[Foundation-l] retire the administrator privilege

[Samuel Klein]

Amir: your original idea is lovely.  Reviving it for a moment:

On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 4:31 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter <putevod at mccme.ru> wrote:
>
> Now, I found it. Indeed, I exaggerated (not several hundreds, just a
> hundred, and not overnight, but over two or three days, but the idea is
>
> The poll:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Forum/Archives/2008-07#Global_sysops_.28poll.29_.28closed.29

Yet we now have global sysops.  It did take a bit of perseverance.  If
we selected for and named Facilitators on the projects for their
mediation skills, we might have a few thousand of those in addition to
our administrators as a pool of people fully competent to carry out
any of the suggestions we're discussing -- they all seem plausible and
possible to get passed to me.

Amir writes:
> Now i, in general, think that these permissions should be given
> liberally to as many reasonable Wikimedians as possible.
<snip>
> In fact it's quite likely that communities will want to give as little
> permissions as possible to users.

Can you explain the apparent paradox above?

I would be more strongly in favor of this proposal if it was clear to
me how splitting up permissions would give access to them to more
people.  For instance, I think the ability to see and read deleted
articles should be available to basically everyone.


> Ziko van Dijk's "Tell us about your Wikipedia" project [1] in 2008 was
> advertised through sitenotice on Meta and it was quite successful.
> ...low-hanging fruit.
> [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tell_us_about_your_Wikipedia

Indeed.

SJ