On Feb 7, 2008 1:45 PM, tlaqua@svn.wikimedia.org wrote:
- Disallowing deleting user_id 1 (WikiSysop/Admin/whatever)
MediaWiki doesn't have any concept of a root user, and it seems like a bad idea to try to enforce such an idea in an extension. User 1 is just the one who set up the wiki, who might or might not be any kind of special authority. On the English Wikipedia, user #1 is [[User:Damian Yerrick]], who's not even a sysop. That's probably due to import issues, but for another example, user #1 on kshwiki (Kölsch-language Wikipedia) is [[ksh:User:Deprifry]], who has two edits made in 2006 and is also not even a sysop.
Of course Wikimedia is odd in a lot of ways, but as far as third parties go, it's certain that quite a few wikis are set up by contractors or other people who aren't necessarily going to participate in the wiki at all. Or even if they're some important person at first, they might eventually resign or be ousted. It's weird and potentially annoying to add this restriction arbitrarily. It protects someone who might not need protection, and doesn't protect many other people whom you might want to protect.
If you're going to do any kind of restriction like this, IMO, make it a config option, like $wgUnmergeableUsers. I guess you could initialize it to array( 1 ), but I'd still leave it empty by default, personally.