On Thu, 2003-05-08 at 16:41, Daniel Mayer wrote:
And a technical means to "auto-sysop" would be a bad idea; like you said Lir would have been made a sysop, so would Clutch and maybe even TMC (depending on the criteria). These users would have been even more troublesome as Admins and created an even greater amount of damage (blocking IPs willy-nilly, deleting pages that should not have been deleted etc).
Actually, it would have made the case for banning them much stronger more quickly.
Instead of seeing possible auto-sysopping of troublesome members as a Bad Idea, it's more constructive to think about the principle of No Permanent Damage. That is, what constraints/mechanisms would be necessary for a few bad apples to be unable to make the Good Idea--of allowing useful contributors (that is, most people) to automatically gain more capabilities--a problem?
Some people think that society would be better if every teenager were given a gun on their 18th birthday regardless of their mental state or firearms training. I'm definitely not in that camp of thought.
Nor am I. But conflating sysop powers on Wikipedia with gun usage is silly and wrong. Your principled stand against disseminating instruments of death has little relevance in a discussion about Wikipedia editing.