Hello Ed,
I'm posting your message (see below) here on the main list as well, since you said it should be there...
But I'm not sure I'm entirely happy with the idea that someone should become a sysop just from having the right number of supporters. I can easily imagine that a large enough group of sysops could support one person who is not trusted by the rest of the sysops. Would there be an "Oppose user for sysop" button as well? Both buttons could update counts without displaying the names of the people who have voted, so people would feel free to express their lack of trust in a nominee without anyone (apart from the developers) finding out and subsequently holding a grudge against them...
Ah, I'm being very evil today, aren't I? ;)
Oliver
On Tue, 8 Apr 2003, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
Actually, sysops can query the server; they are limited to "read-only" queries, however.
What I was suggesting was that some Wikipedians other than the Developers have the technical ability to:
- grant "sysop rights" to users
- block a signed-in vandal
I don't think a sysop blocking a signed-in vandal should need to see their IP address. Even I as a developer never bothered to look up the IP of the half-dozen or so users I've been told to block. I just ran an UPDATE query in the database.
Similarly, with promoting a contributor to sysop, I think Brion or Magnus could add a page called "Nominate user for sysop". After enough sysops nominated a user, they would automatically get sysop rights.
The point is, I don't want to do Gatekeeper Functions any more. Not only is it time-consuming (up to 10 minutes per operation), but the task of determining whether a person is a foe or a friend should not be centralized on 4 or 5 people.
And, yes, mav, I know I should put this on the main list, but I only subscribe to this one, so I hope anyone who responds will cross post back to wikien-l. And yes, Brion, I know you made a meta-page, but...
lazily, but non-hierarchically,
Ed Poor _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@wikipedia.org http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
+-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+