Ronny Raschkowan wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
I am annoyed by the behaviour of user:fire. He is not a sysop on Wikisource, yet he was able to come and block a user indefinitely with no better excuse than a non-working link to wikipedia about name-change policy. I immediately reversed the block. Those who participate in Wikisource are quite capable of deciding who should be blocked. We don't need this loose cannon who has not otherwise participated in Wikisource to sneakily acquire some kind of superior access for no other reason to block a user that he does not like.
Ec
Hello Ray,
I was doing username changes requested on this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Changing_username
There was also a user, 'Spik dk', who asked to get his username changed. That's what I did. The instructions say also, that I have to move the User: and the User Talk: Page from the old to the new nick. For security reasons ("This prevents a new user claiming the name, which would mean the signatures and author attributions made by third party users of our content would all be pointing to the wrong person."), there's also an instruction to block the old username.
After changing the username(s) in the database, I asked Angela to get temp sys-op on the Wikis were I had changed the usernames of the people who requested to block the old nicks. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_permissions/Archive1
So: I was not blocking the user because I "don't like him" ( I even don't know him :) ), but because he asked for a username change and (following the instructions) it also included to block the old username :)
Yours, Fire
Hello Ronny Thanks for replying. Perception is often everything, and now that you have made an explanation it makes sense. What I saw was a user whose only contribution was to start a Faroese home page (I have no knowledge of Faroese obscenities, so I would have no way of knowing if he had done something like that.)
What I saw was that a user was blocked indefinitely for flimsy reasons. He failed to follow some bureaucratic procedure about how his name would be changed, and was receiving a penalty far in excess of what we would give to ordinary anonymous vandals. I checked the admin list to see if your name was there; it wasn't. By this point I suspected the worse, so I unblocked him and wrote my message to the mailing list.
In retrospect I can now see that this block was for technical rather than disciplinary reasons. No such block had ever taken place in Wikisource before. Would it not be more appropriate if you had explained what you were doing before you took this action? Any of the existing active sysops would have been happy to accomodate the situation. All we had was a non-working link back to Wikipedia.
Ray