I agree with what's been said in this thread so far.
An admin of a large wiki shouldn't be allowed to unblock themselves, if
another admin blocked them.
However, on small wikis, this would lead to a first-mover advantage
situation, so admins should be forbidden from unblocking themselves if
there are more than a certain number of admins (and bureaucrats).
I would recommend a threshold of five admins. Notice that if there are only
three admins (with Nemo's proposal), if one admin blocks another admin, the
situation reduces to a "shoot first to win" between the two remaining
admins. If there are five admins and one blocks another, there will still
be three uninvolved admins left to argue it out :)
The Cantonese Wikipedia recently came close to a situation where an admin
might get blocked for bad behaviour. A few users presented a strong case
that an admin had been acting against policy. Because we have a dozen
admins, a few other admins were able to discuss the matter, and issued
strong words of admonishment to the unbehaving admin, and the unbehaving
admin disappeared from the wiki since then. Thinking back, one of the
concerns we had was that an admin could unblock themselves anyway, so there
was actually no real course of action to take other than desysopping (we
have a bureaucrat; not me). If this feature of "no self-unblocks on wikis
with lots of admins" was in place, then the threat of a block would have
had more teeth.
Deryck
([[User:Deryck Chan]], yue.wp sysop)
On Thu, 29 Nov 2018 at 12:32, billinghurst <billinghurstwiki(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Well said Nemo Bis. There is an ever increasing
autocratic approach to
what used to be community decisions. Societall matters used to be discussed
openly on wiki, or in list, then to have the technical components on
phabricator. Now it seems that the societal are taking place in
phabricator, away from the society and predominantly with the technical.
That is undesirable IMNSHO.
I would think that the easiest and means to apply this is for large wikis
only, and run some checks on the medium sized wikis to understand the size
of the issue, and the consequences prior to implementation. Leave the small
wikis alone.
-- billinghurst
------ Original Message ------
From: "Johan Jönsson" <jjonsson(a)wikimedia.org>
To: "Wikitech Ambassadors" <wikitech-ambassadors(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: 29/11/2018 3:06:34 AM
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-ambassadors] Removal of unblockself rights on wiki
On Wed, Nov 28, 2018 at 4:34 PM Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Brian Wolff, 27/11/18 18:45:
I'm still open to communities who want to
continue to have the old
behaviour to opt out of the new behaviour - The primary thing here is
that the default has now changed, so that anywhere that was using the
old behaviour for no other reason then it was the default is now using
the new behaviour.
The problem with this is that the right to unblock yourself is clearly
something of use in unforeseen emergencies, not something for which
you'd usually write up a consensus discussion or a guideline 5 years in
advance.
I understand the feeling of urgency in doing such changes by fiat in
response to apparent threats, but I hope you do appreciate the potential
for such permission changes to alter the power structure and social
workings of the wikis in ways we don't fully anticipate. This change may
seem small, but it does dismantle one component of the reciprocality of
administrative powers on the wiki.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Administrator
In particular, such a new default means, on wikis with 2 sysops, that
one sysop has the capacity to unilaterally and irreversibly block the
second sysop, and that in any last-resort controversy the permissions
encourage and give a prize to whoever shoots first. (Which is already a
common problem in online communities, see StackExchange with their
"fastest gun in the west" dilemma.)
I think it would be wise for such a default to be changed only on wikis
which have at least 3 administrators *and* a bureaucrat.
There's an ongoing discussion about reaching out to wikis and ask them if
this will be a problem, and how to solve the problem of one admin blocking
the other(s) on small wikis, in this Phabricator task:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T150826
//Johan Jönsson
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