On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 9:48 AM, Sue Gardner sgardner@wikimedia.org wrote:
My understanding is that administrator rights have been removed from a small number of volunteers, but that those people still have basic editing rights.
Far more than basic, actually. The WMF wiki is unusual in that it allows insertion of raw HTML by any registered user (this is because the donation forms used to be hosted there; they're now developed on a dedicated site). Regular users also have permission to edit the MediaWiki: namespace, which helps with translation. This means that regular users can add arbitrary code that will be executed in the reader's browser, something that only admins can do on most of our other wikis. There are >600 registered users on the WMF wiki.
While I understand the frustration with admin access being restricted, volunteers on this particular wiki are still trusted with extraordinary rights (without prejudice as to whether that configuration should be broadened or narrowed in future). I asked Philippe yesterday, and he said that account requests from Meta would continue to be processed (by JamesA and himself going forward). As Sue says, having the overall governance responsibilities on the wiki clarified is a normal step. Sorry for the rocky transition; no disrespect was intended.
The original text on https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Welcome (written in 2004 when there was no WMF staff) with regard to the Board resolving all disputes should indeed be updated; the Board delegates day-to-day operational responsibilities to the organizational staff, and while the sentence is technically true, it was written at a time when that delegation was not possible. Nonetheless, it was clear from the very beginning that the WMF wiki was not operated according to the community governance practices established in other wikis because it serves a distinct purpose.
Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation