robchur wrote:

I'd be inclined to WONTFIX this, to be honest; the rationale being that it would
place too great an emphasis on administrator permissions and it would get in the
way of administrators responding to both casual issues and time-sensitive
"threats". The other two main concerns this report raises are auditing. Editing
protected pages is logged in the pages' histories as any other edit would be;
rollback operations are also logged here.

Viewing of deleted pages might be a problem in some cases, but I'd be inclined
to suggest that pages which have been deleted for legal reasons, etc. should be
deleted using the [hopefully] forthcoming improved revision deletion mechanism.
Alternatively, they should be wiped from the database.

anon.hui wrote:

For a time-sensitive "threats", a session timeout can solve this problem.
The session timer will be reset whenever the admin operation is used.
This is alike to "sudo" command in most unix-like system.
If the admin use the admin-privileged command continuously or periodically, they
will never be required to re-enter their password.
But this doesn't mean to encourage the admin to continuously overuse the admin
operation.
It means that if they "really" need to continuously use the admin operation,
such as in a time-sensitive situation, they can do that in time.

BTW: I just added the 4th item in rationale session of,
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal_for_a_sudo-like_behavior_for_admin_operations#Rationale

robchur wrote:

I still don't understand why you'd bother to add "sudo"-like functions in the
first place. And what's with the "overuse" argument? It makes no sense
whatsoever to add needless crippling of functionality like this.

I answered on that page your arguments. Please try to get some consensous on
problematic changes before asking them to be done.

robchur wrote:

It's not that the change was problematic, it's that the idea doesn't fit the
direction the software should be following.

I meant "socially problematic" :)

anon.hui wrote:

Ok, I will revise the feature to be the more relax and flexible, to not affect
the existing culture/tradition (in case they have consensus not to change them).
The feature may be disabled by default when upgrading, to not have impact on the
existing project.
Some new project using mediawiki may want this feature.
I, personally, as an admin of http://th.lug.wikia.com, extremely need this
feature in that wikia sub-domain.

anon.hui wrote:

Hi, adding more compromise specification,

8. It will depend on the config on each wiki project to allow admin user to

setup the session expire time (or to not expire at all) in his/her preferences.

9. When upgrading mediawiki, the admin session expire time will be, by default,

not expire at all, to not have impact on the existing project.

See
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal_for_a_sudo-like_behavior_for_admin_operations
for more details of change.