[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia moderators and moral authority

Tue Nov 12 03:29:02 UTC 2002

Ed Poor wrote:

>Jimbo has supreme power.

>The developers have all the rights of sysops, plus the "can" revoke anyone's
>sysop status, ban a signed-in user and permanently erase any version of any
>article. (This doesn't mean they're "authorized" to, just that the power is
>in their hands.)

>The sysops can protect or "delete" a page and ban any IP, even one used by
>a signed-in contributor, as was done temporarily to Lir. Sysops can edit a
>protected page.

>Ordinary signed-in users have immunity from banning, although they might have
>to jump through hoops if their IP is blocked. They can't delete pages, edit
>protected pages or block IPs. They get a user page.

>The non-signed-in can edit any page except the few protected pages, and they
>don't get a user page. They can be blocked by any sysop.

I disagree with your assessment of the current situation
only in that I believe that the bottom 2 levels are really the same.
You're talking about power here, what people can do if they so choose.
(For instance, you list the developers' *power* to permanently delete pages,
because they can, even though they don't have the *authority* to do so.)
Well, an anonymous user can sign in, quite easily.
There's really no difference; even I make anonymous edits occasionally.
But this doesn't mean that I'm shifting levels back and forth,
because at any time that I want to use my adminstrator powers,
I can sign in and do so.

>This is what Jimbo will most likely do:
>* don't fix it, 'cause it ain't broken.
>Larry and others are saying:
>* it's broken, so fix it or I'll leave, or
>* it's broken, and you didn't fix it, so I'm leaving
>I'm saying:
>* it's broken, so let's all put our heads together and find a way to fix it
>before it falls apart completely

I say:
* it's not broken, except in the sense that it's a hierarchy at all,
but it can still be improved; I'm no conservative.

Whatever happened to mav's suggestion of automatic old hand status?
That makes the difference between the bottom two levels smaller
(where "bottom two" is defined after I merge Ed's old bottom two).

And since the only reason that administrators can't ban logged in users
is that we have no way to figure out what their IP numbers are,
let's open that up to all administrators.
After all, developers don't have more power than other administrators
because we decided that they should have more authority,
and then gave them the power to back that up;
rather, they have more power because they have direct access to the database.
If that's power that needs to be used (other than for coding, of course),
then the authority should devlove to all administrators,
and we should find a way to give us the power to back that authority up.

This still leaves the problem that banning can be cast too wide --
this *is* broken, but it's a technical problem of getting the right peron --
and the problem of when we should ban other than for vandalism --
that's not broken, since we discuss it on the list,
but it can be improved, primarily by coming up with clear policies.

-- Toby