Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Re: Fwd: Wikimedia-wide global blocking mechanism?

Thanks for refraining from personal attacks. Please realize the number of Wikimedia Wiki's. Also consider that this number is constantly increasing, and that a serious part of these wiki's have no or little community. I don't see why we should not fight vandalism on wiki's with no community. It just does not make sense. I am talking here about *short term* blocks of proven vandal bots that are going through a high number of wiki's. These bots will not add anything good to the wikimedia wiki's, and are only destructive. Blocking here is stopping that bot from continuing, and I think that falls within the scope of what a steward is supposed to be for. I have no problem with communications. As you might be able to find on metawiki and mailinglist archives, I am for instance highly doubtful for giving automatically bot rights to people on every wiki once they cleared a certain meta procedure. So it is not like I am a bad steward that hates small communities or something, no, I really base this on arguments and considerations. Please let me try again to explain why I think this is better. The current situation is that as soon as a vandal bot is detected, there are two options. Either preventively block the IP on *every* small wiki, which means: go to the wiki, log in, grant yourself admin rights, block, remove the rights. A lot of work. Both result in long blocks, because we do not like the bots to come back tomorrow, it's too much of work for that. I think everyone agrees that this situation is bad and should be improved. This improved blocking mechanism would enable the stewards to stop these bots the moment they are spotted. The can be stopped for a short term, so that the proxies remain opened for the communities that wish/need that. The vandalism would be prevented, and that would save a lot of cleaning work as well. It would be an automation of the current procedure. However, it is imaginable (not likely imho though) that smaller wiki's object to this procedure. They might want the bot to come in, or maybe have an actually good reason, that is somewhat hard to predict. To come to their (possible) wishes, it might be decided that we could do some opt-[in/out] system. I think that an opt-in system will be much worse in terms of manpower, time and vandalism then opt-out. A lot of the wiki's that form the main target group of this tool have not the ability to make such a choise. Either because there is no or barely a community, either because they cant work out procedures. It would also give a lot of extra work for the devs. They would have to optin every community that would like to join. To form consensus, it would require a while to ague within the community, if present at all, which would not only mean a delay, but again a lot of extra work. Yes, extra work is a valid argument for me. Also stewards are volunteers, and have other better things to do then cleaning up vandalism when not needed. If it is needed, fine, I'll do my job if I'm in, but I'd rather see a better way of fixing things then manually. So besides that it is a load of extra work for stewards, devs and other vandalism-cleaners (SWMT) it would also mean that a bunch of wiki's which died slowly in the past for whatever reason, will remain to suffer from vandalism, even when there is no need to. Opt-out is maybe a little less "independant" but just as effective. If a community has objections, they will note them soon enough. Just like you want to send messages to opt-in, we could also send messages to opt-out if they want to. There is no fundamental difference between those messages, the only difference is the momentum. The difference is also that they will have to do a little work to get the vandalism bots again. It would also mean less processing manpower for developers, and a system that is both immediately active and running, but also a system that is better in the long run, as more wiki's will join that have no or barely any community. Best regards, Lodewijk 2008/2/1, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb(a)yahoo.com>om>: