New default user group - Wikitech-l

17 Aug 2007

Hello,

I'd like to throw in my idea to get some suggestions.

Because I've been contacted couple times by different wiki admins as well as
WMF-wikis' users about that, I thought it would be good idea to incorporate it in
MediaWiki.

The idea is to create another default group of users with working title
"poweruser" since the step between normal user and sysop is too high. The most
often request was to have poweruser to be able to edit protected pages without being able
to change the level of the protection.

Therefore I filed bug 10897 to get the necessary prerequisites. Later on I've been
explained on #mediawiki there might be problems with backward compatibility, so I've
reformulated it in bug 10974.

However, during the talk on #mediawiki about technical stuff about
"editprotected" right the opinion it's not necessary to have another default
group ("poweruser") popped up. That's why I decided to throw it in to see
more opinions about that.

Now some cases why I think it would be reasonable to have it as default:
* Having poweruser able to edit protected pages could mean that user gained higher level
of reliability or trust. So if the wiki has say half of articles protected (one admin told
me he set his wiki to subjects are protected, their talkpages are open), currently there
would have to be a bunch of sysops to be able to edit it which is unwanted.
* There's no cascade semi-protection at the moment available, so eg. if Main Page is
protected with cascade, normal users can't simply edit its parts such as article/image
of the week, did you know..., actualities etc. Sysops have to take care about which is not
flexible. Those parts are most usually edited by same people, so these could be the
members of the poweruser group.

Summary:
My idea is to add new default group "poweruser" (or choose any other name) with
default rights same to normal user plus the new "editprotected" right by default
since it's the most requested. Each wiki could add more rights on demand then.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Kind regards

Danny B.