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

Guillaume Blanchard wrote: Let's call it "steward" for now. 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. 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