On Thu, Dec 13, 2018 at 8:20 PM Deryck Chan <deryckchan@gmail.com> wrote:

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.

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 :)

In fact, in small wikis it is more likely that the rest of admins will not want to get involved. I've seen it, experienced it. In wikis with more than five admins (and some may not be active - you loose rights only after two years of inactivity). I have even seen admins blocking themselves and taking wikibreak after blocking another admin, just to show that the were unhappy that they had to do it. 

On Fri, Dec 14, 2018 at 1:39 AM billinghurst <billinghurstwiki@gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, the community is noisy, and has a diversity of opinion, and one that will take time to reach a consensus.  Yes, it is not our technical peoples general skill set, so we have others moderate the conversation.  This is not solely a technical problem, get over it.

Indeed, it is not solely a technical problem. No problem is solely technical. One should think all possible consequences within the community when affecting the status quo. Do not expect that the communities will not find ways to manipulate any technical change in ways unpredicted. For example, the "interface-admins" change resulted in some wikis to not have any interface admins, while it had before admins that where able to do the work and they did it. But the removal of the rights let some members of the community to push a policy that "interface-admins" should be _elected_. So for existing admins that would be a reelection, and in fact a way for some to remove some rights from existing admins without proposing a de-adminship). 
I recall that it was said that it is up to the communities to decide how the rights should given, but the rights were not removed by decision of the communities.

Any technical change should examine all expected and unexpected scenarios for manipulation before implemented.

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