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.

Ideas?

-Mark