Talk:Steward requests/Permissions/2015

In his comment Danny B. called some users "trolls". I believe this is an evident personal attack. We have lots of disputes on cs.wikt recently, most of them stem from the fact that we are unhappy with the way Danny B. and his friends run the project - but this does not make one a troll. I don't know what's usual here - possibly hiding the attack and warning the user he should be civil? But something should be done. Thanks. --Auvajs (talk) 13:32, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

A situation occasionally comes up in places like enwiki where someone's suggested a chance to an interface message (MediaWiki:-space), or similarly dangerous situations (e.g. user scripts that use advanced permissions), but nobody's entirely sure if it'll work or not, and we don't want to break the entire wiki in the case when it doesn't. As such, it makes sense to test the change somewhere less important first.

There used to be a (probably unapproved, but common practice) method of testing the changes in which a http://test.wikipedia.org adminstrator would make the change there first (quickly reverting it if it proved to be a problem), as a safe way to preview the change. That wasn't the intended purpose of testwiki, but it did at least work. (Note that the non-Wikimedia, third-party test wikis often don't work for this purpose, because the change is often in the configuration of a Wikimedia-specific extension.)

More recently, a new wiki http://test2.wikipedia.org has been created, basically as an entire wiki-wide sandbox. It would thus seem like the logical place to test out potentially breaking changes before deploying them on a more "serious" wiki. However, some of these tests need advanced permissions (in the course of today, I've found a need for both administrator and rollbacker permissions to be able to test out potential changes).

My problem is that there doesn't seem to be any established method for requesting the permissions, or determining who is eligible to have them. The stewards have the technical capability to grant them, but according to Meta policy, would need agreement from the wiki's community first. However, testwiki2, by its nature, doesn't have any sort of community, and so there's nobody to get consensus from. What sort of agreement/consensus would I need to apply for advanced permissions on testwiki2 (either temporary or permanent), and where should I try to get it? ais523 (w:en:) 23:08, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

We generally grant rights on test2wiki if there is some good rationale for requesting them, and usually on a temporary basis for the duration of an experiment. We won't grant any functionary-level rights, like CU or OS.

If you are looking to test things, there is the testwiki that you mentioned above, test.wikidata.org for Wikidata testing, and there is also a group of testing wikis on the wmflabs (here) that is up to production standard, so testing can be done there. Ajraddatz (talk) 23:22, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

Hello Ais523 glad to see you around! In addition to what Ajr already said, generally speaking rights on testwiki are granted by the local 'crats, rather than any community (by virtue of its test status) generally by request on testwiki:Wikipedia:Requests/Permissions. On testwiki2, I would say the way to approach it is to contact one of its bureaucrats. As Ajr mentions, the Labs cluster duplicates most (all? I'm not very familiar with it) major wikis's configuration specifically for testing purposes. The Simple English Wikipedia is fully duplicated with all of its articles and pages as far as I understand it and is one of the preferred places to test things, I believe, however I am not sure as to where we're supposed to point users requesting rights there to... de:User:Luke081515 seems to be the one doing the most user rights and global actions lately on the test cluster so maybe he'd be a good point to start with. Snowolf ^{How can I help?} 00:42, 6 October 2015 (UTC)

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