Angela wrote:
On 8/9/06, Wildrick Steele wildrick.steele@gmail.com wrote:
Actually not. There weren't any stewards around and the perpetrator remained sysopped for a full day, doing hundreds of random blocks and unblocks. We had to wait for developer intervention to remove the flag in the database. Quite a nonperformance for the otherwise well-functioning steward team. We'll take Wikimania as a good excuse :-)
Wikimania may have been part of the problem. Also, the request at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_permissions#Removal_of_access seems to have been lost amongst the noise of dozens of other requests, which for some reason, no longer get immediately archived, so it's not easy to see whether or not there are outstanding requests. Perhaps moving urgent requests to a separate section at the top would help in future. There is a (not-very-active) IRC channel at #wikimedia-stewards, but the #wikimedia channel is often a better place to find a steward in an emergency. I don't know whether either of these channels were tried before finding a developer.
This might just be a sign that new steward elections are required.
The other possibility would be to give bureaucrats the power to de-sysop.
Fortunately, these rogue sysops are uncommon, but bureaucrats are more often in a position to act quickly when this sort of activity happens. It would also be handy to have this available for de-sysopping inactive admins; the latter can also be reactivated on request without the need for votes or other complicated community processes.
While it is also possible that there can be rogue bureaucrats, these will be proportionally rarer than rogue admins. Anyone who has become a bureaucrat has a very high degree of trust in the community, and especially in relatively larger communities there is sufficient oversight to prevent the abuses that may be more common with the untested bureaucrats of tiny communities. Speaking arbitrarily, one could define a larger community, as one with at least 50,000 articles and/or 2 active bureaucrats.
Ec