Project talk:Administrators/Archive 1

The following discussion is closed.

We seem to have consensus that Stewards should be fine to give themselves administrator tools if the task is not complex and not contentious. I have added a statement on the project page linking to this discussion. —Anonymous Dissident^Talk 07:20, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

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. --Skizzerz 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|C) 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|C) 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. —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. --Skizzerz 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. —Anonymous Dissident^Talk 08:45, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

I've reverted your edit here. Simply because you disagree that it should be done does not make for a lack of consensus. If no local admin is around, and a steward can clean up vandalism/spam/other messes, why shouldn't they? I for one welcome participation from users whom this isn't necessarily their home project (or even if they are here a lot, they're not a local admin). Asking them to ignore something like vandalism until the community can deal with it strikes me as a bad idea. ^demon 14:06, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

For your information, what you did, ^demon, was exactly what I did. I didn't revert because it happened to be my opinion; I reverted because consensus for *anything* on stewards remained unclear. You, however, re-added the non-agreed-upon material, so it was you who did something out of form here. I am happy for that material to be added if tehre is consensus for it; however, at the time of its addition, there was not. —Anonymous Dissident^Talk 07:10, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

The community here, at least insofar as it's commented, seems to be using its discretion to allow stewards (and presumably anyone else) to use common sense and act appropriate for the good of the Wikimedia Foundation's mission. At the time of your revert we had six against one, by my count, which is agreement enough even by the pathological standards of someplace like enwiki. Now we have three more devs or so who agree on IRC, so I think you're pretty safely outnumbered.
I should also point out that pending further clarification from higher powers, I don't think mediawiki.org is a community-run site, it's a dev-run site. Since a solid majority of sysops and bureaucrats are devs and appear to agree with that sentiment, I think that this can be treated as de facto policy for the time being, as a pragmatic matter. I would advise you to not be so free in reverting developers' policy edits without the discussion and agreement of others. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 14:13, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

(re-indenting) mediawiki.org is not a sandpit for playing about with policy and rules like some other wikis. we are here to create a wiki about MediaWiki, not to argue over who should be reverting spam. rather than reverting common sense changes by developers, go and find something useful to do. (what about reverting some spam?) Kate

/me concurs, especially with the "playing about with policy and rules" part. thanks for this clarification. --:bdk: 14:33, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Concur with Simetrical. There is no possible reason not to allow stewards to do common-sense vandalism reverts and so on. There is no need to add bureaucracy – we like writing code, not reverting spam :-) Werdna 02:28, 25 August 2008 (UTC)