On Thu, Dec 13, 2018 at 8:20 PM Deryck Chan <deryckchan(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I agree with what's been said in this thread so
far.
An admin of a large wiki shouldn't be allowed to unblock themselves, if
another admin blocked them.
However, on small wikis, this would lead to a first-mover advantage
situation, so admins should be forbidden from unblocking themselves if
there are more than a certain number of admins (and bureaucrats).
I would recommend a threshold of five admins. Notice that if there are
only three admins (with Nemo's proposal), if one admin blocks another
admin, the situation reduces to a "shoot first to win" between the two
remaining admins. If there are five admins and one blocks another, there
will still be three uninvolved admins left to argue it out :)
The Cantonese Wikipedia recently came close to a situation where an admin
might get blocked for bad behaviour. A few users presented a strong case
that an admin had been acting against policy. Because we have a dozen
admins, a few other admins were able to discuss the matter, and issued
strong words of admonishment to the unbehaving admin, and the unbehaving
admin disappeared from the wiki since then. Thinking back, one of the
concerns we had was that an admin could unblock themselves anyway, so there
was actually no real course of action to take other than desysopping (we
have a bureaucrat; not me). If this feature of "no self-unblocks on wikis
with lots of admins" was in place, then the threat of a block would have
had more teeth.
Just to keep everyone aware of what's been happening in
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T150826 – to avoid the "shoot first to
win" situation, a blocked admin can block the admin who blocked them but no
one else. Our balance of terror.
//Johan Jönsson
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