On 9/14/05, Michael Turley <michael.turley(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Being granted administrator access is a sign of community respect,
earned within the community. If you want the respect of other related
project communities, participate in those other communities. I expect
members of other Wikimedia communities to establish themselves at
Wikipedia-EN before they get admin access.
Why? I don't see what is accomplished by this. Right now, someone who has
made 5,000 edits and is a well-known and trustworthy user on en.wiki, has to
jump through all those hoops again on other projects just to prove
"establishment" in the community or whatever. Admins are supposed to be
trustworthy folks. If you already know that the person is trustworthy and
uses the tools properly, what is accomplished by forcing them to
"participate in those other communities" while vandalism is going unchecked?
If you don't like the requirements that each of the other communities
establishes, don't try to short circuit their
processes through
discussion on the "parent project". Go there, and convince them it is
in their best interest to grant common adminship. Don't start here
and say "Hey, they should grant me adminship upon arrival". Here, I
think the only appropriate discussion is whether Wikipedia-EN grants
other projects' admins immediate access to our admin toolbox upon
arrival. Just as they have no business telling us who to grant
adminship to, we have no business telling them.
I don't think anyone is trying to order anyone to do anything. He's just
opening up the discussion. Besides, it would be nice if we could at least
say that en.wiki has a general consensus in favor of this issue before we
bring it to them. If we don't even agree, it won't make much sense to
involve the commons.
Even though adminship is supposed to be "no big deal", I'm opposed to
any form of automatic common adminship on Wikipedia-EN
for other
project admins. If it truly is no big deal, then it should be no big
deal to establish yourself anywhere you'd like to have admin tools.
When Jimbo said "This should be no big deal" he did *not* mean that it
should be no big deal to go through some lengthly, arbitrarily defined, and
legalistic procedures *multiple times* in order to get the power to revert
project-wide vandalism. I think he meant that giving admin power to people
who deserve it should be easy and noncontroversial.
Wikipedia is not a federalist democracy, and as such, we are not a
subdivided set of communities existing in a political arena trying to gain
dominance over each other. In my view, a user who gets admin rights on
Commons by virtue of his or her outstanding record on as an administrator of
en.wiki would be one more user who can do vitally important work for the
project *as a whole*, not someone who is there to enforce the views of
en.wiki on this "other" community. Optimally, such a person would at least
be familiar with the differing procedures on Commons, but as it stands, the
security risks that The Uninvited Co brought up seem to justify some
movement in this direction, imo.
- Ryan