I'm sure many of you have noticed that recently there has been a growing problem of people creating user accounts for the sole purpose of using wikipedia's upload utility to place copyrighted and otherwise inappropriate material on the server.

We might want to discuss further limiting just who can use this utility because this is beginning to be a maintenance issue for the syops and the presence of these bogus user accounts is also over-reporting the number of true (as in contributing) users we have .

I know the "trusted hand" status is in the database already so it might be easy to limit this ability to "trusted hand" or greater status users. It would also be nice to have this status granted automatically if say two conditions are met: 1) a user account is at least one month old and 2) this user has edited a certain number of articles (I would be liberal and set this at 30, but I wouldn't mind having it set at up to 100).

And while we are at it we might also want to grant trusted hands the ability to do things that currently only sysops can do -- like edit certain protected pages (those set to "is_trusted" perhaps? "is_sysop" would then only be used to protect established policy pages and for emergencies -- if a "trusted hand" went on a rampage it would be simple to just change the user's status). I wonder if a script could be written to change the status of all current users that have edited a certain number of articles? The sysops could always do this by hand if need be.

Oh, and if something like this were established we should encourage sysops to manually promote outstanding new users to "trusted hand" status early (there are several outstanding examples of new users already: they started off running and "got it" very early).

Just a thought....

maveric149