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Look for ways to consolidate "we trust this human" access lists
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Description

Many developer experience connected systems use allow lists to grant rights to trusted technical contributors. Generally these allow lists are needed to limit the harm caused by unknown users in systems which do not have the sort of deeply integrated mechanisms for cleaning up vandalism that MediaWiki provides. Even in MediaWiki we often use things like autoconfirmed status as a floor to establish trust and allow some actions.

A growing problem for onboarding and reducing friction experienced by new technical contributors is the number and diversity of such allow lists. In a more ideal world we would have a single source of truth for establishing trust rather than a unique list for each service.

Known allow lists:

Event Timeline

bd808 changed the subtype of this task from "Task" to "Feature Request".

The Developer account <-> SUL user mappings that Bitu is now maintaining in LDAP are likely to be of help with this project. Striker has a legacy feature that needs to be updated to also use LDAP for storage (T148048: Store Wikimedia unified account name (SUL) in LDAP directory). A third source of these mappings is right here in Phabricator where a given account can be linked to either a SUL account, a Developer account, or both.

Tool-gitlab-account-approval is attempting to leverage existing allow lists from Gerrit, Phabricator, and Toolforge to establish trust in GitLab. My involvement with that project is part of why I started thinking about this general issue and its complexities.

hashar subscribed.

I am removing Gerrit and Continuous-Integration-Config since this task is not immediate actionable for any of those projects and that requires preliminary work above those specific projects.

I am removing Gerrit and Continuous-Integration-Config since this task is not immediate actionable for any of those projects and that requires preliminary work above those specific projects.

The task is not immediately actionable to any single system that currently maintains a trusted user list. Where should we park it to actually get a chance of being triaged by a team and assigned so resources someday?