"Magnus Manske" magnusmanske@googlemail.com wrote in message news:fab0ecb70612191032s4db8b922h4e121b4413b6c3ba@mail.gmail.com...
On 12/19/06, Mark Clements gmane@kennel17.co.uk
wrote:
The current system works fine, as far as I am concerned. The import is
a
one-way process, and doesn't touch the material on the source wiki.
This is
as it should be, as there will be situations where you are trying to
copy,
not move the material. Currently you do the import and, if the content
is
being moved, login to the remote wiki and either delete the page or add
a
soft redirect. There should definitely _not_ be a mechanism for remotely deleting wiki content from a remote wiki!
Why not? If I'm an admin on that remote wiki, it might be handy when moving images to Commons. At the moment of writing this mail, there are 657,331 media files on en.wikipedia. If 1/3 of them (rough guess) are suitable for Commons, that means >200,000 manual deletions when moving. If an api would allow image deletions by admins, it would save a lot of unneccessary work, without compromising safety (the images are kept, and the api could also offer undelete).
Because you are changing the trust model. PersonA is an admin on WikiA and has been trusted enough to delete articles and to perform a transwiki import. WikiB has not made PersonA an admin - they (implicitly) do not trust PersonA to delete articles. However, PersonA is allowed to delete articles by using the transwiki import + delete.
Admins at WikiA have full delete rights at WikiB, even if they are non-admins and explicitly blocked at WikiB!
I understand that you qualified your statement with "If I'm an admin on that remote wiki...", but I don't see how that can be done without explicitly requiring a username/password each time a user wants to delete (plus, you are then giving your remote details to the local wiki sysadmin - an unscrupulous sysadmin or maybe even a badly behaved extension would be able to access these).
- Mark Clements (HappyDog)