Project talk:Administrators/Archive 1

Stewards
There seems to be some confusion as to whether stewards can use their admin rights here. Personally, I have no issue with it. And I can't imagine what possible objections could be raised to such a thing. But I'm asking here for another view before I codify such a thing. Thoughts? --MZMcBride 18:41, 15 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Don't see why not... if a local sysop isn't around when something happens, why should someone with the ability to do something wait for someone local to take care of it? Reminds me of janitors at Wikia who have global sysop rights but can't use them for many things without permission from the individual wikis, kinda defeats the purpose of having global rights. Besides, if we can't trust the stewards to do the right thing, then something is very wrong. -- Skiz zerz  18:48, 15 August 2008 (UTC)
 * well yes definitely, but it mainly depends on the type of vandalism, if its the same ip creating and adding nonsense and not stopping when "warned" then yes, but if its some individual normal/random vandalism, then the stewards must have faith in the local sysops to clean it up...-- Cometstyles 19:53, 15 August 2008 (UTC)
 * It's everyone's benefit that vandalism/junk/random crap is cleaned up as soon as it's been created. I have no issues with stewards performing these tasks. Bureaucracy -- especially excess bureaucracy -- is harmful for everyone and I'd really like if we would not add another level of unneeded bureaucracy to this wiki. -- Sayuri 21:16, 15 August 2008 (UTC)
 * What's there to codify? The steward handbook and policies don't require stewards to consult local policies before reverting vandalism. —Emufarmers(T 22:26, 15 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Stewards generally can't act without explicit permission to. At least one steward was under the impression that they were not allowed to act on mediawiki.org, thus the post here. :-) --MZMcBride 18:44, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Really? In that case, the steward policies themselves probably need clarification, because all the guidelines on usage appear to be for managing user rights (perhaps because this "omni-janitor" ability is relatively new?), and we've had a couple stewards delete spam recently. —Emufarmers(T 06:01, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
 * The rules on this one can be sketchy. Stewards can generally only go so far as to revert vandalism, or perform other actions which any registered user can. They typically can't go much further than that; ie. making themselves an admin and deleting a page would be contentious and probably in bad form unless the community has requested in some way (speedy tag, Afd) and they don't have their own local admins. Stewards are supposed to act as instruments, tools who act upon the community's wishes when the community can't technically do something itself. I say that in the highest regard for what they do, but they shouldn't really be more than that, and they shouldn't be making any decisions for the locality. &mdash; Anonymous Dissident  Talk 00:27, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
 * I think it is best if spam/vandalism/trolling/etc. is cleaned up as quickly as possible. While I do agree that local admins should be cleaning this up as it appears, there simply aren't enough local admins for at least one to be on and patrolling recent changes or an IRC feed 24/7. If a steward happens upon such spam/vandalism/trolling/etc. and a local admin is actively doing anything about it, they should be allowed to clean it up themselves if they so choose, even if it means using tools that are only available to administrators (such as the ability to delete pages). Of course, other tasks that would require administrator rights or higher (renaming users, promoting users, updating various protected pages) should be left to the local administrators, since it isn't pertinent that it happens as soon as possible, but I do believe that stewards should be able to utilize all of the global rights granted to them in the effort of cleaning up spam/vandalism/trolling/etc. as soon as it appears. Perhaps we need to hammer out a steward policy regarding this and alert the stewards afterwards so that they know they are allowed to use their tools here for specific purposes. -- Skiz zerz  03:27, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Then we should make more admins. Stewards simply should not be doing this:
 * Stewards are not allowed to make decisions, such as 'this user should (or should not) be promoted'. Their task is to implement valid community decisions. If there are any doubts on the election, the steward will not act or make decisions before the uncertainty is eliminated. The only exceptions are in emergency cases where no local user with that right is available, or for projects that demonstrably have no community.
 * ^ from the Stewards policy on Meta. Now we have a community, and we definitely have admins. It is not the Stewards job to complete cross-wiki tasks at their own discretion; it is their job to complete cross-wiki tasks at the community's discretion. &mdash; Anonymous Dissident  Talk 08:45, 24 August 2008 (UTC)