[Wikimedia-l] Go away, community (from WMF wiki at least)

[Katherine Casey]

Having read through this entire thread, I have to ask: would there have
been any value in, instead of desysopping non-staff (because there appears
to be a possibly-valid argument that non-staff did most of the
administrative work on the wmf wiki), instead making it clear that unlike
on all other wikis, +staff users had the final say in any
administrative/editing dispute on the wmf wiki? That is, since Sue says a
large part of the problem was non-staff making staff justify themselves and
their decisions endlessly, why not just short-circuit that particular weak
spot and otherwise let work carry on? I guess the operative questions here
would be something like:

   1. Was there actual misuse of admin tools being done by non-staff?
   2. Were there other, non-misuse issues that arose from non-staff having
   +admin (i.e. we already know about "too many challenges to staff", but was
   there anything else that made non-staff admins suboptimal? this would
   include even things like "it looks weird to outsiders to have non-staff
   changing 'corporate' content")
   3. If there weren't other issues, could the issue of "non-staff
   challenging staff decisions" have been corrected with a less-drastic
   solution (such as clarifying who had final say in things)
   4. Is it true that non-staff admins do significant portions of the work
   on that wiki, such that their loss will now cause the wiki to go un- or
   more-poorly-maintained?
   5. If 4 is true, what solutions can we/the WMF put in place to pick up
   that slack so the wiki doesn't become worse?

None of these questions are intended to apportion blame or determine who
was "right", but they may help us figure out why actions are being done,
how we could have routed around this huge blow-up, and where to go from
here.

-Fluffernutter


On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 2:19 PM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 9:48 AM, Sue Gardner <sgardner at wikimedia.org>
> wrote:
>
> > My understanding is that administrator rights have been removed from a
> > small number of volunteers, but that those people still have basic
> editing
> > rights.
>
> Far more than basic, actually. The WMF wiki is unusual in that it
> allows insertion of raw HTML by any registered user (this is because
> the donation forms used to be hosted there; they're now developed on a
> dedicated site). Regular users also have permission to edit the
> MediaWiki: namespace, which helps with translation. This means that
> regular users can add arbitrary code that will be executed in the
> reader's browser, something that only admins can do on most of our
> other wikis. There are >600 registered users on the WMF wiki.
>
> While I understand the frustration with admin access being restricted,
> volunteers on this particular wiki are still trusted with
> extraordinary rights (without prejudice as to whether that
> configuration should be broadened or narrowed in future). I asked
> Philippe yesterday, and he said that account requests from Meta would
> continue to be processed (by JamesA and himself going forward). As Sue
> says, having the overall governance responsibilities on the wiki
> clarified is a normal step. Sorry for the rocky transition; no
> disrespect was intended.
>
> The original text on
> https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia:Welcome (written in
> 2004 when there was no WMF staff) with regard to the Board resolving
> all disputes should indeed be updated; the Board delegates day-to-day
> operational responsibilities to the organizational staff, and while
> the sentence is technically true, it was written at a time when that
> delegation was not possible. Nonetheless, it was clear from the very
> beginning that the WMF wiki was not operated according to the
> community governance practices established in other wikis because it
> serves a distinct purpose.
>
> Erik
> --
> Erik Möller
> VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
>
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