[Wikipedia-l] Re: Developers should mind their own business

[Tim Starling]

Robert Michel wrote in part:

> 1. When a trusted user logs in he can declare that he would candidate for
> chief duty editor in that session.
>
> 2. The first candidate who logged in become the demand note by the
Wikipedia
> System to be the "chief duty editor" for the next 2 hours. (He can accept
or
> reject, for example when he is drunk at that time).
>
> 3. When two or more candidates are online they have to agree who takes the
> job, in case of a stalemate (stand-off) an algorithmus like the one with
the
> most edits since be the last time chief duty editor could help.
>
> 4. In case that one chief duty editor time of 2 hours are finish, he goes
> offline before or he does not answer on requests to ban one IP/User
inbetween
> 3 minutes, the system calls again all candidates to find one new chief
duty
> editor
>
> 5. In case that no candidate is only all trusted users become a message
> (pop-up) to become candidate inbetween next 2 minutes ;)
>
> 6. On a populare wikipedia page is shown who is chief duty editor right
now
> and has a log of all shifts, with all action in the name of chief duty
> editor.
>
> 7. The chief duty editor use his special account only for administration
and
> statments as administrator, but not for normal editings - for that he must
> use his normal account, but he should work full time with reading, giving
> comments on disscussion pages and delete nonsens, and not try to write or
> change own article during his shift.
>
> 8. In case that the chief duty editor is going mad, every trusted user can
> request a despose of the chief duty editor but the one who request this
can`t
> become chief duty editor for next 24h. If  he has to argue well and to try
to
> solve the problem in dialog with the chief duty editor before and every
> trusted wikipedian who is online become a call to vote. The one who lost
this
> vote lost his status trusted wikipedian after a final voting inbetween 48h
> clears this case.

Yes, that's a very nice fantasy. Are you going to program it? Because I have
better things to do. My objective has always been to produce a practical
model, one which I can code in a few hours of my spare time. We can all
dream up fantastic power models, but they lead to nothing but stalling and
tangential unproductive debate.

Maybe some programmer will come along wanting to spend weeks coding a power
model which will quite possibly meet strong opposition from the users. I
would advise such a programmer to instead spend that time on improving our
seriously inadequate database schema, optimising the parser or working on
load balancing, thus allowing us to keep the site operating with an
acceptable response time for a while longer.

-- Tim Starling