Proposal for a new permission: Global Admin View

Background

• Commons & Wikidata material (& to a lesser extent Meta) gets grandfathered in to local projects, and the local admins have no means of checking that material once it has been deleted from its home wiki.
• Material on Commons is requested for deletion as advertising. By the time the Commons admin sees the request the local wiki's article/draft which contained the image (showing it to be clearly advertising) has been deleted and that context no longer exists.
• Sockpuppetry is a cross-wiki problem. Checkusers are restricted in what they are permitted to investigate. Evidence needs to be acquired before Checkusers can act. If the sockpuppets are active cross-wiki, those users trying to investigate need access to the cross-wiki evidence.
• Cross-wiki spamming is often trackable through the shared wikidata item. If that gets deleted, the evidence is broken up.
• The ability to verify cross-wiki should also improve mutual confidence between wikis and reduce inter-wiki NIMBYism.

Proposal

It is proposed to create a global permission, global admin view which may be requested at meta by admins from public-facing wikis (i.e. not the test or development wikis). It would allow on ALL public-facing wikis without the opt-outs which restrict global sysops :-

• View deleted history entries, without their associated text (deletedhistory)
• View deleted text and changes between deleted revisions (deletedtext)
• Search deleted pages (browsearchive)
• View hidden abuse log entries (abusefilter-hidden-log)
• View the abuse log (abusefilter-log)
• View detailed abuse log entries (abusefilter-log-detail)
• View title blacklist log (titleblacklistlog)

(based on m:Special:GlobalGroupPermissions/global-deleter & similar to m:WMF Researchers)

Candidate requirements & request process

Candidates for this permission should be acceptable across wiki projects. To this end:

• The user must have held permanent (not temporary) sysop permission on their home wiki for at least 3 months before applying. They must have acquired their sysop status by being elected with the support of at least 25–30 members of the local community. ^{[Notes 1]}
• The user should not be blocked on any WMF project.
• The permission should be requested at m:Steward requests/Global permissions with no fewer than 2 weeks of discussion. This is the same requirement as requests for global renamer and global sysop. The purpose is to establish that the user is trustworthy across projects.

^{[Notes 2]}

Removal

The permission will be removed from a user:

• On the loss of local admin rights. This will need coordination between local bureaucrats & stewards.
• On being blocked on any local project. It's not supportable that someone should see deleted content on a wiki on which they are blocked. This will need coordination between local sysops & stewards.
• For misuse, e.g. using the ability to see deleted material to restore the material to public view on any WMF project out-of-process under the same or another title.
• On request of the user.

• As the permission does not include the potential to act, just to see, there are no activity requirements.

Areas for discussion & refinement

1. "must have held permanent (not temporary) sysop permission on their home wiki for at least 3 months"

   The period is open for discussion.

Notes

Support

Oppose

Neutral

Discussion