On 5/11/13 8:01 PM, Seb35 wrote:
Thanks a lot for this explanation.
On the other side, wikis not only need content producers (here WMF) but also curators (wikignomes) who are sorting the pages, deleting and moving pages, typocorrecting, templating things, helping new users in formatting texts, etc. (I read some of the Florence’s blogposts :) -- and not being admin restricts a lot the possible actions.
Yeah ! :-)
As a side note, Philippe has apparently restored my admin status (I did not ask any special favor) upon the reason that I am on the Advisory Board.
But let me put it this way...
I do not buy the argument offered by Sue that "But, my understanding is also that occasionally volunteers have overridden decisions made by staff on the Wikimedia Foundation wiki."
Sorry Sue... but this is a very poor argument. If there is a problem with ONE or TWO editors (was there at least two ?) then the way to go is to talk with this editor, not to remove all volunteer administrators who have been helping nicely for so many years.
In the past, we used to talk about soft security as opposed to hard security. Hard security was about passwords, rights, filters, walls, blocking, deleting and such. Soft security was about conversations, peer reviews, reversions, recent changes, and other collaborative transparent processes. We have been going on for over 10 years primarily relying on soft security. And it did not work so badly in the end. Because for one bad person, and one confused, there were swarms of good people. Is not that sad that staff decided that soft security was no more the way to go, and that implementing hard security to prevent problems with ONE or TWO people was a better way than relying upon dozen of good people and spending a little bit of time discussing with the confused ?
The decision made by staff make it appear that volunteers are more an inconvenience than a help.
I can not blame a staff member to feel this way if he had to spent some time arguing with a volunteer whilst he had a mandate to do something specific and the volunteer was preventing it (whether a good or bad idea). It can be very annoying ;)
However, I feel that management and board should have a slightly higher view on the matter and should realize how much they actually DO NEED the volunteers to BE happy and to FEEL useful and appreciated (See the recent discussion related to Wikimedia Hong Kong) and to reflect whether the long term outcome of the decision to remove admin rights to volunteers on the foundation wiki (and blog if I understood well) is a good idea or not.
Alternatively, it might be good to really move as much as possible of the Wikimedia Foundation Wiki to meta (where at least, the community is in charge of who is admin and who is not).
Flo
PS: however, do note that it is a good idea to remove admin flags from users who quit the community entirely.