[Foundation-l] Adminship tools on Commons

Sat Apr 14 21:50:38 UTC 2007

On 4/14/07, Alison Wheeler <wikimedia at alisonwheeler.com> wrote:
>
> On Sat, April 14, 2007 19:02, Casey Brown wrote:
> > We are not denying or accepting the fact that you deserve, could use, or
> > will be trusted with the tools.  We are denying the fact that you are
> > entitled to them and that you should discuss this with Wikimedia.  Sysop
> > powers are something that is given based on *local-community* trust.  If
> > you have hardly edited on that site, then you will not be given ... etc
>
> A thought from the sidelines here, rather than about this particular case.
> Whilst a "local community" should, I concurr, decide who is and who is not
> to be an admin/sysop of the local projects - be they language-based or
> otherwise (books/source/pedia/tionary/etc) I do wonder whether the same
> should apply in all cases to commons, specifically because commons is a
> resource for *all* the Wikimedia projects world-wide, and not strictly a
> "local" project at all.
>
> I could see that there is some validity to accepting someone's need for
> admin/sysop capability on the multinational/multilingual commons where
> their 'track record' - and need for access - is based on a more local
> project.

It does make sense, but Commons is an image and media repository and we deal
mainly with copyright. While an admin may be greatly admired, trusted,
loved, etc. on another-language project it doesn't mean they will have the
knowledge that Commons requires for dealing with our particular issues.
Copyright on Commons is also different from that on other wikis as we accept
stricter licenses (no fair use) and have very different policies from most
other wikiprojects.

~Ayelie