effe iets anders wrote:
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.
This seems like shifting the goal posts. As I understood the issue from the many messages in this thread it would apply to human editors as well as bots. How do you propose to distinguish whether a vandal is a human or a bot? What is the process for establishing that it is a "proven" vandal bot? How can you guarantee that the process will not be used against human editors who have merely been caught up in a pissing match with the admins in a particular project?
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.
If communities are going to insist that a steward desysop himself every time he goes into a project to perform routine anti-vandalism it's easy to see that it is more objectionable that they perform acts automatically without ever logging themselves in. Perhaps it would be preferable that once a steward has properly given himself sysop rights he retain those rights unless there is a specific objection from the community. That would be far more acceptable than any kind of automated process.
Ec