Project:Requests/User rights/Happy-melon

Happy-melon

Requested user-rights: Administrator.

What the hell, can't hurt to ask :D. I'm Happy-melon, I'm an admin at en.wiki, somewhat active here, active at Bugzilla, and I have the odd SVN credit, although I don't have commit access. I'm keen to make progress on the largely-stalled process of transfering help content from meta and en.wiki over here. I'm also a competent template coder and I can see a lot of scope for improving the appearance and professionalism of this site, using parserfunctions on system messages, etc. A lot of the outstanding issues are simply because this site is quite quiet, so I like to think that an extra pair of hands won't go amiss... Happy‑melon 17:06, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, but I'm going to have to oppose this request. The majority of your reasons for wanting adminship don't require adminship to perform. You can open up a new request for the "transwiki" group if you want to help import pages from meta, and the vast majority of our templates are not fully-protected, which means editing them and making new ones does not require sysop access either. As for the parserfunctions-on-system-messages bit, I'm currently unaware of any messages (besides maybe the copyright notice) that could benefit from them. For your "extra pair of hands," you might like checking out the sysop listing to see the massive amount of sysops we already have for such a quiet site, so everything that needs to be covered pretty much is covered. Finally, your contributions here do not contain anything of merit. While it's awesome that you're an enwiki admin and an active contributor on bugzilla, neither enwiki nor bugzilla are this wiki, and adminship is a relatively local process. --Skiz zerz 00:33, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

From the tone of your reply, I seem to have offended you somehow; I'm sorry if that's the case, it certainly wasn't my intention. Certainly I'm aware that adminship is a local process, I presented my en.wiki adminship merely as evidence of the "trustworthiness" suggested by the guidelines at Project:Requests. I'm not trying to imply that my permissions anywhere else should 'entitle' me to any here.

Regarding my intentions, therefore, let me clarify. Yes, I intend to work on improving our Help: and Manual: namespaces here, but I don't really think there is very much more good content to be directly recovered from meta, making transwiki less helpful. What remains to do is to transfer the remaining ideas and organise the new content here at mw.org, as I've been trying to do; I'm saddened to hear your reaction to my efforts at Help:Namespace. That process may require the creation or deletion of redirects, etc, although I agree it is primarily an editorial task. To be more specific on interface messages, MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning is one as you note, but there are many other things that could be usefully done with new features. Why are we still putting a notice to editors (Template:PD Help Page) on the page itself (hence visible to all readers) when it is more appropriately an editnotice? Moving that content to MediaWiki:Editnotice-12 would make it automatically visible above all help pages, and with some clever parser functions (:D) we can make it change language to match the language code of the content. This would also make it even easier for the help namespace to fulfil its purpose as an easily-portable documentation, as the notices would disappear automagically when taken off this wiki. I'm prepared, even eager, to use my skills to try to implement that, but not if I have to ask an admin to handle every edit I want to make to the interface. I am aware of the large number of admins on this site, but are you aware of just how many of them are active? The steward activity monitor is revealing; yes there are 47 admins here, but only half of them have edited in the last month, and less than a quarter have made a log event. My work at commons and meta, both "quiet" compared to en.wiki, has revealed the amount of time that is wasted waiting for the attention of small groups of admins, which would be even more pronounced here with an even smaller group of active sysops (magnified further by the absence of any system analogous to en:wiki:Template:Editprotected). With such a small active group, I'd hope that any extra hands to assist with vandalism and spam cleanup would also be helpful; I assumed that went without saying.

All in all, then, I'm really looking for sysop status here for exactly the same reason I asked on en.wiki: as I said in my RfA there, "if I'm on any page for any reason and see an obvious problem, I do my best to fix it. Having the sysop bit would simply allow me to fix more problems, more thoroughly.". I was hoping that the "no big deal" principle applied here as much as en.wiki. I hope I'm not mistaken. Happy‑melon 15:41, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm... you do have some valid points there... I'll wait to see what other people think before doing anything. Also, when I said "anything of merit," I meant it as (the lack of) contributions towards relating to removing vandalism, etc. I guess I didn't really phrase it the way that I meant, sorry if I offended you :( --Skiz zerz 00:46, 18 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

No particular feelings either way. Skizzerz makes some good points, but it doesn't exactly hurt to have a new admin or two. Andrew Garrett 05:14, 16 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Seconding Werdna's position. The idea of changing our site license tag to using the editprotected pages is a good one, I think. We may want to consider changing our site policy here to allowing Stewards and anyone with appropriate Global rights to do routine maintenance here as well: While I check this page every couple days, more eyes wouldn't hurt at all. Kylu 19:56, 19 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

As far as I was aware, Stewards and others with Global rights are indeed allowed to perform actions here... or at least Stewards in the current wording of the text. --Skiz zerz 21:08, 19 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Have to agree with Skizzerz..unless you are a developer or an active vandal fighter, you really wouldn't fit the bill...most of your edits were to your userspace and as you have mentioned above, we have 46 admins and only 9 have been active in the last 3 months so can you give us a reason as to why we would want to have more inactive admins around?..--Comet styles 21:18, 19 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Ooh, turn my arguments against me :D. I agree I'm not as active here as I would like to be; most of my wiki-time inevitably goes to en.wiki where I have the most commitments, but my work here is increasing. My response would be, I guess, that I can certainly promise to be more active than the full third of admins here who haven't made a log event this year. I've indicated some specific tasks that I would do with the admin tools, and inevitably more will arise as time goes on. While counter-vandalism is not a focus of mine on en.wiki either, it's something we're all called upon to do in our time; it appears to me that there is relatively little vandalism here that can be effectively countered without admin tools, it mainly seems to consist of deletion of out-of-scope pages. So while I can't say I'd be here every day doing such cleanup, I'll certainly try to muck in where I can, and there's no question that I'd be better equipped and more effective in doing such with the sysop bit than without it. The argument about dormant admin accounts being potential security threats, while true, isn't really applicable here: mine is a global account so if someone cracks my password, seeing the main page covered with penises on this project is the least of wikimedia's concerns. Once again it boils down to the "no big deal" thing: is +sysop here anything more than a set of tools? I would have thought, hoped certainly, that here of all places it would be a purely technical distinction. Does it matter if there is one more admin account on the books, as long as the user does some good with those tools that they couldn't have done without them? That's not a rhetorical question. Happy‑melon 22:28, 21 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Done -- I've checked through your enwiki contribs and I must say that you are by no means inactive, so I doubt you'll fall under that category here as well. I also look forward to seeing your plans for some of the system messages. --Skiz zerz 00:34, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]