Wikidata talk:Requests for comment/Bureaucrats' role in removal of permissions

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Name[edit]

Closer[edit]

Unless anyone has any objections, I volunteer to close this once consensus develops (but no earlier than May 17th). Sven Manguard Wha? 21:02, 10 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

No objections. Regards, Vogone talk 21:20, 10 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Ditto no objections. John F. Lewis (talk) 21:56, 10 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Steward votes[edit]

I am concerned about the opposes from quite a few stewards, many of whom (except for Vituzzu as a local sysop) have very few local edits. My impression of the steward role is that it is to determine local consensus, not to influence local consensus. Thus, while stewards are welcome to provide their perspective, I have concerns about their inserting themselves into a decision that is really up to the local community. I am also curious to know how four non-local stewards happened onto this RFC within 24 hours after its creation. Respectfully, Rschen7754 22:51, 10 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I am also curious about this. John F. Lewis (talk) 22:53, 10 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict) That's exactly how I feel as well. Stewards, and all other users who aren't involved in this project, should feel free to comment, share their experience and express their opinion, but one cannot count this as a community decision now, anymore, because they voted not being a community member. I do not say they are not right with their opinion, but manipulating a community RFC is not the best behaviour, in my opinion. Kind regards, Vogone talk 22:59, 10 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Oh thanks, my nearly 9k edits are worth jacksquat? And if you want to know how I got to know? You told me. With regard to stewards, one of the most knowledgeable and regarded set of people elected by the broadest part of the community. I stand by my comments and broad expertise throughout WMF sulutil:billinghurst, in fact I was encouraged to stand for adminship here by multiple people.  — billinghurst sDrewth 04:19, 11 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Those comments weren't directed at you in particular, especially since your comments on the RFC came after my initial post above. Rather, it was addressing those with few local contributions; three of them aren't even autoconfirmed. --Rschen7754 04:25, 11 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
@billinghurst: Yes, I wasn't talking about you. More about Special:Contribs/-jkb-, Special:Contribs/Barras and Special:Contribs/DerHexer. Regards, Vogone talk 08:35, 11 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
And even at that, one of the other two stewards at fault has a record of showing up to our rights-related discussions and opposing everything, and has few mainspace contributions. This is not the way to build any sort of working relationship with the Wikidata community. --Rschen7754 09:08, 11 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
First of all, -jkb- isn't a steward. Second: stewards might be mostly active on meta, but they are still normal editors. So it hurts me when people see us as "the outside". We try to be as informed as possible about local issues, RFCs etc. It might've been different in the past, but right now we are involved on multiple projects, especially on the multilanguage ones like wikidata. Oh, and my opinion stands: this project is simply too small to have the power in removing advanced rights (especially crat rights). Trijnstel (talk) 18:00, 11 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not criticizing your opinion and regarding to "[f]irst of all, -jkb- isn't a steward.", I wrote "and all other users who aren't involved in this project". I do not see stewards as "the outside" and in my opinion, the section topic is wrong chosen. The only thing I am not okay with, is to vote on community RFCs which have the target to show what the local community thinks about a topic, and not what users think who aren't even contributing to this project (like -jkb-, Barras and DerHexer). Best regards, Vogone talk 18:17, 11 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It hurts when people do not understand the local habits and the local problems. There is lots of noise from meta that a project is "to small" to have local sysops and local crats. In some projects it is more or less impossible to edit without the help of somebody present who can delete and move pages. The proofread-page-extension on Wikisource is a good example to that. It takes to much time and energy to call for help and explain the problems to somebody unrelated to the problems and the language each time. Sysops and Crats do not posses "power", they posses useful "tools" that helps us to design our own local wiki-culture. There is some kind of misunderstanding that there exists some kind of global policy for such things as bots, sysops and other things. It doesn't! Not even the CU and OS-tools are used in the same manner everywhere. Each project has it's own unique culture, built by their set of users and their ability to handle their own problems. -- Lavallen (block) 18:19, 11 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
But the things you want to have changed, will only be done when there is a clear need for it and there is definitely not a need for it here. Trijnstel (talk) 19:00, 11 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Apparently because the stewards think it's okay to torpedo a local community proposal that they don't agree with. --Rschen7754 19:08, 11 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Looks like some of us, at least in parts, has another opinion about that. -- Lavallen (block) 19:10, 11 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Without commenting on this RfC,I would say I value the input of Stewards that supposedly aren't "local community members" (whatever those even are). a) Most Stewards are experienced and have seen a ton lot more rights requests than we have, especially with rage quits, resignations, drama llamas, etc. b) Stewards are being directly affected in this proposed change, so their input is quite relevant. c) Wikidata is a global project, in that all wmf projects (and people outside the wikiverse too) have a stake in. Whether an editor makes one edit or 100 edits in a month doesn't make anyone more or less a community member. Legoktm (talk) 12:12, 12 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

a) True b) True, their input is relevant as I said before. They can and should share their experience in form of comments but the decision should still be a community decision. c) What has this to do with local user right management? Users who are neither a stewards nor have any contribs (-jkb-) and who oppose without even leaving a senseful comment (Barras, DerHexer) aren't really helpful. Regards, Vogone talk 13:22, 12 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Crats are also directly affected and this is precisely the reason I refrain from giving my opinion on the matter.--Ymblanter (talk) 13:25, 12 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I refrained as well. The community has to give us our jobs, not we ourselves. Vogone talk 14:07, 12 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
But if our Crats do not feel comfortable with having these tools, I think it's apropriate to tell us that. -- Lavallen (block) 15:22, 12 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Personally, I don't want to force the crats into something that they don't want to do, and I will move to oppose if that is the case. --Rschen7754 21:00, 12 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
@Legoktm (and others): I think there is a fundamental difference between giving input and taking part in the decision-making process. The former, anyone can do. The latter, however, is best left to the local community. By your comment regarding everyone having a stake in that project, by that line of reasoning, we should be pursuing "affirmative action" by making sure that there is a Wikidata admin for every Wikimedia project, large and small - yet that's something that the WD community has consistently rejected, and rightfully so.
@all: While I'm sure that the (non-local) steward comments were well-intentioned, this is really something that the local community has to decide. Think of it like if we got a bunch of English Wikipedia admins to come and vote on a RFC that only affected Meta (such as m:Requests for comment/Proposal for a policy on involved administrators). That wouldn't go down very well (and it didn't, in my particular example). This isn't the Egwfgdfgdfhe Wikiversity with 2 active editors, we're easily bigger than a lot of wikis with CU/OS. I think that we can make decisions like the one in this RFC by ourselves, and are willing to accept the "consequences" if we make the wrong one.
Some of the thoughts that one particular steward has expressed to me (in private) are worth considering and have some merit, and I may well retract my support of the proposal based on that. But the manner in which this was initially done was ill-considered and sends the wrong message: that stewards see nothing wrong in micromanaging medium-sized wikis like Wikidata. It's not only impractical to keep track of the going-ons of 700+ wikis, it's unhealthy for the global community at large. Having talked with several Wikidata admins over the last few days, I think it's safe to say that quite a few were offended at the manner in which this was done. An honest conversation and honest advice would have been better than being "parental" and immediately shooting down this RFC with vague comments relating to "seeing no need" and accusing us of being hat collectors. In short, think about the foundationwiki scandal going on right now: while there may have been some legitimate problems there, the manner in which the situation was resolved there was certainly suboptimal and showed a gross lack of respect for the community, and I certainly think that was the case here. --Rschen7754 04:04, 13 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I will also note that the snide comments related to this and to OS in #wikimedia-stewards are not helping matters, considering that a high percentage of Wikidata's sysops idle in that channel. --Rschen7754 04:04, 13 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • My 2 cents are that if experienced Wikimedians are coming here to oppose this even though it's widely known that you shouldn't jump into RFCs and the like until you've familiarized yourself with a community, it's indicative of just how bad an idea this is. The community here is asking to do something that only a handful of other projects do, without presenting any convincing reasons (as opposed to somewhere like En-WP, which desysops upward of a dozen people a month, and has a long history of rogue admins), and we're getting the pushback we deserve. I can't say I condone people voting here who don't play an active role in the community, but I can certainly understand why they feel the need to. — PinkAmpers&(Je vous invite à me parler) 03:02, 14 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • I think we're both in agreement that this was in good faith - my issue is that they chose to !vote instead of just leaving comments (which were a bit vague at that). --Rschen7754 03:07, 14 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
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