[Foundation-l] SUL pilot and renaming issues

[Robert Rohde]

On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 7:54 PM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hoi,
> Actually the discussion about POLICIES and the differences between
> conflicts
> between global vs local policies is best done at this list and not
> wikitech-l.
>
> There is a sufficiently large group of people who are of the opinion that
> there is  a need to have a platform to discuss these things and come to a
> resolution. At this moment any community can throw spanners in the works.
> Single User Login is to be used on all projects for all users. The notion
> that one project would be against this is anathema to getting this sorely
> needed project implemented on all projects.
>
> I have read what has been referred to and the only thing I find is that a
> steward cannot do this thing because there are bureaucrats on the
> en.wikipedia. Jeez, what are we talking about? This seems to me a
> straightforward situation where the bringing together of all users is a
> foregone conclusion. The only argument is a formality ???
>

Currently, the Meta usurpation rule says that local projects decide when
usurpation is appropriate.

Given that, it is expected that Stewards (who will in general be less
familiar with the policies on individual projects) should defer to local
Bureaucrats when they are available.  Darkoneko acted outside of that and
executed a usurpation that violated enwiki policy.  For which Darkoneko has
apologized.

I don't think the specifics of Darkoneko's actions are very important, but
the general principle are.

Should Usurpation policy be dictated by individual wikis?  And if not, what
should a global usurpation policy look like?

In the case at hand, the enwiki account that was usurped had ~6000 edits,
but hadn't edited in over a year.  Even if there was a global usurpation
policy, I'm not sure I would want us to go around usurping accounts with
that had thousands of edits since it strikes at the heart of the user's
expectation of attribution under the GFDL.  Currently enwiki policy says
that an account can only be usurped if it has no substantive edit history,
out of concern for the GFDL.

-Robert Rohde