[WikiEN-l] Vandalism concerns with commons images

Tue Sep 13 22:44:49 UTC 2005

Dan Grey wrote:

> It's not "wikipolitics". You had made two edits to the Commons beyond
> your user pages before you applied for adminship. Not suprising you
> were turned down, is it?

It's becoming clearer to me that, for better or worse, commons sees
itself as a separate entity that does not have close ties to Wikipedia.
 In that light, it is unsuprising that people's history and involvement
at en.Wikipedia, or meta, or on other sister projects isn't much of a
consideration in granting or denial of adminship at commons.

I do want to make it very clear that I'm not bringing this up here on
the mailing list in an effort to try to get adminship for myself on
commons.  That is not my goal.  My goal, instead, is to address the
much broader matter of coordination and shared trust between projects. 
I realize that commons policies are not identical to en. policies, and
that the projects despite their overlap do each have their own
decisionmaking.

On the other hand, I believe that the en admins (and the de and fr
admins, and those of other large wikipedias) are trustworthy,
responsible people who are familiar with wikis and respect the rules. 
En (and de and fr) admins, in the course of dealing with vandalism, are
likely to encounter it on commons images.  If there is a shared goal
between the projects, and shared trust, there is no reason that I can
see to refrain from granting adminship on some sort of reciprocal
basis.

I don't think that it's fair or appropriate to insist that admins from
these large projects leave a message for someone from commons when they
need to protect an image.  They should be empowered to do so themselves.