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

[Ray Saintonge]

Brian McNeil wrote:
> 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.
>   
I like the idea.  Admin privileges are often dependent on what someone 
intends to do with the privilege, and somehow simply using its passive 
features doesn't count.  I have avoided becoming a en:wp for the last 
six years, but there have been times when being able to look at deleted 
edits would have been very useful.  Notably in reviewing the edit 
history of transwikied material that has already been deleted from wp.  
Having the privilege in other languages would also be useful too, even 
when an attempt to make a single edit would look idiotic.
> Who should be permitted to grant the privilege? Bureaucrats, or just
> stewards?
It should be much easier than becoming a sysop.  The damage that such 
privileges can create are much less. Someone with the privilege who uses 
it to expose private identities on other sites would not be a good 
person to have the privilege, but that extreme badly-behaved group 
remains very small.

Ec