On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 5:46 AM, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia-inc.com> wrote: I appreciate this step, but the community has now firmly rejected your continued status as "Founder flagged"-- you have not been asked to cut back on your privileges, you are being ordered to relinquish your founder flag. I'm happy that you're beginning to question your earlier actions, but your founder status is not for you to decide. Currently it's 3-to-1 against you continuing in this role. If that doesn't change, you need to abide by it.

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 7:46 PM, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia-inc.com> wrote: You have kept 'protect', which I am guessing overrides the 'autoconfirmed' that you removed. You have also kept 'Edit membership to global groups' and 'Manage global groups', which means you can change these permissions at any time. When you have time, I think it is necessary to explain why you need those, or to relinquish them. -- John Vandenberg

On Sun, May 09, 2010 at 10:46:50AM +0100, Jimmy Wales wrote: In the immortal words of Judge Judy; "Perfect, PERFECT!". == Perfect == I was just about to post about the need to assure the commons community that there would be no repeat performance. This is a risk-management issue: why would a commons user take an initiative that might be marginalized or rendered futile in the near future? That kind of situation has a paralysing effect on a community. The paralysing effect has now been largely negated. Perfect. == PERFECT! == Do you know how long I've been trying to encourage experienced/high profile admins to hand in their flags? Why? It's a Poka-yoke / idiot-proofing measure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poka-yoke As a precaution, one should not take (high profile) actions, without confirming it with at least one other person in the relevant community.[1] By not having the requisite permissions oneself, one is forced to talk with someone who does, no matter how impatient, panicked, or tired one is. Obviously this doesn't catch all edge-cases, but it certainly reduces the number of ways in which things can go wrong. In this case, Jimbo Wale's founder flag gave him _Uber_-Admin powers. That's Got to Lead To Uber-Pain. And It Did. So now that's fixed. I wouldn't be surprised if Jimmy's influence in the community didn't actually *increase* due to this. [2] PERFECT! == Me three? == Jimmy Wales correctly identifies the fact that experienced users who do hand in their flag should still be able to view things, such as deleted pages, etc. In fact, the reason that I haven't been able to convince fellow admins to retire, is because they really didn't want to lose their viewing abilities. <drama> Before, I was but a single voice, calling in the dark. But Now! Now that the world's most high profile Wikipedian has *de-facto* finally vindicated my position, after all these years... </drama> ... it would be really nice to have a similar set of permissions for "retired" admins and stewards. Please? <Puppy-dog-look> sincerely, Kim Bruning [1]It is always wise to work in pairs anyway. Ask Ward Cunningham, or any other Agile-type person you know! [2] This wouldn't be immediate. First some wounds will need to heal, of course. And people still need to vent their catharthic venting for now. -- [Non-pgp mail clients may show pgp-signature as attachment] gpg (www.gnupg.org) Fingerprint for key FEF9DD72 5ED6 E215 73EE AD84 E03A 01C5 94AC 7B0E FEF9 DD72

On 9 May 2010 10:46, Jimmy Wales &lt;jwales(a)wikia-inc.com&gt; wrote: Thanks for this, it is a very good move. I think this will have the desired effect of allowing us to move on from discussing you and discuss the actual issue. I notice you have kept "protect" and "undelete". Is that intentional? If so, can you explain your thinking behind that decision? As someone else has mentioned in this thread, you have kept the rights necessary to change your own rights in the future. It would probably be best to remove them too. I'm assuming you don't intend to give yourself back rights should you want to use them (that would make this a meaningless gesture, which I've never known you make before), so you have no need to keep those rights. I think you should also consider your admin rights on English Wikipedia. I know they are historically a separate issue from your founder rights, but since you have already voluntarily given up your enwiki block rights, now might be the time to give up the rest too. (You can use the founder flag for the various view rights, which I think you are right to keep.) Thank you again for doing this - despite the fact that I've just been picking holes in it, I really do think that even with these issues it is an excellent thing to have done. The important this is the good attitude you've shown in doing this.