[WikiEN-l] Please change your passwords.

[Tim Starling]

Zoney wrote:
> On 08/05/07, Matthew Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> We're not professional.  Except for a tiny bunch of people who work
>> for the Foundation, we're all volunteers and our time is not
>> especially coordinated.  Wikipedia is what it is, and part of that is
>> that we've grown faster than our organization has.
>>
>> -Matt
>>
>>
> The project should be managed professionally if it is indeed a serious
> project. Otherwise it's all just a bit of a larf and it'll eventually come
> crashing down. However, the project *is* taken seriously by those of us
> involved, and attempts to pass itself off as a serious endeavour. Indeed
> that mostly works, and so a large section of the media and the public take
> the project seriously (maybe they shouldn't). That is why I consider it
> serious for us to be so unprofessional about such a critical issue as site
> security.
> 
> Is there an official line on what needs to be done, and what exactly
> administrators should do with respect to passwords? Has it been relayed to
> each and every administrator in a proper fashion? (the email I received was
> rather informal) Is this information put to new admins (or even ordinary
> users) in a coherent fashion? I do not think being knowledgable on the
> subject of password security should be a necessary criterion for a Wikipedia
> administrator. So there needs to be a definitive process for the uninitiated
> to follow.

Who are you calling unprofessional? The people who quickly, competently
and comprehensively fixed the problem on the server side, or the people
who jumped up and down on the lists and wikis about the need for everyone
to change their passwords? I think you should make that clear.

-- Tim Starling