There are plenty of admins that happily make their real identity
public knowledge and apparently aren't so afraid of "stalkers" that
they're unwilling to block people. There's probably at least one of
them online 24 hours a day. Get one of them to make the block.
If there are some gaps in that 24 hour coverage, hire someone to fill
in those gaps. Pay them enough that they can buy a PO box, an alarm
system for their house, etc. How does society handle having judges
and police and presidents and soldiers and other figures who have to
make and enforce decisions that rile up a few nutters? Not by making
them unaccountable for their actions. If Wikipedia is a serious
project creating a real benefit to society, why shouldn't it do the
same thing? Being part of the wikipolice is surely less dangerous
than being part of the real police.
On 9/20/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 20/09/2007, SlimVirgin <slimvirgin(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
The only workable solution I can see is to make
it less likely that
stalkers will want to target particular admins.
It's tricky. The problem is that a lot of the people who get blocked
are blocked because they're arseholes or nutters. They will take a
block for whatever reason as an unacceptable assault against (a) their
ego or (b) the REVEALED TRUTH (in capitals). This then gives them an
exciting new holy mission in life.
One way to do that
would be to set up anonymous admin accounts that multiple admins could
use. So for example, if a difficult user needs to be blocked, any
admin could access the joint admin account to make the block. The user
would only see that User:Admin1 had blocked him. Only trusted people
would have access to which admin had made a block with User:Admin1 at
time T.
I know it would complicate things, and it might make admin abuse a
little more likely. And we'd still have the problem of potential
leaks, so it wouldn't be foolproof by any means.
Crikey, I'm trying to imagine how paranoid people would get with that
in place compared to now. It strikes me as disastrous public relations
to remove any accountability or traceability. If you think the
paranoids are bad now ...
A solution to an edge case that breaks the normal case is unlikely to
gain traction.
- d.
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