[Wikipedia-l] Software updates

[Daniel Mayer]

On Friday 09 August 2002 05:15 pm, Lee wrote:
> I made a round of bug fixes and other planned software updates today;
> most ofthem shouldn't even be noticeable by most of you, but one will
> be, so I'm giving the militia a heads up: "Move page" is now
> available to all logged in users.

I thought you were going to make an automatic promotion for this type of 
thing based on some criteria beyond mere logged-in status? It is potentially 
dangerous with newbie experiments and a drain on sysop resources to let 
somebody who has been logged-in for 5 minutes the ability to do something 
that can /only/ be corrected by a sysop and not by any other member of the 
community. 

After a /great/ deal of effort over several months a majority of articles are 
now correctly named. 

There should be some reasonable expectation that a user with such an ability 
has been exposed to our naming conventions on capitalization, pluralization, 
common names ect. It took me a month to figure out how to manually move an 
article and by that time I learned how I was aware of and followed our naming 
conventions. Now there is a simple button for that that can be pressed on a 
whim by an experimenting newbie. 

Does the move feature fix redirects now? Does it move talk pages 
automatically? These are non-obvious things for a newbie to know about in the 
first place, let alone fix after a move.

As I stated before I'm all for letting old hands the ability to do this and 
many other sysop functions (if not all in one way or another), but newbies 
who tend to improperly capitalize and pluralize article names because they 
are unaware of our naming conventions?  

Furthermore without a log of moved pages and a summary field for explaining 
why a move is being made, it will be darn near impossible to catch these 
things after they have dropped off of RecentChanges.  

Please reconsider. It already takes me two hours a day just to greet new 
users and check past edits for vandalism in RecentChanges. This is yet 
another thing I and the other sysops have to review and fix when needed. 

--mav