On Fri, 2003-12-05 at 22:13, Delirium wrote:
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
I for one love this idea. In addition to addressing the problems that
Delirium lists above, it would have the added benefit of giving users a
modicum of validation from very early on, thus maybe reducing the number
of walk-in walk-outs, and also reducing the number of folks applying for
sysophood after 2 weeks and 100 edits who only really want validation
for their existence on wikipedia.
Now at the other end of things, maybe at this point on the English
wikipedia we have enough sysops in attendance at any one time, that it
would not be unreasonable to require two concurring sysops to perform
sysopactions which are uncommonly needed but potentially particularly
controversial. I am thinking about unprotection of pages and undeletion
as well. Perhaps protection of page as well, with the proviso that only
one of the sysops participating in the protection be uninvolved in
editing the page or having taken a strong view about it. Is this
technically feasible?
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen (aka Cimon Avaro)