Forum:Special groups with customizable rights

Hi everybody, I would like to let you know a little problem: in the wiki Nonciclopedia, the italian Uncyclopedia, the administrative work is so various that we had to create several projects to organize ourselves. Some of these projects are quite technical, like for example the one that controls all the images, put the right category and has to move images with bad names, like AOSNADOFADSPF8Hiubdasf9i7g887G.jpg to something that every human being can understand; or the group that has to adjust the pages with a low technical quality, like articles with a totally wrong layout, or without images, they control the quality of the most edited and famous articles, and sometimes it's quite a long work to eliminate everything wrong from a page, expecially if there are some edits in the middle of the work. Now it's always needed the help of an admin to do such little annoying things, like moving images or block pages, but it would be really useful if it could be possible to create customizable groups with a some of the admin rights, just like there is the rollback right for the users who control the last edits.

I think this would be really usefull for all the wikis with a quite substantial amount of articles and images like ours. It is possible to add this idea to the next update? --MFH 17:53, 28 April 2009 (UTC)


 * +1. While I don't know the internal workings of MediaWiki, I can see that this would be very useful for delegating to users who aren't completely trusted (or just don't need to be).  If the implementation isn't too involved, this is a great idea. --Jesdisciple (talk) 22:02, 9 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Mmm there is already other options if the wiki has active bureocrats they can give and remove the sysops right (opose to the past) so they can give temporal sysops rights to specific users, the idea of Images not been able to move by users its for security reasons as sysops tend to be a more selected breed of people, and this chores could be program to be done every week or every 2 weeks or once a month, if the images are properly documented they just have to go and move them and edit the page to remove the movement info, or leave it there so the people in charge of the project finish the moving. Also this can be partially achieve with the use of templates and the infamous #ifexists parse function. At the end it depends on how creative they are and the human force available to them, a small wiki it will be more beneficial the idea expose in the original comment but a wiki that has the enough human power would be less of a problem --


 * It could be an idea, but we'll have to organize a day every week/2 weeks/month in which quite every trusted user is present, and we boureaucrats have to watch over them, and this will turn in a complete mess, imo. With special groups everyone can work when he wants, without a big risk of creating chaos. --MFH 18:17, 11 May 2009 (UTC)


 * +2. This is a really good idea. Admin has far too many rights once granted so we have to be very careful during promotion. There are many instances where Wikipedian admins abuse their rights. One of the problems is an admin is unable to be familiar with all the policies involved so they often misuse of abuse it. So it's great to grant rights which only concerns them. "Ban" and "Delete" rights are those that should be split. It's likely that "ban" is used as a way of punishment rather than a way to prevent further vandalism. --MyBrute Resource Center@Ronga 10:47, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Yes, these things are technically possible in mediawiki, but their a pain to manage. As long you can CLEARLY define what rights you want the group to have (please, use Special:ListGroupRights and get the rights name), we can try to set something up. This is very VERY much a case-by-case basis, its not something most wikis will need (even if they want it). Get your admins/community together, and work out what you want this group to be able to do, and sent us a message via Special:Contact from your wiki, with a link to the page where it was all worked out and voted and stuff, and we'll see whats feasible to do. --Uberfuzzy 18:27, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

Customizing protection levels
I always want to create a special group between autoconfirmed and sysop, perhaps called trusted group. And we have 3 protection levels, autoconfirmed, trusted and sysop. This way we can open up to more restricted pages to people which stay in the wiki long enough that it's unlikely we will vandalize the page.

Do you think it's technically possible? --MyBrute Resource Center@Ronga 10:47, 12 May 2009 (UTC)
 * You have not tell what rights you are interested to give to that group... so wikia can't answer if it is technically possible or not, also read uberfuzzy answer he has clear detail instructions on what you have to do --
 * Unfortunately, since 1.14, custom protection levels are harder to do. They also are not something I think are worth trying to do at Wikia (possibly at all). Protection should not be used that often, wikis are meant to be open for editing. You should be more trusting of users from the start. Dont overprotect and make people "earn" more access. --Uberfuzzy 20:15, 14 May 2009 (UTC)


 * It's funny because i dont trust users (mainly anon) at all and yet, i dont protect anything except highly used templates. — TulipVorlax 01:20, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

My reply is as follows: --MyBrute Resource Center@Ronga 19:36, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
 * @Cizagna, to start with, let trusted users edit pages which used to be admin-protected. Also let them handle delete page requests (deletion rights). I feel deletion right is safe to give out since we can always undelete pages.
 * @uberfuzzy, thanks for the tips and it's actually the philosophy I hold too. In fact this question is to do with the goal towards more open editing. Take the main page of Wikipedia as an example, we can't leave the main page semi-protected. However the only protection level after autoconfirmed is admin-protected which is too restrictive. There are many active users we can trust and allow them to edit the pages straight away. It's unnecessary to restrict it to admin only. It would be ideal if we have a protection level in between. The threshold of autoconfirmed is even lower in Wikia. It appears a user registered for a few days. Is it possible to customize the threshold of "autoconfirmed" per wiki?
 * @TulipVorlax, no page is locked from editing in our wiki (our wiki is small after all), even the main page is freely open for editing.


 * yes, the autoconfirm age is 4 days here (fairly standard i think). it CAN be changed per wiki, but you need to have a really really REALLY good reason for wanting it, and even then, its likely not going to. --Uberfuzzy 19:55, 19 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Wikipedia is 50 edits and 7 days. So "4 days with no requirement in edit count" seems to be a really low threshold. Someone can simply register a ton of accounts, waiting for 4 days, and mass doing negative edits one by one.
 * Disadvantages of having a low threshold. If the pages are on (rather) high/middle risks and is a frequent attack target (e.g. main page), we can't just keep it semi-locked because it's too easy to get an autoconfirmed account. We have no way but to fully lock it. --MyBrute Resource Center@Ronga 00:55, 23 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia extra days + edits its because the shear volume of wikipedia, wikia is more clear of that issue as instead of 200 huge wikis its compose of thousands of little wikis, its a bit harder to vandalize/affect here --

(edit conflict)
 * But, the "Wikia spirit" is to make it as easy as possible for anyone to contribute anywhere. In fact, it seems to me that anons can do as much damage than registered users. Sure it's hard when the founder of a wiki is the only one that contribute and fight vadalism but if people think their newly created wiki should have as much success than Wikipedia... That is why, maybe, some wikis get abadonned after a few weeks or months. It's difficult to keep our interest in a project that no one seems interested in.
 * I've read somewhere (craowiki?) that when creating a new wiki, we must understand we will have to work alone (or so) on it a long time before people will be able to find it interesting (and stay).
 * So, with our difficulties in trying to get contributors, I dont think it's a good idea to limit their possibilities to contribute just because some people have bad intentions in the world.
 * The main idea that was behind many of the changes Wikia has done to the UI were so users, even anons, would be more inclined to click on the edit button. Sure that bring more vandals, but also more good contributors.
 * In an ideal world, there wouldn't be any vandals, but we are not in an ideal world. — TulipVorlax 02:04, 23 May 2009 (UTC)