2008/2/4, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb(a)yahoo.com>om>:
As I said before [1], stewards should be allowed to
opt-in the wiki's with no community. Disscussions
only need to happen if there is an active community.
I also don't mind opt-out if everyone gets
comprehensible notification about the system and how
to opt-out.
The idea that people check the wiki's block logs on a
regular basis and would even know what such block
would signify if they saw them is unreasonable. The
only time people completely uniformed about this
system are going to discover it, is when they are
already experiencing a problem. And they will
speculate amoung themselves about what these blocks
mean and come up some strange bad faith ideas. And
once they are alll worked up about this, they will
confront the stewards with these bad faith
accusations. And it will be quite hard to explain
things to them at that time. Do none of you remember
all the other times we have been through situations
like this?
The recent messages on this thread show that those
responding to me are twisting what I say without even
considering the compromises I suggest. So I am done
commenting on this. Just don't pretend I was
suggesting something as foolish as a wiki with no
community come to a local consensus on opting in,
because I was not.
Birgitte SB
[
1]http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2008-February/038322.ht…
I think that a minimal notification would be to explain the situation
in several languages on the userpage of the username that appears as
the blocker. See for instance the [[user:Proxyblocker]] on several
projects. However, we should do that then on every project of course.
If a user would be "hit" by such a short duration block, (s)he could
easily check why, what and by whom, where to protest and how to opt
out. Of course we would never be able to cover all 250 languages, but
we could of course aim to at least have it translated in 20-30
languages, maybe centralized to have an updated version all the time.
Additional to that a message on the village pumps as far as available
would of course be needed etc.
The blocks would in my view be quite short (long term blocks we would
have to handle in the old fashioned way?) so if a user is frustrated
by it, xe should be able to complain about it the next day.
Btw: about the question what is a bot:
If it sounds like a duck, if it looks like a duck, if it smells like a
duck, you can act as it would be a duck. Of course we don't bother
whether it is *really* a bot, or some moorhuhn that is editing
vandalism very fast, it's about the type of "contributions" I was
referring to of course :)
BR, Lodewijk