maveric149 wrote in part:

...

Again I would like to restate my proposal to have an 'old hand' status that would allow users that have been around a while and are generally trusted to move pages and edit protected pages.

I don't think that I've done this before, so I'd like to officially state my agreement on this. 30 days/30 edits, mentioned before, seems reasonable offhand. Is there agreement that we do want to open up these two functions, and that the only thing left to discussion is the criteria? ... -- Toby Bartels

There seems to be a growing consensus that these two functions should be available to many more users than they are now.

The 30 day AND 30 edit automatic promotion idea was really an off hand suggestion of mine. The 30 day part seems reasonable enough to me but I am now not sure about the 30 edit part -- which may be a ridiculously low number of edits for an entire month. What does everyone else think? Would changing the criteria to 30 _pages_ edited AND 30 day old account seem more reasonable?

During my first month I averaged 10 edits a day -- most which were clustered around several different pages per day. I still easily surpassed 30 pages edited in a month. Heck, if we wanted to we could even make it 30 pages edited in the article namespace in order to promote editing of articles over chatter on talk or user pages (which I know I am guiltily of -- sorry, I developed a bad habit in my early wiki days..). At any rate I don�t think any harm will be done to those that take two or three months to hit the 30 edit/pages edited/articles edited threshold -- we are in fact giving users /extra/ features and not holding back current ones.

LDC -- would it be possible/easy to allow an 'old hand' (or whatever we decide to call this � I never liked "trusted hand" though) the ability to edit a protected page /without/ being able to protect/unprotect the page (which is a meta function that should be limited to admins me thinks)?

Also, if we do decide to reinstate the "vote for�" convenience feature, should this also be something only available to 'old hands' and above (newbies of course being less familiar with NPOV and our deletion policy)? There still would be nothing stopping newbies from bookmarking, linking to or searching for the various "vote for" pages and editing them manually (as we all have to do now). This would be an added bonus for users as they graduate to 'old hand' status.

If we do choose to have a 'old hand' status, then the only special features admins would have available to them would be meta functions: page deletion, page protection/un-protection, blocking IPs and the ability to promote/demote users to/from �old hand� and admin status (just as it was in phase two -- although "trusted hand" was a clone of "user" then). Admins could also be encouraged to promote newbies who obviously understand our policies and guidelines earlier than 30 days to 'old hand' status before they are automatically promoted.

--mav

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