Brian McNeil wrote:
On Sun, 2010-01-10 at 18:34 +0000, Thomas Dalton wrote:
2010/1/10 Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com:
Shrug. Admins are never "obliged" to enforce policy if it gives a stupid result. ArbCom are "obliged" to make some sense out of what the policy pages say, bearing in mind the good of the mission. Asking for 1500 admins to come up with a consensus position is fairly futile. Asking an Arbitrator is consulting an informed person. I know what I'd think of an admin who blocked a school project on this technicality. i'll concede that what is recommended should be well thought through, but my feeling is that this could lead to second-best advice being given.
You have some really big problems with your understanding of how Wikipedia works... First, you claim that ArbCom should be deciding our policy on role accounts and now you claim that admins should. You are completely wrong on both counts. Policy is determined by THE COMMUNITY.
Right. And policy is enforced by admins, bureaucrats, checkusers, admins, stewards, and project arbcoms.
The issue on role accounts is that anyone who can use them can change the registered email address and password. So, shared accounts are out.
Any admin or, more appropriately, checkuser will tell you that generating a lot of similarly formed account names will raise suspicion. It's a common troll modus operandi - and it has been done from school IP addresses. I think Charles is speaking from the perspective of someone with access to nonpublic data. My concern is that said data may require accessed. On rare occasions a school's IT administrator may be contacted if they're a persistent source of vandalism; most admins never see that nonpublic information and may make blocking decisions they feel in line with policy but absent that knowledge.
Come, now, save it for wikien-l. (Upper case is shouting, and I understand the operation of the enWP community perfectly well.)
Admins personally decide how to apply their extra buttons. If no admin wants to block some account, it stays unblocked. That is how it is, and how it should be. User:Tottelwiki was an American college project, it was editing a page I started, I didn't block it. My discretionary call.
This list is for WMUK, not soapboxing about enWP politics. Great job on the fundraising, by the way, Thomas, but why are you picking fights?
It looks like this, then. "Wikipedia welcomes school projects. If, however, you set one up the wrong way, you may be blocked by one of the site's jobsworths, in which case you'll find it useful to know the address of the unblock mailing list. Be quick about it, though, because if one of your GCSE class lads sets up an alternate account, your school may suffer an IP range block and you'll have some explaining to do to other staff members who had the same idea." A tad too honest for a guide, perhaps, but if the community is infallible ...
Charles