Requests for comment/Userrights on Hindi Wikipedia

The following request for comments is closed. Large consensus that the user groups on hi.wiki are broken and that there's been abuse of at least some of the local special rights of bureaucrats (local community members agreed or didn't comment). The draft for a solution will be implemented by stewards. Implementation: bugzilla:35355 [1] [2] [3].

Taking a look at Top Indic Admins another steward saw Mayur did ~101.000 deletions while hi.wiki has about 102k pages. Checking some deletions we found most of Mayur's deletions were made on pages created by Mayur himself. Then I start checking some stuffs and I found this: Mayur changed his own local rights about 150 times! As far as I can see most of these rights changes are definitely useless, starting from

1:31, 29 June 2010 Mayur (Talk | contribs | block) changed group membership for सदस्य:Mayur from administrator to administrator and IP block exempt (necessary during blocking of ip range) (administrators are already IP-block exempt)

to

08:31, 17 October 2010 Mayur (Talk | contribs | block) changed group membership for सदस्य:Mayur from abuse filter editor, autopatroller, bureaucrat, confirmed user, protected page editor, interface editor, IP block exempt, reviewer, rollbacker and administrator to abuse filter editor, autopatroller, bureaucrat, confirmed user, protected page editor, interface editor, IP block exempt, reviewer, rollbacker, administrator and bot user

There are many redundant usergroups on hi.wiki, most of them were created by dev under Mayur's request and he grant himself them all. Mayur owns a bot which he grant *many* rights, but the weirdest thing is that Mayur hid this entry ((Logs) 17:47, 1 October 2010 Mayurbot unblocked Mayurbot (Talk | contribs) (testing complete)) and the bot did the same with

13:19, 13 August 2011 Mayur changed group membership for सदस्य:Mayurbot from abuse filter editor, account creator, autopatroller, bot, protected page editor, eliminator, bot user, importer, interface editor, IP block exempt, reviewer, rollbacker and transwiki importer to abuse filter editor, account creator, autopatroller, bot, eliminator, importer, IP block exempt, reviewer, transwiki importer, file mover and bot with administrator rights (केवल वह अधिकार रखें जो समस्त बाट कार्यों के लिये उपयोगी है। बाकि अधिकार हटा दिये गये है।)

Against any idea of transparency even this entry has been removed:

13:20, 13 August 2011 Mayur changed visibility of a log event on विशेष:Log/rights: content hidden, edit summary hidden and username hidden

(and the bot did a similar thing on another log).
Finally Mayur proposed to allow local bureaucrats to remove sysop flags (bugzilla:24933) and then asked even the right to manage checkuser and oversighter bits (bugzilla:26159). The latter request has been incredibly accepted by devs and the assigned himself oversight bit and he used it to hide

13:59, 2 December 2010 Mayur changed group membership for सदस्य:Mayur from abuse filter editor, autopatroller, bureaucrat, protected page editor, eliminator, bot user, interface editor, IP block exempt, reviewer, rollbacker and administrator to abuse filter editor, autopatroller, bureaucrat, protected page editor, eliminator, bot user, interface editor, IP block exempt, reviewer, rollbacker, administrator and oversight

Basically I see a really poor flag management and, until rights are fixed in respect of WMF's policies, I removed all bureaucrat bits on hi.wiki (even if it seems they are no longer able to manage restricted groups such as oversighters' one) because I cannot be sure there are other config bugs which can allow other violations of WMF's privacy policy.
Finally I found what seems to be a great issue: Mayur asked the creation of many new usergroups, after that *no* new sysop has been flagged but also many of them have been removed with an strange inactivity threshold (less than 150 edits/year) and other reasons written in Hindi I cannot evaluate now.
I'd like to focus your attention on three elements:

devs must pay attention to Wikimedia policies, honestly I found almost unbelievable oversighter righst were assigned so easily
this poor user rights' management can damage hi.wiki, I see many users having even the 80% of administrator's rights (splitted into many different flags) but not the true sysop bit. This is definitely, the best way to send new users away, frustrating any attempt, by newcomers, to get involved into hi.wiki's management.
WMF's privacy policy has been violated, granting oversight bit to non-identified people but also giving abusefilter-hidden-log right to hi.wiki's bureaucrats (see bugzilla:26364).

I'm asking to manage, for at least a year, all hi.wiki's userrights on meta and some Hindi-speaker trusted user to check old local discussions and also rights logs from आशीष भटनागर‏‎, the other active bureaucrat but it seems quite ok to me.

--Vituzzu (talk) 22:00, 9 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Possibly relevant - Requests_for_comment/Vibhijain_and_Mayur Theo10011 (talk) 22:45, 9 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I've just disabled and made public hi:विशेष:AbuseFilter/6 basically he prevents other users different from Mayur to edit userrights' policy. --Vituzzu (talk) 00:14, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

PS: opening this rfc to Mayur, आशीष भटनागर and at the village pump. --Vituzzu (talk) 10:35, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

Comment by Billinghurst

From an initial review of the information provided there

does not appear to be reasonable overview of rights within and by the hiwiki community.
looks to be serious breach of WMF processes, protocols, and possibly a breach of privacy
the use of a wiki as a personal fiefdom with no accountability to the immediate wiki or the broader WMF

While I would like to think through this some more, and to ask some questions or to look at various aspects, it would seem to me that there is a prima facie case for the immediate emergency suspension of all user rights at hiwiki

These issues can be resolved probably in tranches, and it may or may not take a year to fix this problem, whichever, there is an immediate need to resolve immediate problems, and further investigate a means to return rights and the appropriate time frame to the community. I would think that stewards and community can

work through these means to how to remove the community rights to a secure basis that are locally managed
separately investigate the issues surrounding the issuances of rights to wikis, prepare a summary of findings and look to how recommendations can be made to improve WMF processes and the protocols.

I will return to this matter later as I have been asked for prompt response. billinghurst sDrewth 22:27, 9 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Having spent several hours looking through this situation it looks to be a very concerning situation. An administrator with many rights, and no real community oversight, seemingly personalised many aspects, and built aspects that either denied, restricted or separated the community and seems to have used the wiki as a test place, and without reference to outside consideration. There has been requests to have rights added that when looked at collectively, demonstrate why we separate rights and look to have good oversight. Looking at the hiwiki AbuseFilter rights available at hiwiki, these seem fairly extreme, and more extreme than I have seen at other places, and that they exist like that seems excessive and it would be interesting to see the evidence base that demonstrated that need.

Interactions with WMF: I see bugzilla requests being filed, eg. bugzilla:29956 which point to w:hi:विकिपीडिया:नयी_सुविधाएँ, and I actually wonder how such a complex request was even understood by the community as a consensus, and then approved by WMF. Then reviewing bugzilla requests it seems something approaching a bombardment of requests. Once can understand the difficulties that are being faced and addressed, though there seems no real review process.

After viewing other comment, I have had a look at wikt:hi: and see smaller amounts of similar behaviour. At that site, I see the same administrators, and bureaucrats, appointing each other, and Mayur assigning rights to own bot, and them revdel on the factors around renaming of the bot, and deletion of user pages assigning with this bot.

Thoughts

There seems examples of poor practice in there is no recording of assignation of rights that link to relevant discussions; hiding of moves, renames and deletions. All this seems to be avoiding accountability and exhibits poor governance in my opinion.
The processes to assign rights to wikis needs to have a review process that ensures that the rights/permissions being requested are in line with the principles expected by Wikimedia Foundation, and part of that seems due to the ability to request unusual rights combinations directly in what would seem to be extraordinary discussions with extraordinary means to demonstrate consensus.
The clear ability to see what rights users have, and how they are being used does not exist, and as such oversight is not possible especially where rights are concentrated in a few.
I don't see this as malicious behaviour on behalf of any person, just a corruption of process and the consequence of allocation of power without checks and balances.

I will leave the commentary there as in short we have something is closely resembling a personal fiefdom, and a system that has allowed that to happen over a period of time without corresponding oversight. billinghurst sDrewth 07:24, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Malicious behaviour or not (this is not the point, indeed), Mayur below doesn't really answer to anything nor addresses any concern. Nemo 08:13, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by Nemo

There seems to be enough evidence about poor usage of his flag by Mayur to remove it permanently and not reassign it. The local community should be notified. He currently has these flags: «abuse filter editor, importer, administrator»; at least importer should be removed, given the mass pages actions highlighted above. Some strange behaviours have already been reported in the past, see Stewards/elections_2011/Questions#Mayur, Requests for comment/Vibhijain and Mayur.
If I understand correctly, most abuse happened with flags that are normally managed centrally by stewards. This proves there's a reason in general not to let local users manage them without any check by stewards (if only because often they won't know what they're doing), but besides that it can't be tolerated any longer on this wiki.
- From hi:Special:listgrouprights: bureaucrats can Add groups: Interface editors, Bot users, Abuse filter editors, Eliminators, Importers, Transwiki importers, Account creators, Protected page editors, Bots with administrator rights, Ex bureaucrats, Ex administrators, Administrators, Bureaucrats, Bots and Reviewers; Remove groups: Administrators, Interface editors, Bot users, Abuse filter editors, Eliminators, Importers, Transwiki importers, Account creators, Protected page editors, Bots with administrator rights, Ex bureaucrats, Ex administrators, Bots and Reviewers.
- This should be changed at least to: Add groups: Interface editors, Bot users, Abuse filter editors, Eliminators, ~~Importers~~, Transwiki importers, Account creators, Protected page editors, Bots with administrator rights, Ex bureaucrats, Ex administrators, Administrators, Bureaucrats, Bots and Reviewers; Remove groups: ~~Administrators~~, Interface editors, Bot users, Abuse filter editors, ~~Eliminators, Importers~~, Transwiki importers, Account creators, Protected page editors, ~~Bots with administrator rights~~, Ex bureaucrats, Ex administrators, Bots and Reviewers.
As an additional measure, there should be some consideration of additional user groups created on the wiki. If they're empty, they should be immediately deleted. Deleting them and asking the local community to review the decision about them, or the other way round, seems a good idea. Example: the bot users group seems to have a single member, who has been constantly in it since 14 December 2010: surely better to delete it. Also, the other groups are mainly useless and meant to assign redundant rights, as explained by Mayur in the first link above. Nemo 22:28, 9 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
hi:Special:AbuseFilter shows many abusive filters, mainly hidden to public inspection. Because of the weird configuration of the wiki, only bureaucrats were able to modify and see them (if I understand correctly), and nobody currently can but stewards. Stewards need to make all or most filters public to allow review of them. A local discussion might be needed, but in practice no local users are probably able to understand the AbuseFilter and most filters need to be deleted, disabled or weakened as soon as possible (the community will be able to readd them later, maybe with a more sensible permissions management). Nemo 00:14, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by Barras

Actually, I think it would be a good move/start to remove the ability from bureaucrats to remove sysop/bureaucrat rights. Some wikis which come to my mind are meta, simpleWP, simpleWT and the English Wikipedia. I'm a crat on meta, simpleWP and simpleWT, and I really can't even remember when I used the removal the last time. On simpleWP, there aren't many cases either. Those few occasions can be handled on meta by the stewards. On meta, I think it has some kind of historical reasons. There was a time when meta 'crats had much more rights than nowadays.

I formerly was a strong supporter of this "Keep as many things as possible locally"-idea, however, seeing this incident, it might be of much more use to have removals of such rights on meta only.

As we can see, even our developers aren't actually familiar with some of the more basic policies of the foundation. Granting 'crats the right to remove and add the oversight permission. That is really worrisome. Imagine that a dev would've given local 'crats the right to grant/remove the checkuser right. This is a really serious matter.

Some suggestions from me:

Remove the ability to remove crat/sysop access from bureaucrats on any wiki.
Reset hiwiki's userright management to the basics, very carefully review which groups actually make sense and which not.
Maybe prod the stewards to review userright-management changes on wikis to make sure this won't happen again. Many things like importer rights are surely uncontroversial and won't be rejected, but other rights like the oversight permission/chckuser access need to be handled carefully.

-Barras talk 22:33, 9 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with everything, just a note: importer right can be used to cause an awful lot of disruption. It can effectively destroy the database of a wiki with a single click, and should be managed locally only on very big wikis with clear need and policies about it, if any. Nemo 22:42, 9 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I use the right from time to time and haven't managed to seriously break something yet. I know that it is not the most riskless right, but it is surely less harmful than checkuser or oversight rights.

If we want, we can change the "importer" to let's say IPBE or anything even less dangerous when you have an idea. -Barras talk 22:46, 9 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Of course you didn't break anything, that's why you're a steward. :-P But local users usually don't know what harm they can do with that flag. Nemo 23:09, 9 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Well, being a steward doesn't mean that I can't break things, but I used that right even before being a steward as an admin. -Barras talk 23:12, 9 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I endorse Barras' suggestions, specially #1. —Marco Aurelio (Nihil Prius Fide) 16:11, 15 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Strong oppose to #1. Meta and stewards are not in the position to dictate policy for local projects, and there seems to be no evidence that this is a systematic problem. Many wikis have had this feature uncontroversially for years, and there's no reason to treat them like children and force everyone to come to Meta every time a right needs to be removed. Jafeluv (talk) 13:32, 19 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Completely agree with Jafeluv. There is no reason to force large, developed projects who have already had this ability for extended periods of time to come to meta for every change. These projects are well up to the task of handling desysopping themselves, and it is also (IMO) out of the steward scope to force all projects to go through stewards for desysopping. Ajraddatz (Talk) 13:47, 19 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I think you both fail to see the basic problem here; we've got just one example. That move was a utterly bad idea and it's sad meta was even the first (or seems so). —Marco Aurelio (Nihil Prius Fide) 20:33, 19 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I think that you are identifying abuse where none exists. Mayur has never abused the technical ability of the bureaucrat group to desysop anyone - all actions he took with that ability were within local agreement. I will not agree to set a global precedent when no abuse is present anywhere. If there is abuse in the future, I will be more open to looking at removing the ability from that one project, but not all. Stewards should not have a role as global overseer. Ajraddatz (Talk) 20:40, 19 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

IMHO Stewards are global overseers, that's our main purpose! a×p_de ^Hello! 21:04, 19 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It's a bit discomforting to hear you say that, since the policy (and info page) would disagree. Stewards are tasked with "technical implementation of community consensus, and dealing with emergencies". I don't read anything about overseeing. Ajraddatz (Talk) 21:07, 19 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

How do you know that he didn't abuse it, did you check all the logs and discussions to verify the (apparently) dozens of desysoped users have been removed according to a fair policy (not one protected by the abusefilter)? Not commenting the general issue here because it deservers its own RfC. Nemo 06:33, 20 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by Ajraddatz

While I have no problems with local wikis establishing new user groups, and don't think that any private consensus developed on a mailing list or the accepted "status quo" should define how projects behave in that regard, there are clear signs of abuse in this case. I partly agree with Barras, and suggest the best course of action would be to reset to the default user groups there and have the community carefully review which extra ones are needed or not. Ajraddatz (Talk) 23:20, 9 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by Seb az86556

Crap like this shouldn't be happening, much less on a 100,000+ project. It puts all other projects into a bad light; shameful, really. I hope this won't lead to a situation where everybody else will get punished because of one freak going nuts (I came here via this comment). Seb az86556 (talk) 23:38, 9 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, it won't... I mean, ever seen a western media talking about a non-western wiki ? Me neither. DarkoNeko (talk) 19:23, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by John Vandenberg

I've tried to understand what has happened regarding the privacy violation, and would appreciate clarification if I have made a mistake.

The three crats on hi.wiki were

Mayur (talk · contribs) (identified)
~~Vituzzu (talk · contribs) (identified)~~ (see below)
आशीष भटनागर (talk · contribs)/Ashishbhatnagar72 (talk · contribs) (not identified)

There have been two potential privacy violations.

hi.wiki crats have been able to grant oversight (bugzilla:26159)
hi.wiki crats were granted abusefilter-private (bugzilla:24394#c12; reverted in bugzilla:26364)

Oversight

Regarding the first problem, Mayur only gave themselves oversight, in what appears to be a test only, and this was back in December 2010. Here are the two log entries[4]:

6:06, 2 December 2010 Mayur (Talk | contribs) changed group membership for user:Mayur from ... oversight, .. to ...
13:59, 2 December 2010 Mayur (Talk | contribs) changed group membership for user:Mayur from ... to ..., oversight

abusefilter-private

Regarding the second problem, Mayur requested the change in October 2010 when the AbuseFilter extension was being set up for Hindi Wikipedia. Other projects have also requested this (such as Japanese Wikipedia - see bugzilla:24789#c3; and French Wiktionary - see bugzilla:25711#c1), and it appears that English Wikipedia gave this permission to sysop. bugzilla:29922 and bugzilla:32595 have worked in permanently resolving this in Mid 2011. Mayur reported the Hindi Wikipedia bug in February 2012. Granting of abusefilter-private has now been disabled in the config[5]

There is another potential privacy violation we should investigate. Was abusefilter-private or abusefilter-view-private given to non-identified people on any project? My memory leads me to believe that previously non-identified people have been abuse filter editor on en.wiki. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by John Vandenberg (talk)

Yep, you're wrong:

I've never been a hi.wiki's bureaucrat, I'm an Italian steward, I don't speak any Hindi
Abusefilter-private is a right related to the abusefilter which let people see ~~suppressed abuselog's entries~~ IPs of people matching filters.

--Vituzzu (talk) 00:29, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry about putting your name in the list. I was looking at the list of names on the right side of the meta log. John Vandenberg (talk) 00:33, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

No pb. --Vituzzu (talk) 00:37, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'd like also to point that giving yourself oversight access let you see all previously suppressed stuffs, that's why I find the matter so serious. --Vituzzu (talk) 00:39, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I agree it is serious. There was consensus for hi.wiki 'crats to be able to assign oversight, however checkuser policy and Oversight policy requires 25-30 votes for wikis without an arbcom. So:

user:RobH shouldn't have made the requested config change, because it is too small of a consensus.
user:Mayur shouldn't have granted oversight to himself without a consensus on hi.wiki.

John Vandenberg (talk) 01:32, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I think the key issue here is that the oversight user right was able to be granted without ensuring that the users with access to the tool have identified to the WMF. That is why Wikimedia Foundation projects are set up so that only stewards can grant checkuser and oversight, and so that they can only do it from Meta. Stewards can (if they want to be banned) give themselves +steward on the wiki in question, and then do whatever they want there, but doing that (or other more esoteric things like manipulating the Steward global group) still leaves a log on a centralized place (here) that they did SOMETHING. That bugzilla request not only allowed unidentified users to gain access to the tool, it allowed them to do so in such a way that there was absolutely no outside knowledge of the fact whatsoever. J.delanoy ^gabs _adds 02:00, 18 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by Thehelpfulone

I have, pending the outcome of this RFC, removed the abuse filter manager right from Mayur on the English Wikipedia as it was granted for him in relation to his access on the Hindi Wikipedia. The full request at is w:en:Wikipedia talk:Edit filter/Archive (permission requests)#Request for permission: User:Mayur. The Helpful One 00:38, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I did this as I believed that his abuse filter right had been removed on Hindi Wikipedia, although I just double checked it hasn't. Nonetheless, the apparent abuse of the Abuse Filter as demonstrated above by Vituzzu is enough reason to justify removal of this right on the English Wikipedia, and as there are no clear policies with regards to the granting/removal of it, this should be a valid enough justification. The Helpful One 00:43, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I am not sure that this is directly relevant to meta, as long as it has been appropriately managed at enWP, and notified to admins there accordingly. billinghurst sDrewth 02:10, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by AshLin

Mayur has a history of admin abuse and partisanship. Here is a still open RFC from Hindi Wktionary where he systematically tried to desysop dormant sysops so that only his cronies remain. - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Vibhijain_and_Mayur.

Mayur's actions need to be checked across the range of projects where he has crat/admin status. AshLin (talk) 02:47, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by Rsrikanth05

I'm not very active on Hindi, but I do create stubs there once in a while hoping someone will help me bring it up in size. However, at the same time, I've since 2009, I've ben working as a translator from English to Hindi. I started, and did a quarter of translations for meta:Huggle to Hindi, which was finally completed [after a lot of effort and and what not, both on Meta and en wiki] by Rohit, and Vibhijain. I was pointed to this: Requests for comment/Vibhijain and Mayur, and after reading that, I read this. From what I know, Mayur is the main fellow "running" hi wiki. Several people from non Hindi, [wikis in the real world] often refer to Hindi Wikipedia as "Mayur Land". Creating new articles was an especially difficult task, there were so many edit filters in the way, which I believe were put in place by Mayur. I had not gone thru any such filters in 2009. Judging by the previous RfA, where User:Mayur 'egged' Vibhjain to request desysop of Sir Nicholas, I believe he was also behind the request for desysoping HPN on Samskrit. I would hope that a user like Mayur would make better use of the privileges and responsibility that he has been given and not use it to his own personal needs. ----Rsrikanth05 (talk) 05:42, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by Mayur

Regarding deletions

Hi heard complain regarding lots of deletions, I made lots of deletion bcoz of deleting unnecessary pages on Hindi Wikipedia. Yes most of them was yearly based category pages(Category:1 BCE to Category:50000 BCE) which i deleted after discussing with my community member. Secondly yes I created those pages from my bot but it as no another admin was active so i deleted those pages myself and I see no issue in this. I was the only admin who did admin action regularly but as soon as we formed eliminator group it took away a lot of burden over me.You can see that I did very less admin actions in last three months. For every user group we explained significant reason to media wiki developers.There is nothing like misconfiguration as any right is not violating media wiki policies.

Oversight

if you will check the my request for enabling oversight flag it was I who again requested to remove crat ability to assign this flag.I as soon as I came to know WMF policies I reopened that bug and rectified it. Yes I did some experiment just 2 to 3 to check this flag ability.But there was nothing intentionally wrong.

Abuse filter private logs

Abuse filter private was enabled as a misunderstanding between me and robH. I asked him to enabled to see private filter capability not Ips. As soon as I saw this issue I informed it to another steward Jyothis and he discussed that it with some another stewards and he suddenly asked some developer to remove this ability from hi crats.

So many right changes

Yes I changed my rights many times as many user groups were enabled on hi wiki so to test them I changed my user group many time.Also I keep any user group with me when i required it after its usage i removed that flag from me. I tried to make so many user groups bcoz hi wiki need many active admins but as soon as a person become admin he became inactive that left a complete burden on me and 1 or 2 another active admins so we decided to make small groups inspired from some another wiki so that we can assign any user to a user groups as per his willingness. Any user who want to stop vandalism we gave them rollback and eliminator. and any user who wants to maintain main page we gave them editprotected.

Community

I did everything according to community consensus whenever anybody opposed me I clarified it and apologized. if you all think that I did any think wrong then I should be first of all warned for my actions. We gave atleast one warning before we block or remove any flag from any user.

Removal of crats right

I removed all bureaucrat bits on hi.wiki (even if it seems they are no longer able to manage restricted groups such as oversighters' one) because I cannot be sure there are other config bugs which can allow other violations of WMF's privacy policy.

Why did all crat flags were removed as crat haven't ability to assign oversighter and CU user group. I think these two groups have link with WMF policies and also Abuse filter manager group haven't ability to see IPs of users.These both option had been removed by Bugzilla devs a year ago on my request and discussion with stewards. After that incidance there is not a single incidence of this type. It was I who informed Bugzilla devs to remove oversight flag approach from hi crats.

Top indic sysop crap

This list was prepared by me to motivate hi wiki admins to perform admin actions, as you all have listened below that almost all hi and many indic wiki admins don't perform their admin duties and work as a regular user.Lolz for blaming me so many deletions to be Top Indic Admin as you can see it in the list 2nd highest score is around 18000 and mine are 100,000 and that user is retired so if I had such intention I could stop at 19000 or 20000 why so much work? Secondly I was blamed to just create many pages so as to increase my admin log, wow you have given a excellent idea to many admins but my case was opposite I never just created a bunch of pages to delete them.The number of pages were created by me a year or some months ago before deleting them. if still discount deletions of pages created by me I shall still remain Top indic sysop.

Breach of stewards policies

I think we should rather then file a another Requests for comment/Vituzzu for breaching stewards limitations for Vituzzu as he did it so suddenly without any warning to any hi crat. I believe this to be a well planed group effort to remove hi wiki crats and their user groups as many wikis have many user group why hi wiki is being targeted without any initial warning, we all give atleast one warning to a user so why to make so hurry. Is Vituzzu is trying to convince us that media wiki devs are not aware of foundation policies or What do you want if a admin is doing nearly 99% admin tasks in his project is wrong in your sense.

Final Words

At last I want to say that we all are working for a same cause, As a Hindi Wikipedia I tried my level best to make it best from efforts. I have spent many nights and days for improving its interface and many things which I didn't know. I think we all are attached to this wiki-love that's why you all were Anxious. Thanks to Hindi wiki community and others who trusted me. if you all people still thing I did any wrong then I have nothing to say beyond this but anybody should get one warning before we take any action against him, he should be told not to do objectionable things. But again I shall respect your consensus. Thank you--Mayur ^{(talk•Email)} 04:50, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

Feel free to open any rfc you feel appropriate. But it won't change reality, putting it mildly I'm quite sure you wouldn't had to do the 99% of hi.wiki's administrative log if you had involved more users into hi.wiki's management, and yes, devs did some incredibly severe mistakes. --Vituzzu (talk) 17:40, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, So i was punished for doing more and more admin work.What a reward from Wikimedia Community.BTW FYI hi wiki already have 8 active admins and I think that is enough for management.But I am pleased that stewards finally come over "Community consensus", I shall appreciate this effort of stewards they should keep track of all small wikis and some common policies for each wiki to be established. So I think my time and support is over for Wikimedia projects. Sorry to those who felt bad due to any of my statement in mailing list or any wiki projects. I had very nice time with all you Wikimedia community members.All the best to all of you:-)--Mayur ^{(talk•Email)} 18:45, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

"Punished"? I think you misinterpreted almost every action I took. --Vituzzu (talk) 20:48, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

CommentMayur, stop being the hero wearing your undies on the outside and be a professional — stop being so "you" centric in this matter. The broader WMF community is addressing an issue that the hiwiki community and its overarching management has moved from the model expected by the WMF community, and these actions are looking to align it back to the model. There are many factors at play here, and we are concentrating on a governance solution, not undertaking a blame model. billinghurst sDrewth 02:15, 11 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Diverting the topic because things aren't in your favour is not something of an option here. It'll merely get you into more trouble and increase the trust deficit. ----Rsrikanth05 (talk) 09:46, 11 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Suggesting that you implemented abuse filters such as the one preventing everyone apart from those with over 40k edits (ie you) from editing a policy with good intentions is absurd. Blaming others or opening RfCs are unlikely to change your position. In fact, it is more likely people will view you in a negative light for such actions. Pmlineditor (t · c · l) 13:07, 12 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comments by SBharti

The situation seems to rise due to over-management. It is a fight between "What we create" and "How we create", wrt wiki content. I am not sure how this is going to affect hiwiki (removal of bcrat rights). I request User:Vituzzu to own up any bcrat needs for hiwiki and related projects, since it has initiated the process. --Sbharti (talk) 11:04, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I also believe that User:Mayur may have best intentions in his bract activities, however, clearly enough stewards here do not agree with that. At the end, wiki works with "the authority of consensus" and we can accept it. --Sbharti (talk) 11:04, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I also support the view of putting immature users like User:Vibhijain with suspended admin rights across all wiki projects. --Sbharti (talk) 11:04, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

(This user is slightly active on hiwiki, contributes little to content creation but works on bots/tools to enhance hiwiki quality)

Comments by Bill william compton

I'm not in a position to judge what has been "breached" or at which severity, but keeping track-record of Mayur, as an only active admin/'crat on Hindi Wikipedia, he should have been given a warning first at least? I'm not re-assessing what has been done before, but I think the conflict is in between consensus building process of local community and Foundation's rules/norms, if my interpretation is correct. Does Mayur grant special rights to any rambler of Hindi Wikipedia? No (at least, not in my time). There has always been a process of nomination→support/oppose→success/failure. Yeah, Hindi Wikipedia do have some redundant rights, and a very few make "80% of administrator's rights", but you must take into account the ground realities. These "users having the 80% of administrator's rights" are performing more than 80% of administrative tasks (please check logs). Few admins don't even know their job, forget it, they even don't know basic copyright policies regarding images, text, etc. So, in this case, I do not see how possibly you can call it "poor user rights' management"?--Bill william compton (talk) 13:08, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comments by Siddhartha Ghai

Regarding the oversight and checkuser rights management, I cannot say anything since I do not have much knowledge on the rights.
One technical correction in the original comment above: hi-wp has 102k articles, but the total number of pages stands at 3,66,998.
Regarding the addition and removal of users groups to Mayur and Mayurbot, it may be possible that they were done out of ignorance of the fact that they were redundant.
No, mayur knew that, as his answer at the stewards election question by me shows. Nemo 13:45, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Regarding changing the visibility of log events, any changes made without community discussion and/or valid reason are clearly out of bounds of the conduct expected from an admin/crat
Regarding the abusefilter, it is most probably true that noone on hi-wp would know how to manage them. Hence, in my humble opinion, it would be best if they're first made public and then someone who understands them tries to explain what each one actually does. The latter will be a tough job, but I find that to be the only way the community can make an informed decision about whether to keep or discard them. While I agree that certain filters may be too harsh (as it seems from comments above), disabling them completely would only wreck havoc on the current system. Even as it is, finding vandalism on hi-wp is a tough job considering the number of active users, and if all abusefilters are disabled in one go, it would open all floodgates and do more harm than good. It would rather be better to place a human-readable form of the filters in front of the community for consensus where each filter would have to be decided upon individually.
Regarding filter 6 in particular, it seems quite out of place for a wiki, especially if it was applied without community discussion
Regarding the current system of usergroups, it seems most were created after Mayur came. Some usergroups are redundant to each-other, but again, there are certain groups that are useful and removing which would negatively impact the maintainance activities on hi-wp. So, it would be better if redundant groups are normalised, i.e merged; however, if that is not possible, and it is decided that usergroups have to be reset, I think it would be better if prior opinion of the hi-wp community is taken before such a big step, allowing them to keep certain useful groups.

Having said the above points, I would now like to put things that happen on hi-wp into perspective. Even though hi-wp has 100k+ articles, the community strength effectively remains small, and communication is low. Discussions tend to attract a very small number of users, which I have never seen going beyond 15-20 in the extreme cases. Needless to say, those extreme cases are the ones with highly polarised opinions and general discussions have even fewer members ranging between 0-10. In such situations, consensus becomes a matter of having 3 or maybe 5 votes, which may or may not be the will of the entire community since many people simply do not respond. There are two ways out of such a situation, one can either go ahead with what one believes to be right, or one can accept the status quo. At first look it may seem that the latter way is correct, but if the latter way is always followed, it leads to stagnancy in the wiki where a community cannot thrive. Needless to say, the former approach does result in some bad decisions too, since one cannot always be right. And if technical stuff like user-rights and abusefilter is involved, the matter can get as bad as this.

Please keep in mind that I am not condoning any of the actions of the said user(s), only trying to bring into perspective a possibility of what can happen in situations like the one hi-wp is in. And I should add here that Mayur is still by far the most active admin. Most of the other admins do not perform any admin tasks, and act like regular contributors only.

Moving on to the usergroups, as of now the main usergorups can be summarized as follows:

Group	bureaucrats	sysops	editprotected	reviewers	eliminators	rollbackers	autopatrolled	notes
autopatrolled							34
rollbackers						17	15
eliminators					13	12	13
reviewers				14	12	12	14	one user differs between the two 12's and User:Mayurbot doesn't have either flag
editprotected			12	11	10	11	11	all three 11's are same. 10 is a subset of the 11.
sysop		8	3	3	2	3	3	all 3's are same. 2 is a subset of the 3.
bureaucrats	2	2	1	1	1	1	1	The one is Ashish bhatnagar

Each row gives the stats for a usergroup as to how many hold which other flag. (I hope this makes sense. Please ask me if it doesn't.)

Clearly, it can be seen that what should be a system with independent rights management, it has turned into a hierarchy of sorts; meaning that higher we go, the fewer are the people. It can be seen that higher group flags are alloted mostly to those who already have a lower flag. This makes becoming an admin or crat jumping through a series of hoops hoping you'll get through before the next guy does. Whether intentional or accidental, this has led to decreased manpower for the maintainance of the wiki since:

We get fewer people
The numbers are inflated, since all the groups consist of essentially the same people; and this means less work gets done.

Please do note that there are other usergroups which I have left out of the table since they don't seem to form a step, meaning they are still independent as all rights should be. These include filemover, interface admin, former admins, former crats, patroller (empty), amongst several others.

Also note that the nomination page of the editprotected group(w:hi:विकिपीडिया:वरिष्ठ_सदस्य) states:

इसके अलावा इनकी इच्छा पर इनको रोलबैक, पुनरीक्षक, उत्त्पात नियन्त्रक एवं स्वतःपरीक्षित समुदाय के अधिकार भी प्रबंधको द्वारा दिये जा सकते है। अतः सदस्य मुख्यत: प्रबंधको जैसे कई उपयोगी अधिकार रखते है। एक प्रकार से इन्हे उप प्रबन्धक माना जा सकता है।

which can be literally translated as:

Also, if they wish, they can be granted rollback, reviewer, eliminator and autopatrolled rights by the admins. Therefore they have many useful tools at their disposal like the admins. Hence they can be considered assisstant-admins/deputy-admins/sub-admins.

This leads to these users becoming almost sysops. They can edit fully-protected pages, but not cascade-protected (chain-protected?). They can delete/undelete but not nuke. They can't edit the interface or set any user rights. (There may be other things I missed.)

Usergroups such as autopatrolled, eliminators, rollbackers, reviewers are very important for the maintainance of the wiki. Currently most deletions are handled by the eliminators. If used correctly, I feel it is these groups that can form the backbone of the maintainance workforce; but used in a hierarchical fashion, they probably scare away more people than they attract. So rights management does need to be reviewed, but resetting the groups will break the camel's back. What we need is to delink these groups and make them independently accessible to general users. Whether this is done on hi-wp with stewards keeping a watch or here on meta is for the stewards to decide.

PS:This was supposed to be after Sbharti's comments, but it took me a while to get the info together.--Siddhartha Ghai (talk) 13:42, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comments by Sir Nicholas

There was a thread of discussion surrounding this in July 2011. The links to the discussions are available below in chronological order:

Thread name : Top Indic administrators List: wikimediaindia-l Month: July 2011

Comments by Pmlineditor

From my initial review of the facts presented here, I view this as a serious breach of accepted Wikimedia policies, particularly due to the random addition of rights for himself (by Mayur), and using a wiki (which has a small community) like a personal playground, imposing his own rules and violating the Oversight policy.

The Hindi Wikipedia appears to have a highly complicated system of userrights, which I think should be simplified. Redundant groups, empty groups and the "sub-admin" groups should be deleted to prevent further misuse. Bureaucrats should not be able to grant so many rights. As such, no one apart from stewards should ever be allowed to grant OS and CU rights in WMF wikis. It is indeed concerning that our devs allowed crats to grant OS in a wiki without much community support (2-10 !votes is not "consensus"). Mayur's explanation that he was experimenting with sensitive permissions like OS is concerning too; I find it absurd that someone with so many edits and admin rights in multiple wikis is not aware of meta policies and does not even bother to check them before granting himself such rights. Giving hi wiki crats the "abusefilter-hidden-log" permission is also unacceptable and a violation of privacy. The abuse filters are mostly private and I think it is best to make them public or grant someone with knowledge of regex the right to modify and disable the filters as per community consensus and remove the highly restrictive and unnecessary filters introduced by Mayur.

I think we need to work on removing this autocrat-like behavior of admins in the smaller wikis. As someone on this page mentioned, Mayur (and some other hi-wiki users) have been doing the same thing in the other Hindi and Indic language wikis (I've seen Mayur doing thousands of useless minor edits like minor changes to categories, welcoming every page under the User: namespace). This should be stopped immediately. Also, for smaller wikis, it is best to follow the normal userrights structure. Perhaps it would be possible to have a log in Meta where addition of permissions to usergroups in small wikis (GS wikis at least) could be monitored. Certainly, I'm not suggesting stewards or GSes take over admin jobs in the wiki, but the former would prevent disruption and violation of policies seen in this case. I don't want this list to be something stalked by hundreds of editors who will file RfCs if a single uncommon right is granted to a usergroup, but to be a reference list, which people active in crosswiki matters can occasionally check to see if weird changes (like those in hi wiki) are being made to the userrights system. Moreover, it will allow speedy action if crats or admins (or others) are allowed to grant sensitive rights.

Regards, Pmlineditor (t · c · l) 10:25, 12 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that such information would be useful. I imagine it as an auto-updated table like that on Abuse filter; speaking of which, I've proposed some monitoring of filters: Talk:Abuse filter#Monitoring. This is really not done against any wiki, as shown by the fact that most wikis I contacted are happy to receive comments on their filters, discuss them and act on them. Nemo 10:35, 12 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by axpde

Recently I tried to make a list of all usergroups available on different wikis conc. editing:

autoeditor
autopatrol
autopatrolled
autoreview
autoreviewer
editor
reviewer
trusted
validator

Can we please tidy out a bit? At least give local groups with the same rigths the same (English) name! Regards a×p_de ^Hello! 12:54, 16 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Draft for a solution by Vituzzu

Setting apart some concerns about actions which seem to have been made just in order to increase editcounts (actually the "Top Indic Admins" list sounds very badly, also the creation of a useless "bot with administrative rights" ) I think hi.wiki has gone through a sort of sclerotization process ceasing to involve new users and pushing away old ones. I can just try to figure out the reasons, one of these should be Mayur had no feedbacks to his actions. I don't support "punitive" measures against him, he did many mistakes but hi.wiki's community lacked of giving him feedbacks and checking his actions, furthermore some dev has "shared" this mistakes.
So I suggest the following actions. --Vituzzu (talk) 13:06, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Remove of all hi.wiki's additional usergroups except autopatrolled and reviewers (after emptying them as per following points).
Move all ex-administrators and ex-bureaucrats to the autopatrolled group.
Merge all the autoreviewer group into reviewers' one.
Remove all extra rights to bureaucrat group, including the ability of remove sysops' rights and edit abusefilter.
Assign to administrator group the right to add and remove self to/from abusefilter group.
Promote all users which are in "editprotected" group to temporary administrators for a term of six months.
Remove all bureucrats' flags for at least a year and then assign if properly elected following usual process.
Manage the assignment of administrators' flag on SRP for at least a year, assigning flags upon local consensus.
Reset abuse filter to the standard form, and especially no ability to block through the filter.
Remove of all bot flags beyond bot itself; if bots require admin permissions a fresh request should follow.
Make all abuse filters public immediately; quickly disable or delete them all except the obviously positive ones, leaving them to local review.