On Sat, 15 Dec 2018 at 15:47, stjn <ole.yves@gmail.com> wrote:

Something is rotten in the way changes are being discussed and communicated, and it must be fixed. The approach to major changes (not talking about some design fix) should involve community and be entirely international, right now, sadly, WMF asks English Wikipedia on a better day and no one on a worse day.


We are a decentralized movement though. Publicizing proposed changes on the Ambassadors list, discussing it on Phabricator, and cross-posting on every VPT, is pretty much the best we can do in terms of getting true international involvement.

On Tue, 18 Dec 2018 at 10:30, geraki <geraki@gmail.com> wrote:
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. 

:(.

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

We should endeavour to explore the impact of all plausible scenarios, but can't reasonably expect a wiki community to examine all unexpected scenarios - if we imposed this requirement, nothing will ever happen. In fact the wiki would never have happened if that was the case.