User:Yatalu/Blog:Moderators/en

Dear Brigadiers, Wikians, other viewers,

This blog is the explanation and start of a community discussion about the possibile addition of a new user group which we'll call "moderators". Apart from a vote on the poll below, comments will be much appreciated. Feel free to express both why you think it's a good/bad idea, as well as useful/useless.

Note: translations of this blogs can be added until next Wednesday (Feb 13). Voting and commenting until the end of next week (Feb 16).

Why?
Why do we need an extra user group? Despite being a small wiki with only maybe a dozen actual content pages, we need to support users in as many languages as possible. We have pages of 26 languages, with the potential to grow to 35+, as we have WLB members who speak more. We would like to give proper support, as well as allow quick spam/vandalism cleanup for all languages.

However, Mime and myself can't speak all of the languages on our wiki, and there is no way we would need 20+ administrators on a 300 page wiki. An additional user group with a couple of rights similar to an admin's sounds (at least to me) like a decent solution.

What's in a name?
I suggested this group to be called "moderators", but you may wonder why the name. Like "chat moderators" and "forum moderators", the people from this user group will moderate the wiki: the chat, messages/comments, and language portals.

List of rights
The following is the list of rights I would suggest to give this user group:
 * Select amount of rights all over this wiki:
 * Deleting comments, message wall threads, forum threads → in order to delete spam in their own language(s)
 * Move files → to fix wrongly names flags, ...
 * Have one's own edits automatically marked as patrolled
 * Edit blog articles → to add blog translations after they have been reviewed
 * Edit MediaWiki pages → to add/update MW messages for i18n of pages
 * Chat moderator rights
 * Full sysop rights (delete/undelete, protect/unprotect, ...) on the "Portal:" and "Portal talk:" namespaces

Voting
If you disagree on one of the rights or think they need an additional one, please indicate so in the comments. In the poll, the following choices are available:
 * 1) Useful and nice to have!
 * 2) Nice to have, but not very useful
 * 3) We don't really need this