Steve Bennett wrote:
On 8/7/06, Ligulem ligulem@pobox.com wrote:
Absolutely not - admins are appointed on the basis of their vandalism skills and trustworthiness, not on their knowledge of content.
Sure. That's why it currently needs an admin to edit [[MediaWiki:Common.css]] or [[template:cite book]] on en, right :)?
Yeah, it's a far from ideal situation. "Vandal fighters" definitely shouldn't be messing with the site-wide style sheets, and admins who primarily reorganise images and recover deletions shouldn't be banning or unbanning users. It's a problem.
The problem is rather the other way round: those that are trusted and knowledgeable to edit [[MediaWiki:Common.css]] or [[template:cite book]] shouldn't need to go requesting the whole set of admin tools (or an ambassador title, as someone put it on en :).
It's not a problem that those who have an "ambassador" title on en *are* allowed to edit [[MediaWiki:Common.css]]. Ambassadors usually are competent enough to recognize when they lack the skills needed to edit these pages. But they might be capable to delegate this due to their trust they own.
Maybe a finer access mechanism would be helpful here. For example an admin A should be able to give a user U the right to edit [[MediaWiki:Common.css]] specifically, because he "knows" that U is capable to do that and that A is capable to survey what's happening on [[MediaWiki:Common.css]] (site looks like shit after edit x of U, U has no reasonable explanation for his botch and A thus removes U's access right to edit [[MediaWiki:Common.css]]).
But this might rather be a wiki-political thing, which should be solved be the users and not by the devs. However, sometimes a bold developer action can solve a Gordian (wiki-)Knot.
For the moment, we could try once again using current capabilities of MediaWiki on en and split off some of the current "ambassador" tools into a new user group. The "protect" right might be a good starter to split off from "ambassador" :)