Global sysops/2008 proposal

Anti-vandal fighters are maintainers of smaller Wikimedia projects and technically skilled users who are able to help other Wikimedians. Their role is global on all Wikimedia projects. They have permissions on all Wikimedia projects, comparable with administrator permissions on particular projects, which they are using at the projects without enough active administrators. However, their rights are limited by the nature of their own job.

While anti-vandal fighters should have similar permissions to administrators, their role is not to maintain wikis at the regular basis, like wiki administrators are doing. Their role is to fight against vandals and to allow to the community at a particular project to take care about their own wiki. Because of that, while anti-vandal fighters need and have permissions like deleting pages and blocking users, they don't need and don't have permissions like "Mark others' edits as patrolled", which is generally a feature which every administrator should have.

This is the list of permissions with explanations which anti-vandal fighters have.

• Edit semi-protected pages: This is a permission which every registered user has 4 days after the time their account is registered. ("confirmed" users) However, it may be useful to give to anti-vandal fighters this permission explicitly because of possible technical problems.
• Edit other users' CSS and JS files: As it is assumed that anti-vandal fighters are technically skilled contributors, they may help to other contributors in fixing their CSS and JS files.
• Move pages: Similar to edit semi-protected pages, this permission is given to confirmed users but will be good to grant explicitly.
• Quickly rollback the edits of the last user who edited a particular page: This is the "rollback" permission. It is one of the most important permissions for anti-vandal fighters.
• Edit MediaWiki messages. To stop local spam or massive vandalism using multiple blacklists (and override them).
• Autopatrol of edits.
• Purge the site cache for a page without confirmation: This is a permission with has every registered user. However, it is useful to explicitly grant this permission because of possible technical problems.

• Delete pages: Vandals and destructive users often make (nonsense) pages that need to be summarily deleted.
• Mass delete pages: This may be very useful to anti-vandal fighters. As far as the proposer of this policy understands, the number deleted pages is limited. However, if a vandal already made a very large number of pages, anti-vandal fighter should be able to delete them with or without help of a program.
• Change protection levels and edit protected pages: Anti-vandal fighter should be able to protect and unprotect pages.
• Overwrite an existing file: This is useful when some vandal made a mess by moving pages, and allows for "moving over a redirect" without having to delete it first.
• Undelete a page: This is currently the only option for undeleting pages, so anti-vandal fighters should have this permission. As the only reason for undeleting pages is to fix their own mistakenly deleted page, If and when the permission "undelete if I deleted" comes into existence, the new permission should be substituted for the more general one.

• Block other users from editing: This permission will be obsolete when centralized blocking system starts to work. After that, anti-vandal fighters will work on centralized blocking system together with stewards.
• Block a user from sending email: The same as previous.

Those meeting all the requirements listed below may request being an anti-vandal fighter:

• Having been a participant for at least 6 months on:
  • Meta; and
  • at least two Wikimedia content projects
• Having edits:
  • Sum of edits
    • at least 5000 edits total (all over the Wikimedia projects).
    • at least 1000 edits total at one content wiki.
    • at least 100 edits total at the other content wiki.
    • at least 100 edits total at Meta.
  • Edits for the last month (so, if you apply for permissions at August 12th, this is your sum of edits for July, not for the period July 12th -- August 11):
    • at least 50 edits at Meta during the last month
    • at least 50 edits on at least two projects (per project) during the last month
• Having a user page on Meta, with link(s) to a local project user page, and a valid contact address (registered and confirmed email address in preferences, or an email address indicated on their user page)
• Having unified account.
• Being a Administrator, Bureaucrat or CheckUser on a content project

The request shall be done on Meta:Requests_for_adminship#Anti-vandal fighter (doesn't exist yet). A time for opinion of at least one week will be given. The candidate will be given the tools listed above only if they are approved by a qualified majority of at least 75%. All editors with an account on Meta, at least one active account on any Wikimedia project, and a link between the two, may participate and give their opinion on the candidate. In case of any opposition, enough people must speak for the candidate for them to be given the tools (a qualified majority of at least 75%).

If the candidate becomes an anti-vandal fighter, they should add their name to the anti-vandal fighters list, and ensure they keep a valid user name page, links to at least one other project, and valid contact. Anti-vandal fighters not respecting these rules will lose their privileges.

See also: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~interiot/cgi-bin/count_edits?user=UserName&dbname=metawiki_p

The Anti-vandal fighter should deal only with projects which do not have enough active administrators in a particular time frame.

• If some wiki doesn't have any administrators at all, the AVfs should take care of that project all of the time.
• If some wiki doesn't have administrators just in some parts of the day (like the night hours in a specific time zone), they should take care of that wiki during the unmonitored times.

Local projects must be respected. Even though their permissions are global, anti-vandal fighters are not allowed to use their rights on any project with a substantial community of active administrators (e.g. the English Wikipedia; as well as a number of smaller projects) without explicitly asking the community, even for such minor things as using rollback. Anti-vandal fighters not respecting this rule will lose their privileges immediately.

It is possible that some larger projects decide to give some rights to AVfs. After reaching consensus in the community, please report the status of your project regarding AVfs at Anti-vandal fighter/large projects (if your project has more than 20-30 active admins).

If there are enough active AVfs and stewards around, AVf should prefer not to act at their home project, unless they are admins there.

Any AVf inactive for a full year will be de-sysoped. "Inactive" means no edits in the past 6 months and less than 50 edits in the last year. They may re-apply through the regular way.

Having AVf privileges is not a lifetime status. Get it if you need it. Keep it if people trust you. Quit it if you do not need it. Lose it if people feel they cannot trust you. Sysop status on Meta will be granted for one year. After that time, people will be able to vote to oppose a AVf. If there is no opposition for the sysop to stay sysop, then they stay sysop. If opposition is voiced, then the sysop may lose AVf status if support falls below 75%. No quorum is required. It is not a vote to gain support status, but a poll to express disagreement with the current situation. The point is not to bug everyone to vote to support the AVf again (if there is no opposition, there is no point in voting your support again); the point is to not allow AVf status to stay a lifetime status. If a AVf is not really strongly infringing rules, but is creating work for the community because of a lack of trust, then it is best that people have the possibility of expressing their opposition.

Page for confirmation/removal: Anti vandal fighter/confirm

Contributors of Wikimedia projects may complain about AVFs' work at Anti vandal fighter/complain.

This page is a proposal and it should be discussed before adopted. If the discussion goes as planned, it should be finished by June 15th at 23:59, after which the community should vote about the policy adoption. Voting will thus last from June 16th, 2008 to June 30th, 2008.

We should discuss all issues related to this policy on the talk page. Please, fix the proposals English, too :)

For successful adoption of the policy the next conditions are necessary:

• at least 30 votes in favor;
• at least 80% overall votes in favor, with neutral votes not counting toward the overall total;

Any Wikimedian with at least 500 edits (across all projects) total, and at least 100 edits (across all projects) within January 1-May 31, 2008 may vote. Voter should have an existing user page at meta with a link to at least one content project. Comments are welcome from all but those not qualifying will not have their votes counted.

• If policy successfully adopted, 7 days after the adoption it would be needed for creating basic guidelines and other supporting pages, as well mailing list and IRC channel. During that period it wouldn't be possible to become a candidate for this role.

For reference these are the current user classes:

Template:User classes

• Policy proposals
• Global maintenance