On Tue, 14 Jan 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:
The Main Page of all language wikis would benefit greatly from this, as it could now be updated by everyone without the risk of the goat-man suddenly appearing on our frontpage.
Well, this would be nice, I admit. But sysop status is handed out freely for the asking, for the most part, so I'm not sure if the benefit is really all that great.
Then apparently you haven't been following the Swedish mess. ;)
The fundamental problem with our current sysop model is that promotion and demotion of sysops rests with Jimbo, the owner, and myself, one of the software maintainers.
Jimbo has very little contact with the non-English wikis, and I am directly active in only a couple; as such we can't easily monitor abuse of sysop privs or find trustworthy people who should be sysops. An edit war goes on and we just don't _know_ who's at fault, who can be trusted to calm down, or who's just going to keep trolling.
Related to this is the absent maintainer bottleneck; if the sysops *aren't around*, changes don't get made to protected pages. If Jimbo and I *aren't around*, new sysop requests don't get filled, and changes don't get made to protected pages.
Automatic replacement of an edit copy means that users can still get stuff done without constantly petitioning a small number of god-kings; instead, the god-kings' responsibility becomes the much smaller task of watching for _problematic_ edits and canceling them before they take effect... and that can be done by the rest of the users, too, so things keep running if every sysop and developer is hit by a bus simultaneously with no plans for succession.
We have the same problem with updates to the interface translation files, which currently wait on me to fix them up and put them online (and if necessary set up and convert the wiki). It's slow, it's prone to delays, and it's damned aggravating for everyone involved. Frankly, it's a kludge and it's un-wiki... the wiki way would be much better served by user-editable stuff at all levels.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)