[Foundation-l] "seeall" privilege Was Fwd: [WL-News] Wikimedia Foundation in dangeroflosing immunity under the Communications Decency Act

[Thomas Dalton]

2008/5/22 Brian McNeil <brian.mcneil at wikinewsie.org>:
> As many will be aware, English Wikinews very recently desysopped fourteen or
> fifteen people - including Jimmy Wales. This was done by project consensus,
> and despite jwales asking for the privilege back the consensus seems to be
> "no" or "only on a temporary basis".
>
> Since there are no visible sysop actions for jwales, the only real use has
> been to see deleted stuff.
>
> A suggestion has been floated that a third way would be a new privilege to
> see everything. Something that - I think - should be granted to all board
> members and likely all staff. I don't just mean for Wikinews, but across all
> languages and all projects.

Sounds like a good idea.

> This doesn't strike me as something particularly difficult to implement, but
> there are some wrinkles to iron out with it.
>
> First, my assumption is all Board members should have this priv.
> Staff? Probably, but most definitely Mike Godwin.

I think giving it to all senior staff and board would be good. Low
level staff (an intern doing filing, say) probably don't need it.

> Should it include oversighted edits? Is this even technically feasible?

I'm sure it's feasible, it may require a bit of work, though.

> Are there any circumstances where someone could be elected to a project
> ArbCom without sysop? Should they then have this privilege?

That would be up to individual projects.

> Who should be permitted to grant the privilege? Bureaucrats, or just
> stewards?

This is where it gets a little complicated. At the moment there is no
such thing as a global permission, as far as I know (it may be planned
as part of SUL, but I don't think it's implemented yet). I think the
simplest way would be a system similar to that which stewards use to
sort problems on small wikis - the steward has the permission on meta
that allows them to give permissions to accounts on other wikis. In
this case, they would just have the right to give and remove this one
user group, rather than any group like stewards can. Stewards would
probably be responsible for giving the staff/board's meta accounts the
permission, then each staff/board member would give their own accounts
on other projects the user group as and when they need it.
Technically, they would be able to give the group to anyone, not just
themselves - I think the only option there is to get them to agree not
to (it's all logged on meta, so it's easy enough to monitor).