[WikiEN-l] Your comments on wikien-l regarding adminship

[Earle Martin]

On 12/02/07, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> You're also forgetting that Wikipedia is not the only wiki, and that
> MediaWiki is not the only wiki engine. Most other wiki engines do not
> have an "admin" user level at all, and last I checked the Pattern
> Repository was still working just fine.

As much as it saddens me to do so, I have to make a correction on that
point. A couple of years back, we started getting our first dedicated
abusive users on the WikiWikiWeb, after a decade of largely peaceful
existence. Since then, Ward has implemented a steward privilege level
with certain administrative abilities, issued to some specific invited
users (full disclosure: including me). They deal with the occasional
odd extreme case that WhyWikiWorks[1] can't deal with.

I think the PPR community has been lucky over the years to have not
attracted the attention of the fringe too much, probably because the
we have a very narrow scope. A generalist site such as Wikipedia is
going to appeal to a much wider audience, and draw more fire as a
consequence. Still, that it took over ten years for us to have to
implement an "admin" user level says a lot about the strength of the
wiki principle.


[1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyWikiWorks - relevant to a large part of
this thread.

-- 
Earle Martin
            http://downlode.org/
http://purl.org/net/earlemartin/