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#Объеди
нение_флагов_инженера_и_техадмина <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
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