[Foundation-l] Global sysop proposals

[Milos Rancic]

On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 2:45 AM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think it points up a problem with his global sysop proposal and your
> global view deleted images proposal for commons admins - that being the
> seeming belief that meta proposals ought to act as a means for overriding
> policies on local projects, as though meta were a central governing
> community. Could be just my inexperience with meta and its relationship with
> content projects, but it seems like something of a departure to insist that
> short discussions and votes on meta ought to be enough to allow people to
> take actions on other projects without any notion of or regard to local
> policies and customs.

Discussion lasts 15 days with announcing every important new moment
here. The "only" problem related to discussion of this policy proposal
was related to lack in other languages than English. Policy was
discussed at least at en.wp [2], en.wn [3] and Species [4], too. So,
English speaking Wikimedians were very well informed about the events.
However, from time to time discussion about the policy at Meta was
very low during the discussion period.

Discussion about the second proposal [5] started "unofficially"
(discussion is at the bottom of the Talk:Globa sysops page [6]), but
the way for addressing the issue related to non-English speaking
communities was not found yet. At least, we need contributors which
speak different languages and who are interested in developing global
policies.

> Maybe what meta really needs is an umbrella global rights policy that makes
> it clear, without limitation to specific rights, that all global user rights
> are subordinate to local rights and subject to local policies in their use
> (excepting those governed by Foundation policies, such as steward). By that
> I don't mean that global admins should be subject to policies for local
> admins, but that each project should be able to limit or forbid the use of
> global rights specifically and have it stick.

Please, read again the first proposal [1]. Even the first one clearly
says that local communities (and their policies) must be respected and
that a global sysop would lose their permissions if they used them
against the policies. Also, there was a very clear option for any
project how to force technically opting-out: to block every global
sysop account and to force them to use accounts without global sysop
permissions. The second proposal [5] assumes existence of the
possibility for technical opting-out.

It may be useful to make the frame of the global policies. However, it
seems that we need much wider discussion about any global policy than
talking about them only at Meta and English language projects.

[1] - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_sysops
[2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project:Global_rights_usage
[3] - http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Project:Global_rights_usage
[4] - http://species.wikimedia.org/wiki/Project:Global_rights_usage
[5] - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_sysops/2nd_proposal
[6] - starting with:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Global_sysops#Rephrasing_the_paragraph_on_.22Permission_usage.22