Wards Wiki Stewards

WardsWiki was once administered by a group of volunteer StakeHolders called "stewards".

In the past, there has been an air of mystery about the stewards. This page attempts to clear the air as much as possible. There's no need for the mystery and it could only have helped in exactly two areas, neither of which are relevant now.

The steward system was created by Ward in response to the then-current village idiot we'll call "RA". Ward signed us up, gave us some tools, and let us loose. The stewards would govern the wiki, and the stewards would govern themselves! Brilliant. But there was really no time to govern ourselves, so that went out the window. The tools we were given turned out to be a lot less capable than what was needed. A small number of individuals stepped up and took the lead, making up the rules as they went along, and trying some sort of by-the-seat-of-their-pants combination of community building and flexing what little muscle we had as a sort of last resort. Anyone who was around in those days (2005-2006) will know these individuals.

That worked for a while. Some bad guys were defeated, but they were replaced in short order with smarter bad guys (or maybe the old bad guys had simply learned new tricks). The bad guys knew enough to work around the limited blocking that could be done, and they did not respond to any sort of outreach that was attempted. It had become a battle of wills. The bad guys would find new proxies, and the stewards would block them. The battle of wills has mostly been lost at this point. New blocks still go up every few days or weeks depending on activity level, but they are ineffective, since there are always more open proxies out there.

The community has always been very actively involved in defending this wiki. There have been very few cases where the stewards have taken a more active role than the community itself, which is probably as it should be.

The powers of the stewards were:

access to a private wiki used to coordinate with other stewards
access to log files and several handy tools to analyze them
access to an enhanced version of NewRecentChanges with quick links to log analysis and single-click revert
hide the codeword display for entire /8 address ranges
use a master codeword to edit even from blocked address ranges
block individual /32 addresses, outside of the codeword mechanism (after complaints that /8 was too coarse)
edit the list of DnsBlockLists? (after complaints that /8 was too coarse)
access to the source code of the main wiki script (read-only access; patches may be proposed)