On 10/01/2008, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
To outline my strong objections to this in one place:
In itself: Negatively: no big deal: Vandals vandalise a little faster? but soon blocked anyway. Edit warriors can go faster? but warriors will war regardless.
Positively: maybe, at best, a little help Lots of people want it to be faster on the draw. However, since in most cases of spotted vandalism six people fight to roll it back, the benefit to the project is negligible. There is no backlog of reverted, yet identified, vandalism. The only conceivable benefit is that it keeps the plebs happy by equalising their 'success' rate in the revert race with admins - I suppose that's not a bad thing, but little to be excited by.
in term of process - admins granting it Negatively: *Increased instruction creed and policy pages *Time spend handling requests *New process - we already have a 'requests' page *Process for removing it will be required *Process for handling appeals against admin decisions will be required *Disgruntled users who are refused it *Disgruntled users who object to x being granted it *Conflicts between admins - wheel wars - ANI reports and arbitrations
If a user abuses the privilege remove it or block them under the current process. It is easy to get because it is also easy to remove. Having a huge removal and appeals process just for this is completely unnecessary due to its trivial nature. Wikipedia can be completely transparent and still not have an excessively large appeals tribunal for every decision. Having admins insist on spending large amounts of time interacting with those people who will inevitably continuously complain about small matters such as this may be a bigger issue.
If a wheel war happens then deal with it the same way all other wheel wars are dealt with. The worst in this case would be a grant or not grant, how is that harming anything?
It is a very small amount of time handling requests when you think about it. If you don't want to be involved in this then that is your choice though.
People say, "how is this difference from block/unblock"? It isn't. But block/unblock disputes are already incredibly disruptive and clog up ANI and arbcom - and we agree blocking is useful.
Some people think vandalism bots combined with generally available rollback procedures can make most blocking redundant...
All of your claims however could be put against any process on wikipedia.
Positively: can't think of any
Conclusion Very minor positives, huge negatives. Combine that with the dreadful disruptive and manipulative way this was rammed through and this is a considerable detriment to the project.
How is it practically a detriment to the project? If a group of admins object to others having partial powers which only they had in the past then they are entitled to put up a fuss but that doesn't mean the change was responsible. The admins putting up the fuss have to be in part responsible for their actions.
And I have ignored the argument that scripts make it redundant anyway for those who really want it.
Server loads decrease with the inbuilt php method as opposed to the javascript multi-GET/POST method. That definitely isn't to the detriment of the project if there are a non-trivial number of non-admins helping with vandalism related issues. Given the take up so far I suspect there are quite a few non-admins who don't want to bother dealing with block/unblock/delete/undelete issues but do want to be able to practically help out on articles more efficiently. You can't easily ignore its popularity so far in non-bureaucratic circles. The masses can only speak with their feet in a heirarchical society. If they can get it anyway why not at least reduce the server load for the large number who will have used the old slow resource hungry method anyway? Combined with people who will now spend less time patrolling their watchlists and more time making edits to articles I definitely see it as a good thing.
Peter