[Foundation-l] Stewards are ignoring requests for CheckUser information?

Sat Apr 15 12:01:12 UTC 2006

Walter Vermeir wrote:

>Essjay schreef:
>  
>
>>Perhaps this would be an appropriate time to say "Maybe we could use a 
>>couple more stewards?"
>>
>>Essjay
>>    
>>
>
>There are already a fair number of Stewards;
>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards
>
>The problem I find as a steward is that is difficult to know what you
>are supposed to do. There is no communication platform for the stewards
>to discuss things. I find that there should be a mailing list for
>stewards. That would be something. Then at least problems could be
>discussed with the other stewards. And agreements  about how to do thing
>could be attempted to me made.
>
>Now not all stewards work by the same standards. Some stewards are more
>easy to give sysop or bureaucrat status then others. The rules of
>conduct are not clear or not existing.
>
>I find it difficult that I need to say to a user that I do not grand
>bureaucrat status because I find his home wiki is to small when other
>stewards do grand bureaucrat status to a similar small wikis.
>
>Walter
>  
>
I would have to agree that the current set of steward policies is rather 
vague, and even the defintion of what a steward ought to be doing is not 
really well defined.  Stewards do grant adminship and bureaucratship to 
projects with a small set of users, and I also understand strongly the 
reluctance for a steward to get involved with a local project squabble, 
such as one recent fight that happened on en.wikibooks of the 
deadminship of one user that unfortunately needed a steward to make a 
decision on limited information, and community support for deadminship 
was not very clear.

My own experience in dealing with stewards is that they do a very good 
job of doing the administrative tasks when there is no controversy and 
the decisions are obvious.  It is these border-line cases where perhaps 
some standards to becomming an admin on a very small project like 
simple.wikiquote should be a little bit higher than seems to be done 
right now.  Language barriers add still additional levels of 
misunderstanding to really complicate this issue.  Having a clear policy 
makes deciding these borderline issue much easier, as a codified policy 
avoids seemingly arbitrary behavior and allows somebody who was turned 
down to at least have something to be angry about, or possibly fight to 
try and change the policy.

Futhermore, there is some appearance that perhaps stewards could act as 
a sort of ad hoc arbitration board for smaller projects, but I havn't 
see that done either.  Is this something that stewards are comfortable 
with, or should projects with seemingly irreconsilable problems go 
elsewhere for assistance in this matter... i.e. see Jimbo?  Currently 
the standard is more to simply muddle through the problem and try to 
work the issues out, which BTW really is the best solution ultimately. 
 Some people do like to appeal to a "higher authority" and stewards seem 
to be a logical step to take some issues.  Unfortunately, this is 
something I've very seldom if ever seen any steward willing to 
participate in.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning