Staff group/map-bms

The staff group is assigned to some paid employees of the Wikimedia Foundation. This group has special access primarily for technical or legal purposes.

The Wikimedia Foundation is constantly evaluating who is a member of the staff user group in order to minimize the proliferation of this very specialized tool. Membership of the staff group is constantly re-evaluated, particularly in light of a more limited tool being available that will fit a staff member's needs, if someone is expected to not need staff rights for a period of time, or if there is something that triggers during a risk assessment. These re-evaluations are part of good security practices.

Previously, who did and did not have staff rights was relatively arbitrary, based upon asking the staff member who was in charge of these rights. The process has been subsequently formalized to protect against abuse or misuse of staff rights. In order to receive staff rights, it requires second level sign-off (meaning that for a new employee in a department, director level signoff is required and for a new manager, C-level signoff is required), a formal written use-case that is kept on file and routinely reviewed to determine whether the use-case is still met by assignment of staff rights, a brief training session explaining their appropriate and inappropriate use, and an acknowledgement (in writing) of the rights and responsibilities that come with staff rights.

Previously, there were few protections against abuse. Today, there are a number of checks and balances built into the system. On the English Wikipedia, for instance, the Arbitration Committee reviews all logged actions and discusses questionable actions with Jan (as the WMF employee responsible for approving rights assignments) to ensure they are within policy. On other wikis where there is no comparable subcommittee, the Trust and Safety (T&S) team audits and reviews employee actions. This has resulted in employee disciplinary action on occasion. These are not toothless protections.

Staff rights are managed by the Global Head of Trust and Safety and the second-level Wikimedia Foundation manager of the person requesting staff rights.

Wikimedia stewards and staff will add or remove permissions ^{(former link)} from the staff global user group and they also add or remove user accounts from the staff global user group based on the requests of the Global Head of Trust and Safety or their designee. There is no requirement that community consensus be demonstrated or that the above requirements (including sign-offs) are proved.

Rationale and responsibility of advanced permissions assignment for Wikimedia Foundation staff are currently recorded in a locked Google spreadsheet. A mirror of that page can be found at WMF Advanced Permissions.

The following chart lists the user rights available in the staff user group and some explanations of why these rights are necessary for staff to have.