Deryck,

I understand your concern, but just for the record, this **was** announced on the wikis, and in the case of English Wikipedia, discussions about how to handle this were going on for about a month (*Wikipedia talk:Interface administrators* was created on July 30th). As a matter of fact, stop-gap measures were put in place in English Wikipedia as well.

You can argue that we need better mechanisms for such announcements, in ways that would reach more admins quickly. I would support that idea. But I do not agree that this has "completely wreaked havoc". Also, if English Wikipedia still doesn't have a formal process for admins to apply, is it because 30 days is not enough, or is it that 30 days is all we can afford and that the wiki community should be more nimble in situations like this?

So let's have a healthy discussion about it that is not driven by emotions.

PS: In Persian Wikipedia, we originally wanted to just wait for ENWP to come up with the policy and then decide to adopt it as is or modify it further; having noticed that the ENWP process is too slow to yield a policy before the deadline, we devised our own processes, and we now have 7 interface admins (out of 33 sysops). So, I guess it can be done?

On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 9:33 AM Deryck Chan deryckchan@gmail.com wrote:

Well, the Interface Administrator right got rolled out and thousands of admins lost their rights to edit the MediaWiki namespace overnight, without any prior notice on their user talk page nor any known process on how to regain that right.

This has completely wreaked havoc on the English Wikipedia, to say the least. If this was rolled out in a way such that existing admins could've applied to get the Interface Administrator flag before the right to edit interface messages was stripped from the Sysop group, this mess could've been avoided.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Interface_administrators

Deryck _______________________________________________ Wikitech-ambassadors mailing list Wikitech-ambassadors@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-ambassadors

Deryck Chan, 30/08/2018 16:30:

without any prior notice on their user talk page nor any known process on how to regain that right.

This is more of a problem on wikis without bureaucrats, or with limited 'crat bandwidth. I agree that such wikis may deserve additional help, including direct talk page messages and a backup avenue for flagging by stewards.

I would be surprised if the English Wikipedia needed to be included in such a class of needy wikis. But yes, restructuring user rights often has unintended consequences, including an increase in instruction creep and a decrease in overall efficiency of the community. (We've had multiple examples in the past... from the English Wikipedia itself.)

Federico