A 'liberalization' of IPBE can easily be enabled by allowing WMF funded projects to add this group to any participants that request it, or even all participants in some editathons given the benefits of editing from shared wifi or through a proxy in some countries where editing Wikipedia may have personal risks.
Editathons in national museums or universities are often hampered, and new joiners have significant amounts of time wasted when they find out their edits made in a library of a cafe get rejected and they can forget editing that day, or told to wait for a month or indefinitely for a global steward to consider their request. The risks are almost zero that someone actively contributing to a funded content creation project would be a vandal. Even if this ever happened, their account would be sanctioned without it becoming a stewards problem. Keep in mind that stopping editing from internet cafes or libraries disproportionately harms poorer people and those editing from countries without the best technical infrastructure who otherwise have to try to edit from a mobile phone and may end up paying to edit rather than using the public free access.
The current system works against the stated values of the community and causes unnecessary harm. Let's just get on with making adding newbies to IPBE a normal part of good faith editing, and stop global stewards and mass IP blocks, being a serious and unnecessary barrier to good faith editors.
Lane
On Thu, 21 Apr 2022 at 10:04, Željko Blaće zblace@mi2.hr wrote:
My 2 cents in this telegraph short email
#1 it is a common situation in Bosnia&Herzegovina and Croatia, likely in other CEE countries of CEE where providers are 'cheap' with IP addresses. I know an amazingly constructive and dedicated, but not proactive editor who failed to get unblocked on EN, as he could not explain as a novice to EN admins in 2015 that he was not a sock puppet . Loss is on our side.
#2 This is a complex (and for outreach mission critical) problem that requires real-time addressing and most likely a dedicated paid professionals (better 4 x 50% across time zones) to take the burden off from voluntary stewards and admins, but also to inform and educate those who could not follow what are common network issues across different regions.
Best, Z.
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