UDWiki:Administration/Policy Discussion/Autoconfirmed Group 2
The "problem"
Due to bad faith use by vandals, the ability to move pages is restricted to sysops. This effectively removes the ability for page moves to be used as a means to harm the wiki. At the same time, it also delegates yet more routine maintenance tasks to Sysops and takes powers away from the community.
The suggestion
The suggestion is to make use of the wiki's inbuilt "Autoconfirmed" group for the purpose of filtering those users who have tools with greater potential to harm the wiki. Autoconfirmed status is assigned to anyone who makes a certain number of edits and has been registered for a certain time period. Wikipedia assigns it after 4 days and 10 edits; on this wiki it has been indicated that a time period of 2 months and 200 edits would be more appropriate.
Autoconfirmed users would have the ability to move pages. It is also possible to protect a page so that only autoconfirmed accounts can edit them, this would afford frequently vandalised pages some level of protection while still allowing good-faith edits from established users.
Protections
Move protections
Pages could be protected from movement separately from other types of protection. This allows the movement of pages which are should not be moved without significant consensus to be limited to Sysops Only. Important administrative pages would be move-protected as part of this policy.
Semi-protection
Would be requested via the current A/P page, the same rules apply and any protections made by Sysops without a request must be listed on the page for future posterity.
Technical Implementation
This policy would be implemented by making the following changes to the configuration file:
Adding: $wgGroupPermissions['autoconfirmed']['move'] = true;
changing: $wgAutoConfirmAge = 0; to $wgAutoConfirmAge = 3600*24*56
and: $wgAutoConfirmCount = 0; to $wgAutoConfirmCount = 200;
Abuse
Misuse of move privalleges is considered vandalism and would be handled through the current vandal escalation system.
In a nutshell
This policy would grant established users the ability to carry out maintenance tasks without giving vandals additional tools. It would also allow semi-protection of high-risk articles without limiting edits only to Sysops.
Voting Section
| Voting Rules |
Votes must be numbered, signed, and timestamped. They can take one of two forms:
Votes that do not conform to the above will be struck by a sysop. |
| The only valid voting sections are For and Against. If you wish to abstain from voting, do not vote. |
For
- For - Semi-protection could be useful for pages like the main page that currently can't be edited by anyone except sysops, or for a group page that is repeatedly being vandalised by throwaway accounts. Obviously there's the potential for it to be used in an anti-newbie way, but seeing how normal protections aren't used in an anti-non-sysop way, I wouldn't expect that to happen (especially if the sysops keep the issue in mind.) --Toejam 01:16, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
