Thank you so much Rae. Reading some emails it seems that stewards spend
their days trying blocking random people.
Vito
Il giorno ven 22 apr 2022 alle ore 13:32 Rae Adimer via Wikimedia-l <
wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> ha scritto:
Hi all,
About unblocking IPs that geolocate to Africa, it’s not as though the
blocked IPs are random. The problem with these affected ISPs are that they
have many users on the same IP address. They aren’t traditional proxies
(and traditional proxies will not be unblocked, that isn’t the issue here),
they’re just poorly managed ISPs. I’m not even sure if there would be more
vandalism from unblocking these ISPs, and I think it should be done.
“Smart blocking” would be a bad idea. It would take *a lot* of work to
implement and would be a net harm to our ability to deal with abuse. I am
strongly opposed to creating this. Also remember to a large extent the
issue with these IPs isn’t a range, it’s that there’s multiple users on the
*same* IP.
Regarding IPBE, the issue isn’t that we’re declining requests, it’s that
we don’t get to them in a timely manner. There are a lot of requests.
I’ve tried to clear up a number of other misconceptions in a comment on
the Meta-Wiki page as well.
Best regards,
Rae
On Fri, Apr 22, 2022 at 07:03 WereSpielChequers <
werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Yesterday I was on a conference call that
included several Nigerian
Wikipedians, I was surprised at how much of their problems editing
Wikipedia were over blocks.
The English language Wikipedia doesn't have an overall problem with
editing numbers, nearly eight years on, editing volumes are still clearly
above the 2014 minima. But we do have huge geographic skews and in
particular we badly underrepresent the English speaking parts of Africa in
our community and in our Projects. I don't know if other languages have
similar issues, but it would not surprise me.
I get that lowering our guard overall against IP vandals would increase
the workload of those who'd rather be improving Wikipedia than clearing up
after vandals. But there are a couple of things that could fairly easily
be done if we want a more global community.
Firstly, unblock IPs that geolocate to countries where we lack
contributors.Yes we will get more vandalism in those countries, but far far
less than if we also unblocked all IPs in countries where we have lots of
editors.
Secondly, implement "smart blocking", especially with range bocks. Yes
there will still be lots of collateral damage where someone in the same
range has the same sort of device/, O/S etc as the person who did the edit
that prompted the block. But anyone in the same range who uses a different
type of hardware operating system etc would not be caught by a smart block.
Thirdly, especially if we can't do the first two, be more liberal with IP
block exemption for accounts in countries where we lack editors and have
problems with a limited number of often blocked IPs.
WSC
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