User:Redmin/Abolish the Global Interwiki Administrators Group

Background: The Interwiki Administrators group was created in 2018 to give a limited set of users the ability to edit local interwiki tables upon request by local admins. The rationale behind giving this right to a specific group instead of all local admins was the fear of malicious links being added to tables leading to phishing attacks. In 2019, a local interwiki admin group was created which could be granted to local users by Stewards following local elections; abolition of the group was also suggested at the time based on the same rationale that I provide below but the proposal failed to reach consensus. In 2022, the

Why Abolish Now: This is something that should have been done a long time ago but has become even more important now as we currently only have 3 interwiki admins, two of whom have other important roles; this is bound to stretch volunteers too thin if it already has not done so. Admins can already do worse than insert malicious links but that does not stop us from granting them access to their wiki's Common.js and other risky pages. If we can accept the risk there then it only seems fitting that we accept the risk here as well. Also, external links can already be made to appear as wikilinks. If the reader cannot distinguish between the two already then surely restricting the interwiki table is not helping. But of course, some people have the argument that something being possible with some effort does not mean that we should make it possible to do without putting the same kind of effort but that fails to account for the fact that someone who has malicious intentions will probably act in that way regardless of the effort taken. If anything, the people that will not put in the effort needed to contact an interwiki admin are local bureaucrats.