There is no sense in giving developers administrative power. Developers are good at programming, not management of a community. By wrapping up their ability to contribute with their ability to rule, they are made effectively unaccountable. Nobody wants to remove someone's developer access if it means they can't do much needed progrmaming work. Administration of the encyclopedia also distracts them from programming, a task which they have a rare skill and motivation for. Wikipedia should not be a technocracy, ruled by those with knowledge of computer systems. Wikipedia should be a democracy. Those in power should be accountable to the community at large, and ideally selected from and by the community at large. I have written a feature giving people with the "developer" flag set in their wiki user accounts a level of administrative ability similar to what developers with shell access are capable of. Specifically, such users are able to set arbitrary user rights for any user on any Wikimedia project. They may create sysops, desysop, create bureaucrats or other developers, or any other user-rights operation you care to mention. This feature is operational right now, and I've been using it for the last couple of weeks to make bureaucrats on various wikis. The feature is easy to use and does not carry the security risks of write-access to the database. At the moment, it is not possible to rename user accounts or change the history of articles through the web interface, but such features are planned. I suggest we use this feature to split the roles of developer and site administrator. Specifically, here is what I think should happen: 1. A policy should be instituted disallowing any developer from using their power for administrative purposes, except where there is no other way to perform the relevant operation. New developers applying for shell access should be made aware of this policy. By "administrative purposes", I mean exercises of power for any other purpose than testing and implementing software. 2. A small number of users should be made "honorary developers" (perhaps a better title can be found). These users should be selected by putting forward nominations and then conducting a vote, similar to the vote now conducted at the English Wikipedia for sysop access. 3. These "honorary developers" can lose their developer access by a community vote giving a majority in favour, by an arbitration committee ruling, or by Jimbo's decree. It should be possible for a developer to hold both shell access and community blessing. Such people would take the role of both programmer and administrator. However as I said above, we really have a lot of programming work to do. -------------------------------------------------------------------- I'll also take this opportunity to drop a few subtle hints. Maveric149 Wikipedia's most active contributor, Maveric149 has done a tremendous amount of work for Wikipedia over the last two years. Mav is always cool and rational when dealing with a dispute, and works hard to find a compromise amenable to all parties. Respect for him in the community is universal. Angela Angela has been extremely active in the Wikipedia and Wikipedia talk namespaces over the last 6 months, organising the formation of many policies. In her enthusiasm for weeding and quality control, she has edited almost every functioning Wikimedia wiki. She also lives in a different time zone to Mav, so she'll be able to deal with situations arising when Mav is unavailable. -- Tim Starling