[Foundation-l] Final thoughts on Jimbo

Sun May 9 17:11:24 UTC 2010

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 9:45 AM, Pedro Sanchez <pdsanchez at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 10:39 AM, Alec Conroy <alecmconroy at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 11:23 AM, Adam Cuerden <cuerden at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > I think it's time to back away from this issue.  Jimbo may,
> > > technically, be able to restore his powers, however, if he decided to
> > > use them in order to  make another controversial action, they wouldn't
> > > last five minutes.
> >
> > You may well be right, but you may well be wrong.  But it's not fair
> > to ask us to contribute our time, energy, and money to a project that
> > 'may'  have an abusive superuser, ya know?   If the Wikimedia
> > Foundation  is going to continue to a functional relationship with its
> > projects, this needs to be resolved with absolute crystal clarify.
> >
>
> This is silly. There are many users that /may/ have superuser powers.
> Live with it. Even if jimbo is removed from all flags, there are people
> with
> shell access that can do (right now) much more than jimbo can with the
> founder flag.
>
> You may want to close your eyes,but truth is, you must trust. There will
> always someone able to do more than you or anybody else. Or what, are you
> proposing removing all devs access just because they in theory could abuse
> it?
>
> Again: face it. There will always someone with the capability to become
> superuser. It's always been the case and it will continue being so, jimbo
> or
> not
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"Might" is far different than "has". If one of the devs did use their
superuser access to intervene in content in a controversial manner
(especially even after significant objection began), I think you would find
calls to remove them as well.

We don't remove sysop flags because they might be abused, either. But we do
allow for their removal if they in fact are used in a manner inconsistent
with consensus and the admin in question refuses to stop even after being
made aware of that. Talking about permissions being removed because they
might be abused is a straw man, and is not at all the same thing as talking
about removing them because they were in fact abused.

-- 
Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.