What I would hope for is guidance from the WMF Board that specifically outlines when WMF invocation of superprotect is and isn't appropriate [1], and which I believe is already being discussed internally by the Board. With that done, my hope is that WMF will take a supportive approach to the community, instead of a combative approach.
With those changes made, I think that the likelihood of another conflict between the community and WMF over a superprotect-like issue would be low. Appropriate uses for Superprotect upon community or WMF request could include (1) legally sensitive documents like the TOS, (2) technically sensitive pages that would otherwise be exposed to administrators who can edit through full protection and should only be edited with consensus, or because of urgent security or stability considerations, (3) pages which are currently the subject of wheel-warring among local administrators, and (4) pages which are currently the subject of a legal dispute that requires a level of protection greater than standard full protection.
Pine
[1] WMF's first use of Superprotect having been a serious misjudgement for which I would like to hear them more fully recant and apologize, and which I would like to see categorized as an inappropriate use of superprotect in the upcoming guidance from the Board.
On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 2:34 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
I hate to say it, but a hijacked Steward account is considerably more dangerous than a hijacked admin account. It's extremely unlikely to happen
- our stewards are probably more aware of maintaining account security than
just about any other group of users. However, stewards under their current process could very well find themselves in a situation where a "community" wants to do something, like change the (global) terms of use or the (global) interpretation of copyright policy....at which point their current rules put them smack in the middle of the global community and WMF board that approved a global policy, and a local community that wants to have its own. It's not a fair situation for them to be in.
As well, there will always be a need for an ability to lock a problem page to address technical problems (in fact, I'm pretty sure there was some code to do that from the back door, and Superprotect is probably the prettied-up interface so others can do it), and if there's a problem that serious it is going to ahve to remain in a broader range of hands.
Risker/Anne
On 11 August 2015 at 17:27, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Most of the time, admins behave as we would hope. Occasionally they
don't,
and on English Wikipedia when that happens often enough or seriously
enough
in the opinion of Arbcom, the offending admins are desysopped. I think
that
for legally sensitive pages, we'd be concerned about the possibility of having wheel-warring administrators or hijacked admin accounts. The
latter
can happen to anyone. Restricting certain pages to being edited only by Stewards via superprotect would help to protect against the former. Generally speaking I agree that standard "full protection" is sufficient, and superprotect should only be invoked in rare cases. I would trust Stewards to implement Superprotect at the request of the community, or
upon
hearing good cause for doing so from WMF.
Pine
On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 2:20 PM, Ricordisamoa < ricordisamoa@openmailbox.org> wrote:
I trust administrators not to edit pages they shouldn't.
Il 11/08/2015 22:56, Risker ha scritto:
There are situations where not even the administrators of a particular community should be allowed to edit a page. A good example would be
the
pages that describe the copyright and licensing of Wikimedia products. Individual communities cannot change that (it applies globally), and individual administrators should not modify it. If there is a problem
with
translation, that needs to be brought to the attention of the WMF,
because
there may be a similar problem with translation elsewhere.
There are also some examples currently being discussed on the
Wikitech-L
list that may require significantly elevated levels of protection
above
'all administrators on Project ABC', although they may call for
another
level of protection that can be customizable to allowing a much
smaller
group or specific individuals to be the only editors.
Risker/Anne
On 11 August 2015 at 16:43, Romaine Wiki romaine.wiki@gmail.com
wrote:
So far I know it has only be used once after the occasion, see:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Superprotect
If anyone knows another occasion, I would like to ask to report this usage at this talk page to keep an overview in future.
Greetings, Romaine
2015-08-11 20:28 GMT+02:00 Magnus Manske <
magnusmanske@googlemail.com
:
Out of curiosity, was it ever used again after that initial action?
On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 6:13 PM Laurentius <
laurentius.wiki@gmail.com
wrote:
Il giorno mer, 12/08/2015 alle 01.11 +0900, Hong, Yongmin ha
scritto:
> >> It has been a year (and a day) since the gerrit 153302 [1] has
been
>> merged >> and deployed to the dewiki. >> > And it's high time it got removed. > > Laurentius > > > > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines > Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > < >
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