[WikiEN-l] RickK

[Delirium]

Christopher Mahan wrote:

>--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> I would support any move to reduce the number of
>  
>
>>sysops.
>>    
>>
>
>Likewise.
>  
>
I don't think I would, though I do think sysops should be sparing in 
using their powers, especially more controversial powers, and we should 
have some way to police this.

Having fewer sysops tends to make it more cabal-like, while the original 
intention was basically "anyone that is halfway trustworthy gets to be a 
sysop."  Also, some sysop powers, like being able to delete a page whose 
only history is a string of redirects in order to make way for a page 
move, are very useful for day-to-day wiki maintenance tasks.

I think some sort of structural change is needed on the protected-page 
front to make that particular sysop power less frequently necessary 
though.  Some have been proposed, although I'm not sure if anyone has 
fleshed out any particular details.  I think that, similar to what some 
people have proposed, there needs to be some sort of "soft protection" 
for controversial articles.  While "be bold" is in general the Wiki 
philosophy, some articles, like [[Gdansk]], [[Israel]], and [[Jew]], 
have been painstakingly crafted over a period of months (sometimes 
years) with lots of discussion.  In those cases, people really shouldn't 
be bold and make massive changes to the article---they should make 
relatively local, isolated changes, and place on the talk page their 
reason for doing anything that might be considered reasonably 
controversial.  If a major rewrite is seen as the only option, it should 
be discussed extensively on the talk page rather than simply boldly 
done---you can't just write your own [[Israel]] article from scratch and 
stick it there and expect it to stay.

One possibility is to avoid any software-level changes, but make it 
policy (or at least pseudo-policy) that on such articles large changes 
made without discussion will be reverted as a routine matter, with a 
comment to the person that they should read the talk page and propose 
their changes, preferably one at a time.  Then instead of protecting the 
page, repeated re-applications of the changes without discussion will 
result in a ban of the offending user, or preferably a per-article ban, 
if that is implemented at some point.  This way individual users making 
massive changes to controversial topics without discussion don't impede 
the normal compromise work by forcing a page protection.

There's other possible solutions, such as moving to a "submit proposed 
changes" model for controversial articles, instead of updating the wiki 
live, but they introduce a whole host of problems on their own... I 
haven't been able to come up with a model of that sort with the details 
worked out in a way that seems satisfactory, so I won't personally be 
proposing something of that sort (yet, anyway).

-Mark