[Foundation-l] Wiktionary blocking policy

[Andrew Whitworth]

> Block with no warning is - in most cases - unacceptable, and I'm sure most
> people here would agree with that. I don't make a lot of use of wiktionary,
> but if people don't get {{test}} and {{don't disrupt}} templates then I do
> not believe the project's administrators are doing their job properly.

A few points are worth making here. First, the other projects are not
wikipedia, and there is no reason to suspect that the same rules,
guidelines and standards that are common on Wikipedia are going to be
common anywhere else. I know that on Wikibooks, we are far less
lenient with our vandals then the Wikipedians are, and we suffer far
fewer vandalism attacks because of it. We do, of course, have an
appeals process for the occasional false-positive (it's never come
up), but I have no reason to assume that en.Wiktionary would have the
same or even a similar process to what we have.

What constitutes an administrators "job" varies from project to
project, and what constitutes the "proper" performance of that job
also varies. What kinds of behavior the wikitionary community have
discussed and agreed upon amongst themselves may be completely
different from the decisions reached on en.wp. I wouldn't be so quick
to condemn the volunteers of another community without knowing more of
the background information, if I were you.

> I'm sure some might argue this should have been raised on the wiktionary
> mailing list, but I believe if a project has - as in this case - earned a
> reputation for capriciously wielding the banhammer it needs the wider
> Wikimedia community to say this is unacceptable.

If you want all the projects to conform to some basic, minimum
standard, then it behouves us to put that standard into writing. I
think such an effort would be doomed to failure, but maybe the
"minimum" is small enough so as not to raise too many objections.
Also, if we want the board of the "Wikimedia Community" to get
involved, it would be good to specify how such an intervention would
even take place.

--Andrew Whitworth