[WikiEN-l] Pedantry on privileges

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 6:37 PM, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> Wow, so he's able to delete content on *one* of the 200+ languages of
> Wikipedia.  I'd still say the statement is substantially correct.  He used
> to have unlimited power on every project to do anything.  Now he's
> administrator on one project, and has the ability to view certain things
> that other people can't view on every project.
[snip]

This is absolutely no different than any of the several other
incidents where a sysadmin or the like had the technical ability to do
something, did it, then were reminded that having the technical
ability to do it doesn't actually equate to having the _authority_ to
do it, and as a result they resigned that particular technical ability
in order to end a perpetual argument that arises because 'okay I won't
do it again' doesn't satisfy a broad enough swath of people.
(I'll leave it to people to muckrake up these events for themselves,
but there have been a couple that I can think of, I don't think it
would be fair to the involved parties to remind people of them)

Probing the bounds of your actual authority in our environment is a
necessary thing that all of us do with every BOLD action, it's a
consequence of the generally non-hierarchical nature of the projects.
So I don't think it's justified to flog someone forever when they
cross a line that was apparently obvious to everyone except them,
especially since these things tend to seem far more black and white
after the fact.

Keep in mind the history of the founder privileged. It's a very recent thing:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/confirm/2009/Jimbo_Wales

For the longest time, Jimmy was just a steward— presumably with all
the rights and restrictions that being a steward entails, such as
having the technical ability to delete things anywhere but only the
authority to do so with the consent (or, equivalently, complete
indifference) of the involved community.

Activity requirements were imposed on stewardship, and Jimmy only used
the technical permissions on enwp (due to traditional practices on
this project) thus failing to meet the requirements. But his
traditional role on enwp justified keeping some elevated privileges,
so rather than cope with an exception to the steward rules a special
role was created. Tada.

But the change in naming of the permissions from the conventional role
to the special one didn't actually confer an increase in authority—
and when the extent of the actual authority to push privileged changes
outside of enwp was tested the unequivocal answer[1] was that it
didn't exist... and there really is no real reason to say that it ever
existed.


Some people want to spin this into a narrative about Jimmy's role on
english Wikipedia, but thats bogus—  This wasn't an english wikipedia
thing, and rather than supporting the suggestion that this signals a
loss of authority on English Wikipedia the actual expedience suggests
the opposite:  Look at relative concentrations of enwp users in the
poll.  ISTM that Enwp users are  quite comfortable with Jimmy playing
an important role as he has traditionally, and that almost everyone
else is either indifferent or surprised by the notion— unsurprising
because they haven't had the pleasure of working with him.   (And,
while it's been a long time since I've worked with Jimmy on anything,
and while I disagreed with his involvement here, it's still the case
that I completely understand where the traditional role on enwp comes
from: He _is_ a great community member to work with... but the other
project communities aren't filled with people that have that
experience)

[1] Or as unequivocal as anything involving 350 people can ever be:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Petition_to_Jimbo