On Sun, Aug 10, 2014 at 3:27 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi folks,
Admins are currently given broad leeway to customize the user experience for all users, including addition of site-wide JS, CSS, etc. These are important capabilities of the wiki that have been used for many clearly beneficial purposes. In the long run, we will want to apply a code review process to these changes as with any other deployed code, but for now the system works as it is and we have no intent to remove this capability.
However, we've clarified in a number of venues that use of the MediaWiki: namespace to disable site features is unacceptable. If such a conflict arises, we're prepared to revoke permissions if required. This protection level provides an additional path to manage these situations by preventing edits to the relevant pages (we're happy to help apply any urgent edits) until a particular situation has calmed down.
erik, this was designed so, and worked well exactly like this. administrators are voted, and there are hundreds which work together. if it is wise process to review a change by another administrator implement it like this. that has to be enough. it worked well 5 years ago when we had most new editors joining. if you cannot convince the admins about a change, there is strong evidence that something else is wrong - not the user rights.
rupert