[Foundation-l] retire the administrator privilege

[Stephanie Daugherty]

Unfortunately, the various communities have demonstrated that any sort of
reform won't happen locally. Too many feathers would be ruffled, and too
many people think they benefit from the current power structure.

I do think that it's reasonable bringing it up at the foundation level, but
keep in mind that at the foundation level there is a tradition of
noninterference that runs very deep - unless something is broken to the
point where it threatens the health of the foundation as a whole, such as
legal and/or privacy issues, it's very unlikely that the foundation will
touch it.

On the other hand, I do think that some of our projects are proving too
large for self-governance in it's current form, but again, that's not
something the foundation is likely to touch until it's far too late, and
then it will probably do as little as it has to.

-Steph

On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 8:08 PM, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 10:24 AM, Amir E. Aharoni
> <amir.aharoni at mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
> > 2011/1/16 Joseph Seddon <seddonwiki at gmail.com>
> >>
> >> I am going to be quite frank and say that it is pointless to have this
> >> discussion on this list. Only a fraction of the english wikipedia
> community
> >> are on it. If you are genuinely serious about this then propose it on
> the
> >> english wikipedia. This is not a foundation level issue nor will it ever
> >> become one so put it to the community.
> >
> > That's the point - i do think that it's a Foundation-level issue, or
> > more precisely, movement-level issue. That's because "RFA is broken"
> > discussion are perennial in all Wikipedias which have functioning
> > communities of about 50 regular writers or more.
> >
> > And in Wikipedias in small regional languages, which have only a
> > handful of writers i often see very confused discussions about
> > adminship which show that they misunderstand the concept - they think
> > that an admin is supposed to "administrate", or that they shouldn't
> > write articles until the Foundation appoints an admin, or that they
> > must draft a detailed voting process document to appoint admins - but
> > can't really vote until they have a quorum, etc. (This doesn't mean
> > that i know a lot of languages. These discussions are often held in
> > Russian or English.)
> >
> > I believe that this confusion is caused by the heavy word
> > "administrator". Eliminating it and calling the permissions by their
> > actual names - "blocker", "deleter", "protector", "reviewer" - will
> > likely eliminate this confusion.
>
> One could impose a new groups / permissions structure from on high,
> across all the Wikis, or (probably) ask the developers to add new
> groups to a specific Wiki on a one-off.
>
> It would probably be harmless to enable the more specific groups
> globally, with local per-wiki decisions as to if or when to allow
> users to gain access to them, and under what conditions.
>
> It would probably be easier to test them out on one project rather
> than try doing the global step first, to avoid the knee-jerk
> opposition whenever the Foundation choses to change anything, but I
> could be wrong.
>
>
> --
> -george william herbert
> george.herbert at gmail.com
>
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