[Foundation-l] retire the administrator privilege

[Stephanie Daugherty]

Split permissions have been a perennial issue for en.wikipedia for a while.
It's proposed every couple months, has vocal support and a handful of even
more vocal opponents, and fillibustered into oblivion to resurface a few
months later. Rinse, lather, repeat. The only partial success was with
rollback, which actually got broken into it's own permission, but it hasn't
happened elsewhere.

Same cycle any time you try to reform a particularly contentious area on a
large WMF project. You get cries of "it's not broken" "That's stupid" that
drown out any attempt to analyse the issue or progress meaningfully towards
improvements.

-Steph

On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 7:32 PM, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 4:02 PM, Stephanie Daugherty
> <sdaugherty at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 5:48 PM, masti <mastigm at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> why should tht be decided on foundation level? Do you think communities
> >> are so broken that they cannot make their own decisions?
> >> This would be the only reason to start discussing enforcement of such
> >> major changes
> >>
> >
> >
> > I personally am not convinced here that we at at the point yet where we
> have
> > this level of community brokenness, but we are getting very close if we
> > aren't there already. The consensus process used at the individual
> project
> > level oftentimes breaks down entirely on very contentious issues with as
> > little as a dozen participants in a discussion. Governance by consensus
> is
> > an important part of our heritage and future, but as currently
> implemented,
> > it holds us a prisoner of our own inertia in some key areas.
> >
> > This is a major threat to the future of several large WMF projects, and
> one
> > that has been getting some media attention, particularly by naysayers. I
> > honestly don't think these issues alone can cause us to fail, but I do
> > believe that if ignored long enough, they will create a set of conditions
> > that will allow it to happen. Once conditions become intolerable to the
> most
> > dedicated members of a community, the possibility of a "mainstream" fork
> - a
> > fork that takes the bulk of the community with it - begins to become a
> > viable prospect.
> >
> > The fallout, obviously, would be enormous. There are a few readily
> apparent
> > ways that I see that we can reach such a point.
> >
> >   - The projects become ungovernable, and the resulting chaos results in
> a
> >   political (in a wikipolitics sense) fork in order to establish a more
> viable
> >   structure. (Likely, and to some degree in motion already)
> >   - The foundation itself goes rogue, and tries to impose conditions
> >   unacceptable to it's member communities. (Unlikely, but not
> inconceivable.)
> >   - The foundation proves too unresponsive for the technical needs of the
> >   communities it serves. (Likely, already happening to some degree.)
> >   - The foundation becomes insolvent. (Possible at some point if
> >   fundraising efforts fail.)
> >
> >
> > Our communities and the foundation itself need to look at these as
> serious
> > "threats from within" to our mission, and decide accordingly how we will
> > deal with them. If we ignore them, and keep our head in the sand, one or
> > more of them may eventually happen, and the outcome won't be pretty.
> >
> > -Steph
>
> Question -
>
> When was the last time something like this was proposed on
> en.wikipedia, or on wikien-l?
>
> I agree that there are some things which have been very difficult to
> get or move consensus on, but I don't know that there would
> necessarily be enough opposition to prevent successful implementation
> of a split permissions level approach on en.wp right now.
>
> I don't recall a prior proposal but I don't pretend to be able to
> follow all the policy threads going on across the many sites and lists
> and umpteen pages successfully.
>
> If one was floated and failed, a pointer is fine, and we can go from there.
>
> If one hasn't been floated - why not take this opportunity and do so,
> and see what happens?
>
>
> --
> -george william herbert
> george.herbert at gmail.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>



-- 
Faith is about what you really truly believe in, not about what you are
taught to believe.