There is certainly no plan to use this to block entire countries. The issue, as others have stated, is where we have a persistent and patient vandal. Willy on Wheels is the ideal example of this; I'd swear he writes down when blocks expire and just starts vandalising again when they do so.
I assure you that the people involved from the CheckUser group do not lightly ask for this tool. The IP that provoked this was UK-based, and I for one would welcome input on exceptions for Mid-East and Asian countries where a limited number of proxies are the population's gateway to the Internet. The vandals abusing such proxies are generally not among such ISP's subscriber base and - with help from someone on language - we can try and persuade the ISP in question to firewall the proxy appropriately or enable xff.
In any case I personally wouldn't have access to such a tool. I would have to justify application of a global block to a steward and have evidence from other checkusers that the IP was problematic on several wikis. Before anyone gets to that stage the IP will have been investigated. If it is a proxy for an entire country - as I say above - then a different approach may be required, and a far shorter block would be applied.
Brian McNeil
-----Original Message----- From: foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Waerth Sent: 01 February 2008 08:43 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Wikimedia-wide global blocking mechanism?
The problem is, these people abuse open proxies in countries where many providers have, for whatever reason, choosen to have a policy of open proxies. Which means you will block most of a country with this policy of yours even on their homewiki. That is not really what you want is it?
Waerth
I'm on Checkuser-l and I'm not going to reveal which IP provoked this discussion. However the block was generally agreed at one year in this
case.
Yes, it is our old friend Willy on Wheels.
In cases like this where you are restricted to short blocks you are just making more work. When you've permanently blocked a dozen vandal accounts registered through an IP over a period of months you want the option to block the IP for a long term.
Brian McNeil
-----Original Message----- From: foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of effe iets anders Sent: 31 January 2008 19:39 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Wikimedia-wide global blocking mechanism?
or we just agree that it will only be used for IP's (and if I'd have to say it, only for short terms, so that overriding would not be a big issue too. ) If we agree on that, I think we should be able to trust the stewards to adhere to that, and there would be no need to also make sure it is not technically possible.
BR, Eia
2008/1/31, Alex mrzmanwiki@gmail.com:
The ability for local sysops to override it would help this a bit, but ideally, it should be restricted to blocking IPs only until SUL is implemented.
Dan Rosenthal wrote:
Yeah, it's not perfect, but it seems like it would be a good tool for stewards to have. Only thing is, I'm envisioning a scenario where a valid user with good contribs gets blocked, doesn't user meta, tries to get unblocked at his home project, but cannot because he's not locally blocked, and the user doesn't know how to get in touch with a steward (Because he doesn't know of this policy) or doesn't understand how to communicate with one. I don't think it's necessarily that big of a deal, but I think it will need a LOT of localization to be effective.
-Dan On Jan 31, 2008, at 7:14 AM, David Gerard wrote:
On 31/01/2008, Yaroslav M. Blanter putevod@mccme.ru wrote:
For the global admin list, I was under understanding that stewards are actually doing the job.
Yes, stewards have a lot of the higher administrative powers for small wikis that don't have much of a community yet. Including checkuser, so the stewards using checkuser are on checkuser-l and haven't yet screamed in horror at the notion ;-)
- d.
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