2008/2/4, Birgitte SB birgitte_sb@yahoo.com:
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.html1
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