Jimmy Wales wrote:
A [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:
*By the powers vested in me by the Wikipedia power structure, I *hereby declare those changes to be de facto official, subject of *course to overruling by other sysops *Is this implying that sysops *have special powers in regards to the formulation of policy, I *thought they were no better than the rest of us...
Adam is right of course. I don't know who he is quoting, and maybe that was only a joke, but sysop is always and everywhere supposed to be a purely technical matter, not a position of authority and power of any kind.
I think maybe I need to say that a lot more often, eh?
And maybe we need to focus on what technical changes could be made to reduce the differences between sysops and ordinary signed-in-users.
This will probably be opposed by those who'll see it as just another step into hierarchical organization, but I think it might be a good idea to create a new, more-inclusive class of users, that has authoritative significance but no technical powers. Basically any user who has been here for some period of time (maybe 2-3 weeks or so), and shown him/herself to be editing in good faith. As we get bigger, I think there will be a lot more "fake" users trying to influence things, so restricting things like policy formation and votes to "real" users in some sort of formal way might be a good idea. I'd envision it being very easy to gain this status: even someone who's invovled in lots of edit wars should be considered a "real user", so long as they aren't purely a troll or vandal, or someone who just signed up 3 hours ago.
This might actually have the effect of reducing the hierarchy somewhat, because right now sysops are a sort of de facto group of "trusted users", since the only defined groups we have are "sysops", "logged-in users", and "anonymous users". Sysops are too small a group, and logged-in users are too big a group (anyone can create 100 accounts if they wish). Making a larger group of trusted users without technical powers would reduce sysops to being just a subset of that group with additional technical powers, but no additional powers of any other sort.
Ideas?
-Mark