As an idea of mine from three years ago, I have written a proposal for a policy that expands on the Author control point of our policy, giving maintainers more control over content they maintain.

In the past several years we've had incidents where users would introduce a change to a script, stylesheet or a Lua module (referred to as "content") that the author of that content would disagree with if they were properly notified of it. To prevent these incidents, the proposed maintainership policy places restrictions on what changes are acceptable without maintainer approval, allows users to revert changes that they see (or suspect) are not following the policy, and allows administrators to block after a few of such violations. The policy of "only maintainers are allowed to change content" is, of course, too strict for our needs, so there are several additions to the policy to reduce that strictness, such as interventions, community-maintained content, maintainership expiry, maintainership requests and the maintainership abuse procedure.

For the last two years, during the UCP and UCX migration, as well as the MediaWiki 1.37 migration, it was of great importance to understand who is the maintainer of a certain piece of content, so they can be contacted about getting it fixed. I'm sure this information is going to be useful in the future as well, and this policy would force us into regularly updating maintainer information, which benefits both users and maintainers. Which users become maintainers is going to be a topic of discussion after this policy passes, but I'm sure current maintainers will, in time, be appropriately assigned and visible in the infoboxes of relevant pages.

I am starting this discussion as a sort of community vote, to see whether such a policy is worth implementing, whether certain parts need to be clarified and whether there seem to be scenarios where the policy would not work in practice. Please express your opinion in the replies, and after enough discussion we can decide the final outcome. I may be announcing this thread, so please do not leave off-topic replies. I'm particularly looking for opinions of users who are authors, maintainers or really in any way contributed to JavaScript, CSS and Lua content (aside from its documentation and translations, which the policy does not cover) on Dev.

Thanks!