ArchWiki talk:Access levels and roles

Some inconsistencies

With the last update of group rights I went over the relevant articles again and noticed the following:

• The "disambiguation" page Roles does not mention this article at all. Arguably there is an overlap between both articles, and the little content Roles has could be merged back here or to Arch terminology.

-- Alad (talk) 15:19, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

About Roles not linking here, it can be an easy fix, for example we can disambiguate between Arch Linux (or the global community) roles, and the more specific ArchWiki roles, which have a more technical reason to be.

Merging Roles into an ArchWiki-namespace page like this one would reduce its scope to the wiki-specific pages, thus possibly generating another inconsistency.

I think Roles can make sense in the context of Category:Teams to give a place where to mention all the official staff sections that don't have their own wiki Team page.

Merging Roles#Package maintainer into Arch terminology finds me in agreement instead: "package maintainer" isn't a community role, in fact in its definition it already says that it's some kind of a more generic term to describe Devs, TUs and generic AUR maintainers (the latter not even forming a team).

Perhaps we may rename the article to something like "Arch Linux Teams"?

-- Kynikos (talk) 16:08, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

• ArchWiki:Statistics mentions the "maximum" of Administrator and Maintainer, whereas both ArchWiki:Maintainers and ArchWiki:Administrators redirect to ArchWiki:Maintenance Team#Active maintainers.

-- Alad (talk) 15:19, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

The legend says that the "Roles" column hosts "a human-readable representation of the most relevant access levels and roles", so not 1:1, for clarity (wiki user groups aren't intended to be directly human readable) and tradition ("administrator" is a globally recognized term to identify users with the main coordination responsibility).

Of course you only reported the inconsistency here, but it could be interesting to discuss improvements, for example changing Administrator to Maintainer^admin (I'm not endorsing that, it's only an example).

-- Kynikos (talk) 16:08, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

• ArchWiki:Maintenance Team lists administrator as an "extra group", when the actual group is sysop. Moreover, other groups like archtu or archstaff are not included in the columns. (With latter admittedly only being relevant to me...)

-- Alad (talk) 15:19, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

I suppose the intention of "Extra groups" is more exactly to list the access level of wiki maintainers (that being the Maintenance Team page), i.e. "cosysop" is implicit (blank), "sysop" is called "administrator" by convention, and the highest access level for a maintainer is "bureaucrat". I think mentioning other wiki roles could be a bit out of scope in that table.

Maybe the column could be renamed "Access level"?

-- Kynikos (talk) 16:08, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

• The archstaff group is given to users with "other roles in the Arch community", when this term is more generally used for any staff members, wiki admins included. [1] That non-admin maintainers are not included in aforementioned list, but do have a special title on the Forums, only adds to the mystery.

-- Alad (talk) 15:19, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

Again, I wouldn't take the wiki group names with their literal meaning, perhaps we could have named archstaff archotherstaffroles instead, but I thought it would be neater to keep it short :)

Should we explicitly warn that wiki group names shouldn't be interpreted literally and are more meant to be configuration-file-friendly than realistic descriptions of the community roles?

-- Kynikos (talk) 16:08, 9 July 2019 (UTC)