Forum:Global sysops

The idea of global sysops is quiet old, but still open (or suspended). At least three persons would be interested in getting this, so I would like to ask the staff finally: global sysop group will be made or not? Szoferka 01:47, 7 May 2007 (UTC)


 * The issue there is technical. I've heard of bug reports of the Staff members losing their staff flags meaning there are some bugs in sharing just the Staff tag alone. Furthermore I do not know the method which Wikia is using to share permissions in that way. I managed to setup a fully working semi-shared permissions setup which defined a set of tags which were global and the rest were local.
 * However, I do not know what Johnq is planning to talk to me about. It's either about a new WGEP top wiki and all of it's technical relations with the other WGEP wiki, or it's about one of my number of technical ideas for sharing some things among select Wikia. So I can't say what's going on exactly. ~Dantman(talk) tricks May 7, 2007 @ 02:14 (UTC)

Best thing I can thing of is that there should be a restriction on who gets such rights. For example, on the Vegan wiki, an admin active mostly on a (not real) "eat meat" wiki would cause serious clashes. Or, have local rights across several related wikis such as those at Imagination hub.

From economy theory, giving admins rights on multiple related wikis, after having demonstrated ability on at least one, is beneficial because this allows the admins to do what they prefer doing on any particular site, and for each wiki to possibly have the services of all of those admins, which are of course different.

I'm no geek, but from an innocent point of view, why can't there be a list somewhere in Wikia HQ that lists everybody's rights, and then have each wiki get this information from that list, so that there'll be no glitches?

On another issue, what about temporary sysop rights? I mean, should bureaucrats have the ability to give temporary sysop rights (ie. for massive page deletions)?

--Yunzhong Hou 00:34, 8 May 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm not actually one who cares to much for a GlobalSysop group when we already have Staff... I mean, who other than staff needs unrestricted delete/protect/block abilities. But what I am interested in with semi-shared permissions is, in creating special tags ge-sysop, ge-bureucrat, ma-sysop, ma-bureaucrat which in these examples ge would stand for the WGEP, and ma would be for Memory-Alpha. Basically, what I'm suggesting is special project wide sysop/bureaucrat tags which basically now allow one or two tags to handle admins who have full access to a set of linked Wikia. Cases like the large amount of Star Wars wiki, the Wikia Graphical Entertainment Project which already spans 4 wiki and is expanding to more, etc... Basically wiki groups which would benefit from shared admins.
 * I wouldn't say that that idea is glitch free, in actuality if you're talking list like how we have the Interwiki Map, then that has the security issue that a Sysop here can make themselves a staff or sysop anywhere. Major security. Plus the list would be to big. As for shared permissions table, thats basically what semi-shared permissions actually is. The idea is that a wiki would grab permissions from a local and shared table at the same time and group them together. That's how a wiki would read semi-shared permissions. As for making those permissions... that's a different story of telling the system whether a tag should be saved locally or globally. I already built a system which does that. I just don't know how Wikia is doing it.
 * Well, we already have rollback for vandalism reverts. Though, mass deletion... I'd never promote users to do that. But I guess that's because I have a bot combo AnimeBot/User:AnimeBotSys. All I'd do is sick my Pywikipediabot framework on those pages, and it would automatically switch itself to AnimeBotSys and run as a Sysop and the mass page deletion would be handled by bot instead of making a user go to the trouble. Actually... Now that the WGEP has CleanDeleteBot, I can delete pages ProjectWide. ~Dantman(talk) tricks May 8, 2007 @ 02:25 (UTC)


 * Well, two of the main reasons to have global sysop is to deal with vandalism and spam across Wikia. Staff can often be found preoccupied with other items on the staff agenda, and there are times where no staff is available to take care of such things. G .He (Talk!) 03:11, 8 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Ya, I can understand the reasons. Same goes for some of the users who start getting an extremely large amount of requests for installing of various things. Perhaps a user who can be relied on to setup the forums. Or even for a forum setup bot who just needs Sysop privileges so it can add the style code. Or even for users who have made various systems like my SearchSwitch, Novelas requested that I install it there. Currently it's contained but theirs also the possibility of numbers of communities wanting it. (Although, with the new skin, there's a chance WikiSwitch and SearchSwitch (SlateSearch/SmokeSearch in their alternate forms) may be turned into actual Widgets for the system) ~Dantman(talk) tricks May 8, 2007 @ 03:24 (UTC)

Technically feasibly or otherwise, I'm not sure I'd agree with the idea of a global sysop. For active wikis, administrators are approved based on the community's trust. A large majority of that community would not be likely to participate in discussions of approval for a global administrator (which would presumably take place here). Without this community support, I can see conflict taking place over an outsider, previously unknown to the community, exercising some of the functions of an administrator (deletions, protection, blocking, etc.).

So far as benefits go, at first glance, I don't agree that having global administrators would help much in fighting spam or vandalism. For more active wikis, the community is fairly self policing. If more administrators are needed, the editors should be able to determine that. Potentially, there may be an argument for having more eyes on inactive wikis. But on such a wiki, would you really need administrator status to revert vandalism or remove spam?

Without trying to sound derisive of the topic, this idea strikes me as a solution in search of a problem. I'd prefer to see individual communities assess the need for administrators. ScottW 01:52, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Global sysops are not for active wikis, but for inactive and they are only to delete or revert spam or vandalism + blocking. They won't participate in any wiki in other way than that - in the same way as staff do. On wikis where is no community or active editors there's nobody to approve or reject global sysops. Szoferka 02:01, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Ah, then I've misunderstood the concept. My apologies. Still don't really agree with the concept, but I have no serious objection to it after all. Thanks for the clarification. ScottW 02:07, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

I guess we could group this under one main type of request Shared Wikia. I'd say this could be considered grouped with the other ideas of sharing things between Wikia. It's not only permissions that people have been entertained at the idea of sharing. There have also been the requests for shared image databases. Some requests for global ones, and some for ones which are just for a select group of wiki. On the more extreme side (But also more thoroughly thought out than the technical aspects of image sharing) is the idea of sharing wiki themselves. I'm talking theories on how to take 2 wiki, merge their databases into one, some theories of merging all the tables such as the Article table into one, and even ideas of merging the file structure of wiki into one and using domain tests to decide what wiki's information to use. So far as to theorize that it's possible to completely eliminate the need to create a new file structure or alter a LocalSettings.php to create a new wiki. In other words, Wikia which depend souly on the database. Making it so that it's even possible to create Wikia, alter namespaces, change to another set of extensions, etc... All without altering a single file, all it would take would be a few statements to the database. VHosts wouldn't even need to be setup. That theory of merging article databases would make it possible to have a "Parallel" tab at the top of a page which would list articles which had the same name on other wiki in the group, and even the ability to make an article shared among the group so that it would be the same on all of them and the same article would be edited. But, they're all theories and ideas right now. Is it possible, yes. Is it happening, I don't know. ~Dantman(talk) tricks May 9, 2007 @ 03:16 (UTC)