I support this proposal MuZemike, the *Superuser *right bundles everything all together which would be very useful rather than an administrator having to go and add rollback, auto patrol, reviewer, account creator separately.

We don't absolutely need admins at all. If we used randomly chosen juries to make decisions then we could use bureaucrats or even bots to actually apply any decisions made. That essentially avoids the 'who polices the police' issue. -- -Ian Woollard

The problem with the idea of administrators is that they have too much power (or are perceived as having too much power) and thus the RFA process becomes unduly picky. If you spread the powers out over more people then this issue is largely or completely avoided.

On 20/08/2010, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:

> (The dangerous things an admin can do include putting > potentially-malicious JavaScript into the default configuration. That > would be a power not to spread all round. History merges are also all > but irreversible. What other admin powers are actually dangerous?)

AFDs. Having admins decide them gives inclusionists/deletionists too much power to side with their friends in a nearly invisible way. Not only can AFDs be vote stuffed, but admins can then decide to follow the 'majority'.

I still don't think that they're required for that. The fact is that most vandalism and attack page detection and fixing is done by non admins, so it's just a question of giving users appropriate powers to deal with those (and making sure that those powers can't be used maliciously). Having them concentrated in the hands of admins is not a logical necessity. The problem with the idea of administrators is that they have too much power (or are perceived as having too much power) and thus the RFA process becomes unduly picky. If you spread the powers out over more people then this issue is largely or completely avoided. But I'm not saying that bureaucrats type roles aren't needed, there are things that cannot be done by users, but things like decision making in AFDs isn't one of them, nor is vandalism fighting. On 20/08/2010, WereSpielChequers <werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Two advantages of our current system over juries are efficiency and > speed. This is particularly useful re blocking of vandals and speedy > deletion of attack pages - in both cases the first admin to pass by > will do the appropriate block or deletion. If you want a slower less > efficient system you don't just need to show that the much larger > number of jury members would be available, you also need to identify a > benefit for this proposal, and that benefit would need to be more than > commensurate with the disbenefits that I've identified. > > > WereSpielChequers

Is it possible to have the ability to blank an attack page and keep it locked until an admin looks at it and deletes it?

Carcharoth

On 21 August 2010 18:12, WereSpielChequers <werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote: This is a pretty widely held view. But RFA is so poisonous that less and less people care to run the gauntlet. And RFA is loath to reform itself. This has been a problem for several years. The real solution is to Do Something about RFA. This having failed, people look to resort to workarounds.

We don't absolutely need admins at all. If we used randomly chosen juries to make decisions then we could use bureaucrats or even bots to actually apply any decisions made. That essentially avoids the 'who polices the police' issue

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Well, first of all, I think "superuser" is a very bad name for the group.  Superuser, as a computing term, is generally synonymous with the root user - the single most powerful user on the system.  To me, superuser as the name of a user group on Wikipedia would imply the most powerful usergroup, which of course would not be true. Second, I take issue with accountcreator being included.  First, when accountcreator (which has 66 members) is compared to rollbackers (3,698 members), reviewers (4,926 members), and autopatrolled (1,539 members), it seems that the superuser group (as defined previously) wouldn't exactly serve much of a purpose in simplifying matters, as only 66 users (at the most, as not all accountcreators have all four userrights) would qualify to be members of the superuser group.  Second, we simply don't need many people to be accountcreators, and some of the administrators and users of the account creation project believe that the accountcreator userright has already been distributed to more users than needed, and for purposes outside the scope of the account creation project (for example, distribution of the accountcreator right so non-administrators could edit editnotices, which is not the userright's intended purpose).  Also, the accountcreator right is regularly removed from users that have been deemed "inactive" over at the account creation tool, and the other three rights usually aren't removed unless the user does something wrong.  (Note: Statistics in this paragraph regarding the number of users in each usergroup taken from [[Special:Statistics]] at the time of writing.) Also, another change I'd make is that administrators should be able to grant/revoke this right, as none of the individual rights included require a bureaucrat. Sorry if this is a bit long winded. :P - -- - --FastLizard4 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:FastLizard4) MuZemike wrote: > I was thinking, after the talk about > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vandal_fighters which doesn't > terribly look like it's going anywhere, why don't we possibly "bundle" a > few of the other userrights into one, such as my proposal below: > > User right: "Superuser" > > Rights included: rollback, autopatrolled, reviewer, accountcreator > > As far as who would grant/revoke such a right, I would personally want > bureaucrats to do that job, as that is their natural-given right as > bureaucrats (to grant/revoke userrights). Some pros and cons that I forsee: > > Pros: Consolidating userrights, increasing transparency for those are > not wiki-experts, less stuff for sysops to do, less confusion > > Cons: Abuse of one of the tools like rollback (as with sysops), trend > seems to be for "unbundling" rights instead of "bundling", updating > those users who aren't around anymore, dispute on procedures to grant > this (i.e. simple request, "requests for adminship"-type voting, etc.) > > I'm throwing this out here to see what people would think. Any thoughts? > > -MuZemike > > __________________________