Jimmy Wales wrote:
Adam is right of course. I don't know who he
is quoting, and maybe
that was only a joke, but sysop is always and everywhere supposed to
be a purely technical matter, not a position of authority and power of
any kind.
I think maybe I need to say that a lot more often, eh?
And maybe we need to focus on what technical changes could be made to
reduce
the differences between sysops and ordinary signed-in-users.
This will probably be opposed by those who'll see it as just another
step into hierarchical organization, but I think it might be a good
idea to create a new, more-inclusive class of users, that has
authoritative significance but no technical powers. Basically any
user who has been here for some period of time (maybe 2-3 weeks or
so), and shown him/herself to be editing in good faith. As we get
bigger, I think there will be a lot more "fake" users trying to
influence things, so restricting things like policy formation and
votes to "real" users in some sort of formal way might be a good
idea. I'd envision it being very easy to gain this status: even
someone who's invovled in lots of edit wars should be considered a
"real user", so long as they aren't purely a troll or vandal, or
someone who just signed up 3 hours ago.
This might actually have the effect of reducing the hierarchy
somewhat, because right now sysops are a sort of de facto group of
"trusted users", since the only defined groups we have are "sysops",
"logged-in users", and "anonymous users". Sysops are too small a
group, and logged-in users are too big a group (anyone can create 100
accounts if they wish). Making a larger group of trusted users
without technical powers would reduce sysops to being just a subset of
that group with additional technical powers, but no additional powers
of any other sort.
I'd like to see statistics about how many users create multiple ID's for
the purpose of mischief. When a vote or policy making takes place, how
much influence do these newbies have now. If a newbie's opinion is
overly naïve it will stand out like a sore thumb and be ignored. On
voting, I don't think that most newbies feel confident enough to
participate, and those who do will not be in significant numbers.
Reducing hierarchy by adding another level of hierarchy doesn't make
sense. I don't support the proposal. It's trying to solve an imagined
problem, not a real one.
Ec