with lots of discussion. In those cases, people really shouldn't be bold and make massive changes to the article---they should make relatively local, isolated changes, and place on the talk page their reason for doing anything that might be considered reasonably controversial. If a major rewrite is seen as the only option, it should be discussed extensively on the talk page rather than simply boldly done---you can't just write your own [[Israel]] article from scratch and stick it there and expect it to stay.
One possibility is to avoid any software-level changes, but make it policy (or at least pseudo-policy) that on such articles large changes made without discussion will be reverted as a routine matter, with a comment to the person that they should read the talk page and propose their changes, preferably one at a time. Then instead of protecting the page, repeated re-applications of the changes without discussion will result in a ban of the offending user, or preferably a per-article ban, if that is implemented at some point. This way individual users making massive changes to controversial topics without discussion don't impede the normal compromise work by forcing a page protection.
There's other possible solutions, such as moving to a "submit proposed changes" model for controversial articles, instead of updating the wiki live, but they introduce a whole host of problems on their own... I haven't been able to come up with a model of that sort with the details worked out in a way that seems satisfactory, so I won't personally be proposing something of that sort (yet, anyway).
-Mark