https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30208

MZMcBride <[email protected]> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
           Keywords|                            |shell
                URL|                            |http://en.wikipedia.org/wik
                   |                            |i/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(p
                   |                            |roposals)/Proposal_to_requi
                   |                            |re_autoconfirmed_status_in_
                   |                            |order_to_create_articles

--- Comment #32 from MZMcBride <[email protected]> 2011-08-09 07:47:44 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #6)
> Can someone explain to me how things work here when editors need to interface
> with the developers to make a change?  We were hoping to just clearly explain
> what we need, point to the successful proposal which shows community consensus
> for a trial of the change, and get a dev to flip the user-rights switch for 
> us.
>  We were not aware that the entire concept was subject to another round of
> re-litigation by the developers at the 11th hour once the request is made on
> bugzilla.  In particular, I'm concerned that these bugzilla discussions are 
> not
> visible to any of the hundreds of editors who participated in the actual
> request for comments on enwiki.

In rare cases, the Wikimedia sysadmins act as Defenders of the Wiki.
Occasionally a Wikimedia wiki will decide that it wants to implement a change
that is technically feasible and that has consensus among the local community,
but the change is still rejected by the system administrators. An old, classic
example is the proposal to delete unused accounts from the English Wikipedia.
It received substantial on-wiki support, but was flatly rejected by the system
administrators (cf. [[Wikipedia talk:Delete unused username after 90 days]]).

There are arguments for and against this type of guardianship. In the best
case, it acts as a safeguard against the will of an often ill-informed
majority. In the worst case, it eviscerates project autonomy in favor of a
[[m:technocracy]].

In this particular case, there seems to be a great deal of unnecessary
hyperbole from the Wikimedia Foundation/system administrator side. I don't find
much of it to be helpful or substantiated.

I'm re-adding the "shell" keyword to this bug. There isn't any technical reason
that this change can't be implemented by a shell user right now. That's the
standard for use of the keyword. Individual objections, from Wikimedia
Foundation or others, don't affect this reality.

As with so many other bugs, there's a likelihood that this bug will simply be
left to rot. System administrators have never been above
passive-aggressiveness. In this case, it's not some poor project with a
half-dozen active users in a language that nobody speaks, though, it's the
English Wikipedia. So I can't imagine trying to ignore this bug will go over
well, for better or worse.

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