After learning about yet another case of WMF forcing down changes
without discussion (bad MediaWiki 2FA implementation being mandatory for
certain roles), I can only endorse it in its entirety.
Something is rotten in the way changes are being discussed and
communicated, and it must be fixed. The approach to major changes (not
talking about some design fix) should involve community and be entirely
international, right now, sadly, WMF asks English Wikipedia on a better
day and no one on a worse day.
On 14/12/2018 02:39, billinghurst wrote:
Call me a simpleton, though sometimes I wonder whether
we have the
technical team of WMF staff and developers trying to get ahead of
(around?) society, and societal models.
The societal model that the wikis have implemented is a thing called a
bureaucrat, their role is to implement the change of status of members
of the community. Soooo how about we go back and investigate utilising
that model with regard to this matter?
Please explain in the current deliberations that there was the
consideration for how the community's existing model of rights
utilising bureaucrats? I just see a technical implementation,
primarily focusing around a single wiki.
This is and will always be a community issue, and I look forward to
seeing this more broadly proposed and discussed at Metawiki. Not
stuck here in a small email forum for ambassadors. Not stuck in a
phabricator ticket in the back of nowhere. I look forward to this
being open to the whole community, not one particularly controlled by
developers and staff of WMF. That has been the wiki way through
times, though not in more recent times where we have what is this
approach to more technical-only solutions, and divorced from the
broader wiki community.
This is a societal issue, and the technical team should be developing
the tools that the society needs to manage. It needs to come out of
Phabricator for the community discussion. It needs to come out of the
limited scope of this mailing list. This is not about operating in
your comfort zone.
Yes, the community is noisy, and has a diversity of opinion, and one
that will take time to reach a consensus. Yes, it is not our
technical peoples general skill set, so we have others moderate the
conversation. This is not solely a technical problem, get over it.
-- billinghurst
------ Original Message ------
From: "Johan Jönsson" <jjonsson(a)wikimedia.org
<mailto:jjonsson@wikimedia.org>>
To: "Wikitech Ambassadors" <wikitech-ambassadors(a)lists.wikimedia.org
<mailto:wikitech-ambassadors@lists.wikimedia.org>>
Sent: 14/12/2018 6:25:59 AM
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-ambassadors] Removal of unblockself rights on wiki
On Thu, Dec 13, 2018 at 8:20 PM Deryck Chan
<deryckchan(a)gmail.com
<mailto:deryckchan@gmail.com>> wrote:
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.
Just to keep everyone aware of what's been happening in
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T150826 – to avoid the "shoot first
to win" situation, a blocked admin can block the admin who blocked
them but no one else. Our balance of terror.
//Johan Jönsson
--
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