[Wikipedia-l] Re: Please clarify the honorary administrator status

[Tim Starling]

Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
> Before voting to our honorary administrators (also called steward,
> super-admin, etc.) I like someone (Tim?) clarify the role of this new
> status.

Let's call it "steward" for now.

> First, what is the goal:
> - Manage new Wikipedia where there are no administrators?
> - Become a new level over bureaucrats for all Wikipedia?
> - Something else?

Since my goal has been to disavow developer power in favour of 
democracy, I'd prefer not to dictate the rules under which stewards will 
operate. This should be a decision made by the community, or by Jimbo.

However as I've said on meta, my preference is that the users of each 
wiki administer their own wiki, except in the case of very small wikis. 
For the moment, bureaucrats cannot desysop, so stewards will have to 
evaluate community consensus and decide whether to desysop. This is the 
role formerly assigned to people with shell access.

> What specific feature will they have:
> - Same as bureaucrat, but Wikimedia wide?
> - More than bureaucrat (for example only HA may be able to remove admini
> status, or give bot status)?
> - Something else?

Currently they have more abilities than bureaucrats. They can grant or 
revoke any level of access. Currently bureaucrats can only grant 
bureaucrat or admin status.

Additional features may be implemented depending on community sentiment. 
Ultimately I would like to see stewards capable of configuring the power 
structure on each wiki individually, or to allow some subset of local 
users to set their own power structure. For example on request from the 
Korean wikipedians, a steward might delete the bureaucrat level from ko 
and allow sysops to create and demote other sysops. Or, the English 
Wikipedia community may request that bureaucrats be given the ability to 
determine the set of operations which sysops can perform.

I expect steward rights to be maximally unrestricted, analogous to root 
access on a Unix operating system. However it's possible that some users 
will have virtually unrestricted rights locally. It all depends on what 
people want.

-- Tim Starling