Walter Vermeir wrote:
Essjay schreef:
Perhaps this would be an appropriate time to say "Maybe we could use a couple more stewards?"
Essjay
There are already a fair number of Stewards; http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards
The problem I find as a steward is that is difficult to know what you are supposed to do. There is no communication platform for the stewards to discuss things. I find that there should be a mailing list for stewards. That would be something. Then at least problems could be discussed with the other stewards. And agreements about how to do thing could be attempted to me made.
Now not all stewards work by the same standards. Some stewards are more easy to give sysop or bureaucrat status then others. The rules of conduct are not clear or not existing.
I find it difficult that I need to say to a user that I do not grand bureaucrat status because I find his home wiki is to small when other stewards do grand bureaucrat status to a similar small wikis.
Walter
I would have to agree that the current set of steward policies is rather vague, and even the defintion of what a steward ought to be doing is not really well defined. Stewards do grant adminship and bureaucratship to projects with a small set of users, and I also understand strongly the reluctance for a steward to get involved with a local project squabble, such as one recent fight that happened on en.wikibooks of the deadminship of one user that unfortunately needed a steward to make a decision on limited information, and community support for deadminship was not very clear.
My own experience in dealing with stewards is that they do a very good job of doing the administrative tasks when there is no controversy and the decisions are obvious. It is these border-line cases where perhaps some standards to becomming an admin on a very small project like simple.wikiquote should be a little bit higher than seems to be done right now. Language barriers add still additional levels of misunderstanding to really complicate this issue. Having a clear policy makes deciding these borderline issue much easier, as a codified policy avoids seemingly arbitrary behavior and allows somebody who was turned down to at least have something to be angry about, or possibly fight to try and change the policy.
Futhermore, there is some appearance that perhaps stewards could act as a sort of ad hoc arbitration board for smaller projects, but I havn't see that done either. Is this something that stewards are comfortable with, or should projects with seemingly irreconsilable problems go elsewhere for assistance in this matter... i.e. see Jimbo? Currently the standard is more to simply muddle through the problem and try to work the issues out, which BTW really is the best solution ultimately. Some people do like to appeal to a "higher authority" and stewards seem to be a logical step to take some issues. Unfortunately, this is something I've very seldom if ever seen any steward willing to participate in.