Fennec Foxen wrote:

On Fri, 2 Jul 2004 14:17:12 +0200, Erik Zachte e.p.zachte@chello.nl wrote:

...

Only trusted mentors should have access to this function to avoid trolls approving their own edits.

"Trusted mentor"? If you're proposing a new permissions bit, how will we go about selecting people to fill the role? What would you say to the (numerous) objections about there being a new role, the confusing and/or evil heirerarchy, and stuff like that?

Or would you rather attach this to the Administrator role? What would the risks of that be, with... <ahemahem> certain administrators whose neutrality have been questioned of late?

Well, naturally that will lead to people patrolling the un-trusted mentors to make sure that the areas they're responsible for covering are being handled "properly". Dr. Seuss wrote an entertaining bit about the fictional residents of Hawtch-Hawtch, who assign someone to watch a bee work. When the bee's work doesn't improve, they have someone watch the bee-watcher, and then someone watches the bee-watcher-watcher, and so forth. Given the predilection so many of us have for looking over other people's shoulders to check their work, it seems that we're headed down that path.

So, a word to the wise for the developers - don't delude yourselves that coding this kind of feature will ever satisfy people. They'll just want you to duplicate the work again later, one step higher in the food chain.

Mentoring is _very_ different from monitoring.

--Michael Snow