Aryeh Gregor wrote:
We could also try to work out ways to make adminship
less important.
If protection, blocking, and deletion could be made less necessary and
important in day-to-day editing, that would reduce the importance of
admins and reduce the difference between established and new
contributors. You could often make do with much "softer" versions of
these three things, which could be given out much more liberally.
For instance, to replace blocking, you could have a system whereby any
reasonably established editor (> X edits/Y days) can place another
editor or IP address in moderation, so that their edits have to be
approved before going live, in Flagged Revs style. As with blocking,
any established editor could also reverse such a block. Abuse would
thus be easily reversed and fairly harmless (since the edits could go
through automatically when it's lifted, barring conflicts). Sysops
would only be necessary if people with established accounts abuse
their rights.
Likewise, most deletion doesn't really need to make anything private.
Reasonably established editors could be given the right to soft-delete
a page such that any other such editor could read or undelete it.
This would be fine for the vast majority of deletions, like vanity
pages and spam. Sysops would only have to get involved for copyright
infringement, privacy issues, and so on.
As for protection, we already have Flagged Revs. Lower levels of
flagging should be imposable by people other than sysops, and since
those largely supersede semiprotection, sysops would again only be
needed to adjudicate disputes between established editors (like
full-protecting an edit-warred page). Obviously, all these rights
would be revocable by sysops in the event of abuse.
There's an extension to 'delete' pages by blanking. I find that approach
much more wiki.
We should also work on allowing more protection levels. Fixing problems
with the "if you can protect, you can edit anything" behavior and such.