A summary, for those who are completely lost:
Recently developers added the ability for admins on the English Wikipedia to grant rollback rights to non-admin accounts.
This followed a large discussion and vote on enwiki in which ~2/3 of participants favored this feature
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Non-administrator_rollback/Poll Unfortunately, 2/3 is a ambiguous standard for consensus on enwiki and previous developer requests have been denied with higher standards of support.
So now there is a large debate on enwiki about whether or not there was consensus. In the meantime, other people are moving full steam ahead with Requests for Rollback (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RFR) with about 400 people having been given rollback rights so far through a variety of informal and semi-formal processes.
There is also an arbitration request ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RFAr#Rollback_consensus) whose arguments provide a variety of background. Presently the enwiki Arbs seem inclined to decline the arbitration request on the grounds that setting policy is really a community issue and not a place for Arbcom dictates.
Personally, I think this is far more of a tempest in a tea cup than a real major problem. It appears to have spilled over here because some people want the Foundation to order the developers to switch this new feature off. While I can't speak for the Foundation, I would think those people would be better served by talking to developers directly, or trying to come to some resolution on enwiki itself.
-Robert Rohde
On Jan 11, 2008 7:50 AM, Guillaume Paumier guillom.pom@gmail.com wrote:
On Jan 11, 2008 4:44 PM, Andrew Whitworth wknight8111@gmail.com wrote:
On Jan 11, 2008 10:40 AM, Majorly axel9891@googlemail.com wrote:
Where is the consensus for it to be switched off?
More importantly, where was the consensus to turn it on in the first place. From what I hear, no such consensus was ever obtained (i could be wrong on that).
More importantly, wtf are you talking about? A link or a short explanation would be welcome.
-- Guillaume Paumier [[m:User:guillom]] "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined." Henry David Thoreau
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