from:"Saint Johann"

Re: [Wikitech-ambassadors] Grievances about future technical administrator group

2018-07-26 Thread Saint Johann


Hi Gergő,

Immense thanks for this response. Other than the note about 4 engineers 
(one was elected not long before, one is a bot that maintained user 
JS/CSS before and just one with his bot doesn’t need such permissions at 
all), you’ve confirmed everything I and others tried to convey in the 
discussion.


Oleg


On 26/07/2018 03:40, Tisza Gergő wrote:

Hi Oleg,

I am sorry if the change or the way I communicated about it is 
frustrating to you . I'm happy to provide more insight into the 
motivation behind the change, if that helps.


On Tue, Jul 24, 2018 at 12:41 AM Saint Johann <mailto:ole.y...@gmail.com>> wrote:


— Some tell that, apparently, after working for 2 years already and
doing more edits than all sysops combined in JS/CSS, engineers do not
have ‘at least as much trust as being an administrator’ since they
weren’t elected like administrators (we are electing sysops with a
vote
and engineers are being elected with a discussion, so people argue
that
engineers do not have trust because they weren’t subjected to a vote).


I think someone who had those rights for a while and did not abuse 
them can be reasonably trusted with them (which is why I suggested 
simple opt-in as the migration process).
From what I could understood with Google Translate, this seems to be 
the current community consensus as well.


— Others claim that, because MediaWiki developer community decided to
unite those rights under one group, merging any groups with it is not
acceptable, and, moreover, the engineer group shouldn't be given
those
rights at all.


One goal with the change was to reduce the number of people with JS 
editing permissions as much as possible without preventing them from 
doing their work. If a group is primarily about JS editing, it might 
makes sense to merge (that might be the case with interface-editor on 
some wikis, although not all). If a group has a wider range of roles, 
then merging would mean giving the permission to people who might not 
be interested in JS editing, and avoiding that situation was the 
entire point. I 'm not  sure which of those applies to engineers - at 
a glance, out of the 12 of them 4 have never edited CSS/JS and one 
almost never [1], so probably it makes sense to separate 
interface-admins from engineers?


— Moreover, some people claim that if a group would be too small,
like
engineers right now (12 accounts with 85 sysops), they could, in
opinion
of those people, usurp all editing of JS/CSS, decline to revert edits
that are deemed controversial by community, and this justifies giving
the permissions to all 85 existing sysops, even those that didn’t
edit
JS/CSS at all.


Again, as far as I can understand the discussion this was a fringe 
opinion and the current consensus proposal requires admins to opt in.


I really think that it all comes down to focusing on
projects that didn’t have any technical administrators and not
explaining anything to projects that did.


For projects which do have some kind of non-admin JS editor role 
(engineer, interface-editor, templateeditor, botadmin) there were two 
"social" goals:
- Warn them against handing out JS editor too easily. With the current 
structure, that does happen sometimes, and can you get things like the 
fawiki incident. JS editing should only be given to people who can be 
trusted not to abuse their privileges to attack the site.
- Do not completely discourage people from handing it out to 
non-admins. Trust is important, but it's a somewhat different kind of 
trust (admins need to be socially competent, level-headed, fair etc; 
JS editors don't really need to be all those things, they just need to 
not be malicious) and there are people who can absolutely be trusted 
not to be malicious, but don't have the social skills or the good 
judgement to be admins (or just don't want be one), and there is no 
reason to prevent them from doing good work on JS pages.


[1] https://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/28510

Hope that helps!



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[Wikitech-ambassadors] Grievances about future technical administrator group

2018-07-23 Thread Saint Johann

This might a wrong venue to discuss this but these were the worst 3 days 
of my participation in Wikimedia movement, and that feeling is probably 
shared by my colleagues.


The consultation about the creation of new technical administrators 
group that just ended yesterday was an utter and total disaster for 
people with existing non-sysop groups for editing JS/CSS.


In Russian Wikipedia, for 300 Kb already [1], people are weaponising 
every reading of the consultation document (which they, for some reason, 
consider akin to global policy) against, uniting the same-minded groups 
(local ‘engineer’ group was created under a ‘Technical administrator 
group’ RfC) for an umbrella of reasons:
— Some tell that, apparently, after working for 2 years already and 
doing more edits than all sysops combined in JS/CSS, engineers do not 
have ‘at least as much trust as being an administrator’ since they 
weren’t elected like administrators (we are electing sysops with a vote 
and engineers are being elected with a discussion, so people argue that 
engineers do not have trust because they weren’t subjected to a vote).
— Others claim that, because MediaWiki developer community decided to 
unite those rights under one group, merging any groups with it is not 
acceptable, and, moreover, the engineer group shouldn't be given those 
rights at all.
— Moreover, some people claim that if a group would be too small, like 
engineers right now (12 accounts with 85 sysops), they could, in opinion 
of those people, usurp all editing of JS/CSS, decline to revert edits 
that are deemed controversial by community, and this justifies giving 
the permissions to all 85 existing sysops, even those that didn’t edit 
JS/CSS at all.


I do not expect organisers of the consultation and MediaWiki developer 
community to intervene into a discussion that's happening in a foreign 
language, but I really think that it all comes down to focusing on 
projects that didn’t have any technical administrators and not 
explaining anything to projects that did. In the retrospective, I really 
wish that I did more push on this point on Phabricator [2] since this 
was a major point that I expected to backfire because of the vague 
wording of the document and that did backfire.


What I would like to have from the global community, though, is a clear 
documentation for people who are affected by this change, because right 
now, because of misinformation, misreadings and over-interpretations, it 
could go as far as losing all interface editing permissions for me and 
others because the document in question didn’t go far enough on the 
qualifications and left too much to community’s assumptions.


Oleg

[1]: 
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Википедия:Форум/Правила#Объединение_флагов_инженера_и_техадмина 


[2]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T190015#4257719

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Re: [Wikitech-ambassadors] Fake or truth: blockchain (+ introduce myself)

2017-12-11 Thread Saint Johann

When discussing Everipedia one should also mention that the site in its
current form does not respect the copyrights of both English Wikipedia
editors and Commons uploaders: the articles and the files on this fork
have been contributed without any declaration about the licence of the
original works /anywhere/, the licence of the project itself is a
general ‘CC’, which is /not a licence/.

Everipedia as far as we are concerned is a dishonest attempt by Silicon
Valley’s VC culture to co-opt the encyclopedic format into something
that could be sold in few years. Given the blatant copyright
infringements on the site, however, WMF should’ve made some commentary
on the site given the influx of the news about it in early December.

On 11/12/2017 18:49, bawolff wrote:

Hi,

So everipedia.com looks like some sort of Wikipedia fork/competitor.
Larry Sanger is appearently involved with it (I guess he got bored of
Citzendium). They seem to be a for profit company that wants to be
more inclusionist than Wikipedia, and also raise money by selling
customized articles.

They appear to be advertising that they are doing something with
"encylopedias" and "blockchain". However, they never specify what they
are doing, there are no white papers or technical details, which is a
good measure that something is BS.

Probably they are trying to cash in on the hype around bitcoin.
Blockchain is an ill-defined enough concept that you can make almost
anything be "on the blockchain". Unless you are making a currency, it
is usually a solution looking for a problem.

This definitely has nothing to do with Wikipedia or Wikimedia.

--
Bawolff

On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 3:04 PM, Dennis Tobar wrote:

Hi everyone:

I signed, the past week, the list of Tech Ambassador for Spanish Wikipedia.
My username is Superzerocool, a veteran user (over 12 years) in Wikimedia
movement, and in the real life I being an Engineer Informatic. I live in
Chile and I am currently part of the Board of Wikimedia Chile.

In some chapter off-wiki talk (Telegram), an user share us a possibly
fake-news about the usage of blockchain to avoid the vandalism.

As I see the article[1] (in Spanish), the news talks about Everipedia, a
startup related with Blockchain technology and how they use the blockchain
in English articles(?).

As I see the article, the news is fake.

Kindly,

[1]
https://www.cuartopoder.es/innovacion/tecnologia/2017/12/09/la-wikipedia-ya-no-se-podra-modificar-arbitrariamente-gracias-a-blockchain/

--
Dennis Tobar Calderón
Ingeniero en Informática UTEM

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Re: [Wikitech-ambassadors] Grievances about future technical administrator group

[Wikitech-ambassadors] Grievances about future technical administrator group

Re: [Wikitech-ambassadors] Fake or truth: blockchain (+ introduce myself)

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