I know this has been touched on in other questions, but I'd like to bring up a possible solution for discussion. I think this is different because it offers a possible new solution that I don't believe has been considered in the past. I would like to get some consensus from the group to see if it is something to be adopted.
There has been debate on who should have synonym privileges and to what degree. Who should have blanket privilege to act on tags, particularly for the SE groups that have smaller forums or limited numbers of active moderators. I agree that they should have a minimum score (maybe 2500, can be debated), but to help these forums, what about a criteria like "the top x number of users" or "the top 5% of users", combined with the minimum score criteria?
I put my own case out as a good example. in CS50-beta, we have only 2 or 3 very active moderators (who work really hard, the others are Harvard CS50 staff and can't put in that kind of time), followed by a handful of really high scoring members. I have the highest reputation score on the forum at almost 35k, double the next high score, yet I'm still bumping into an inability to deal with tags and synonyms easily. Somehow, I would think that the top handful of users on a forum would know what we're doing and should have more ability - at minimum to suggest ANY synonyms, if not to vote on them, without restriction.
Automatically authorizing the top users seems like a reasonable solution. The number of users or percentage and a minimum score can be debated, or what privilege should be permitted - suggesting, voting, automatic execution, etc. - or perhaps allowing the moderators to authorize a certain privilege to certain (super?)users would help.
So, what is the consensus?
