Author: jc37_friends
Description:
Hi.
Recently several additional user-rights were added to the Rollbacker user-group. (See [[Special:ListGroupRights]].)
This was done in relation to the poll at [[Wikipedia_talk:Article_Feedback_Tool/Version_5/Archive2#Request_for_Comment]]. (There were apparently 15 total commenters.)
I believe that this was of course well-meant.
However, the poll in question is by it's nature a "local consensus".
To quote: [[Wikipedia:Consensus#Level_of_consensus]]:
"Consensus among a limited group of editors, at one place and time, cannot override community consensus on a wider scale. For instance, unless they can convince the broader community that such action is right, participants in a WikiProject cannot decide that some generally accepted policy or guideline does not apply to articles within its scope.
Wikipedia has a higher standard of participation and consensus for changes to policies and guidelines than to other types of articles. This is because they reflect established consensus, and their stability and consistency are important to the community. As a result, editors often propose substantive changes on the talk page first to permit discussion before implementing the change. Changes may be made without prior discussion, but they are subject to a high level of scrutiny. The community is more likely to accept edits to policy if they are made slowly and conservatively, with active efforts to seek out input and agreement from others."
What was the wider community consensus in this case?
[[Wikipedia:Non-administrator rollback]] - The over-all poll is located at [[Wikipedia:Non-administrator rollback/Poll]] with the very lengthy discussion on several sub-pages and talk pages, including [[Wikipedia talk:Non-administrator rollback]]
This was (as you can read) a very contentious discussion. And gained consensus specifically because the user-right group only contained one user-right. (Something similar could be said concerning several other single-user-right user groups given out by administrators.)
While I firmly believe that [[WP:CCC|consensus can change]], I believe that a recent poll of 15 editors should probably not undo one of over 450 editors.
In addition, even in this recent poll, it was suggested that the reviewer user group (a package of several user-rights which also "mark edits") be used for this, rather than rollbacker.
And it could be suggested that the poll itself was not clear about this (even the nominator appeared to not be sure about this.)
I understand being enthusiastic about the upcoming roll-out, but as you can see here [[Wikipedia:Bureaucrats'_noticeboard#Granted_local_rights_to_WMF_staff]] (another well-intended, enthusiastic project - which appears to be taking community concerns very seriously, and is working on resolving the related issues), the community would appear to jealously protect their right to approve such things.
And subsequent to this, [[Wikipedia:Requests for permissions/Reviewer]] has been re-activated, and people are already requesting the reviewer user-right in preparation for this. So there is also no "need" for rollbacker to have these extra rights, (except the understandable want to have a broader editor base of those who have these rights).
So anyway, I'm requesting that these "extra-user-rights" be removed from rollbacker until a clearer (and broader) community discussion may be had.
As an aside to this issue, autoconfirmed and rollbacker were given:
- Feature/Resolve feedback (aftv5-feature-feedback)
However, reviewer was not. This appears to be an oversight, rather than intentional. So I would also ask that this be fixed and assigned to reviewer.
Thank you for your time,
jc37
Version: unspecified
Severity: major