[Wikimedia-l] Thoughts on Admin Rights on WMF Wiki (and other things)

[Tomasz W. Kozlowski]

Again, this is going to be a general e–mail, so I'm not going to quote 
anyone in particular, and will just refer to some parts of the e–mails 
sent before this one.

First of all, I think some of you guys should really stop freaking out 
about the alleged level of attacks in this thread (and the previous 
one). I haven't seen anyone say anything really outrageous here, and the 
mere expression of an opinion that someone should be fired is /not/ a 
personal attack. Requiring that people better be nice than honest will 
not help solve anything, in the same way that sending small novels 
without really answering any questions does not help anything.

The fact is that none of the questions asked have been answered yet, 
almost three weeks since the situation happened. The thread has not 
died—people are just waiting for some true answers, other than "it's our 
wiki" and "it's always been uniquely governed."

I'm not sure whether this is related to Gayle's joining the WMF just 16 
months ago, but the uniqueness of the WMF wiki was never like she (and 
apparently Sue, if I recall correctly) described it.

The decision-making authority has never been placed "with the 
WMF"—rather, the wiki was an example of a pretty good symbiosis between 
the WMF staff, who have been posting official documents, press releases, 
keeping the staff list up-to-date, and maintaining their user pages, and 
between the volunteers, who have been doing all sorts of things—from 
fixing typos, importing translations, to creating new accounts and 
deleting redundant templates.

This worked quite well, with some minor to moderate glitches, until May 
(April?) this year, when someone thought it was such a good idea to just 
go ahead and remove adminship from all those volunteers. (Yes, I'm no 
longer AGF-ing here.)

You cannot expect people to stop bringing this topic up until they get — 
in their feeling — satisfactory answers, and it is my impression that at 
least some people don't feel that way.

	-- Tomasz