This might a wrong venue to discuss this but these were the worst 3 days
of my participation in Wikimedia movement, and that feeling is probably
shared by my colleagues.
The consultation about the creation of new technical administrators
group that just ended yesterday was an utter and total disaster for
people with existing non-sysop groups for editing JS/CSS.
In Russian Wikipedia, for 300 Kb already [1], people are weaponising
every reading of the consultation document (which they, for some reason,
consider akin to global policy) against, uniting the same-minded groups
(local ‘engineer’ group was created under a ‘Technical administrator
group’ RfC) for an umbrella of reasons:
— Some tell that, apparently, after working for 2 years already and
doing more edits than all sysops combined in JS/CSS, engineers do not
have ‘at least as much trust as being an administrator’ since they
weren’t elected like administrators (we are electing sysops with a vote
and engineers are being elected with a discussion, so people argue that
engineers do not have trust because they weren’t subjected to a vote).
— Others claim that, because MediaWiki developer community decided to
unite those rights under one group, merging any groups with it is not
acceptable, and, moreover, the engineer group shouldn't be given those
rights at all.
— Moreover, some people claim that if a group would be too small, like
engineers right now (12 accounts with 85 sysops), they could, in opinion
of those people, usurp all editing of JS/CSS, decline to revert edits
that are deemed controversial by community, and this justifies giving
the permissions to all 85 existing sysops, even those that didn’t edit
JS/CSS at all.
I do not expect organisers of the consultation and MediaWiki developer
community to intervene into a discussion that's happening in a foreign
language, but I really think that it all comes down to focusing on
projects that didn’t have any technical administrators and not
explaining anything to projects that did. In the retrospective, I really
wish that I did more push on this point on Phabricator [2] since this
was a major point that I expected to backfire because of the vague
wording of the document and that did backfire.
What I would like to have from the global community, though, is a clear
documentation for people who are affected by this change, because right
now, because of misinformation, misreadings and over-interpretations, it
could go as far as losing all interface editing permissions for me and
others because the document in question didn’t go far enough on the
qualifications and left too much to community’s assumptions.
Oleg
[1]:
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Википедия:Форум/Правила#Объединение_флагов_ин…
<https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%8F:%D0%A4%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%83%D0%BC/%D0%9F%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%BB%D0%B0#%D0%9E%D0%B1%D1%8A%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D1%84%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B3%D0%BE%D0%B2_%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B6%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B0_%D0%B8_%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%85%D0%B0%D0%B4%D0%BC%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B0>
[2]:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T190015#4257719