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Proposal:Change usergroup name "Oversight"

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The status of this proposal is:
Request for Discussion / Sign-Ups

This proposal is associated with the bolded strategic priorities below.


  1. Achieve continued growth in readership
  2. Focus on quality content
  3. Increase Participation
  4. Ensure that the underlying project infrastructure is secure, stable, and sufficient to guarantee the permanence of the projects and support ongoing growth.
  5. Encourage Innovation


A feature request or bug related to this proposal has been submitted to Bugzilla under ID 20337.

See Category:Proposals with Bugzilla submissions for all submitted bugs.

Summary

Change the name of usergroup "Oversight" to something more descriptive.

Proposal

This Proposal does not offer a solution, but rather tries to start a discussion about a better name. It has often be pointed out that Oversight is not a perfect name for the usergroup.

Potential new names (please add new proposals, pro's and con's):

proposed name Pro Contra
Oversight (current name)
  • No changes have to be made
  • not intuitive
  • misleading (oversight is not supervision; we don't actually use Oversight any longer)
Suppress
  • Is partially already in use
Edit-Hiders
  • Self-describing
  • It's not only about edits, but also edit summaries, logs and usernames.
  • Sounds juvenile
Revision-suppressors
  • More detailed description
  • Long, possibly difficult to translate
Concealer
  • Somewhat descriptive of what suppression does
Cabal
  • Likely to lend more credence to "cabal" complaints
  • The actual definition is of a flesh-coloured cosmetic
Deletion
  • fairly descriptive of what it does
    • not really, nothing is ever irrevocably deleted
  • Deletion would have to be renamed suppression (actually that's an advantage)
Super-Admin
  • fairly descriptive of what it is
    • Doesn't describe what it is at all. "Super-admin" describes a user not deleting/hiding/whatever something. And oversighters are not super-admins.
  • Sounds like Super-Hero
Janitor Motto: When there's a nasty mess the Janitors clean it up.
  • It's really hard for conspiracy nuts to make Janitor sound threatening.
  • It's a humbling name
  • Not much glory being a Janitor
  • It is a humbling name
Privacy admin
  • Self-descriptive
  • Neutral
  • Used as the name of the IRC group Template:IRC

What it's called in other language

List of back-translation from localisation:

  • id:Pengawas (Indonesian), lit. Watchers -- not very descriptive either -- or Supervisor, Caretaker

Problems

  • Deletion is a wrong term for admin's ability to hide articles from non-admins. Currently the only way of deleting pages is to delete them manually from the database (which is highly discouraged). Terms like hiding suggest that OS is less severe than deletion.

Motivation

Usergroup names should be intuitive and self-descriptive. This is not the case for "Oversight", which suggests some kind of supervision.

Key Questions

  • What better names are there?

Potential Costs

  • No monetary costs
  • Small configuration changes on Wikimedia servers
  • Documentation has to be changed
  • Users who are already aware of "Oversight" have to be informed about the new name

References

Community Discussion

Do you have a thought about this proposal? A suggestion? Discuss this proposal by going to Proposal talk:Change usergroup name "Oversight".

Want to work on this proposal?

  1. .. Sign your name here!