[Foundation-l] Fwd: Re: Fwd: Wikimedia-wide global blocking mechanism?
Ray Saintonge
saintonge at telus.net
Sat Feb 2 19:07:28 UTC 2008
effe iets anders wrote:
> I am talking here about *short term* blocks of proven vandal bots that
> are going through a high number of wiki's. These bots will not add
> anything good to the wikimedia wiki's, and are only destructive.
> Blocking here is stopping that bot from continuing, and I think that
> falls within the scope of what a steward is supposed to be for.
>
This seems like shifting the goal posts. As I understood the issue from
the many messages in this thread it would apply to human editors as well
as bots. How do you propose to distinguish whether a vandal is a human
or a bot? What is the process for establishing that it is a "proven"
vandal bot? How can you guarantee that the process will not be used
against human editors who have merely been caught up in a pissing match
with the admins in a particular project?
> The current situation is that as soon as a vandal bot is detected,
> there are two options. Either preventively block the IP on *every*
> small wiki, which means: go to the wiki, log in, grant yourself admin
> rights, block, remove the rights. A lot of work. Both result in long
> blocks, because we do not like the bots to come back tomorrow, it's
> too much of work for that. I think everyone agrees that this situation
> is bad and should be improved.
>
If communities are going to insist that a steward desysop himself every
time he goes into a project to perform routine anti-vandalism it's easy
to see that it is more objectionable that they perform acts
automatically without ever logging themselves in. Perhaps it would be
preferable that once a steward has properly given himself sysop rights
he retain those rights unless there is a specific objection from the
community. That would be far more acceptable than any kind of automated
process.
Ec
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