[Foundation-l] Fwd: Re: Fwd: Wikimedia-wide globalblocking mechanism?

Birgitte SB birgitte_sb at yahoo.com
Mon Feb 4 14:07:45 UTC 2008


--- "mike.lifeguard" <mike.lifeguard at gmail.com> wrote:

> >Ray Saintonge wrote:
> >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.
> 
> I'd be fine with that too, but it's really a moot
> point. This still requires
> a steward (or team of them) to go to each wiki
> individually to make the
> blocks - hardly the most efficient method. This
> proposed mechanism would
> simply automate the process, saving time and
> manpower. When dealing with a
> large number of spambots, or a persistent cross-wiki
> vandal [1], manpower is
> often a prime concern.
> Can we also try to remember that, as with the change
> pagemove upon
> autoconfirmed, we're talking mainly about wikis with
> a community not able to
> effectively fend off the spammers etc. I wrote [2]
> at the time that Heller
> would be proud of the requests to have wikis with no
> community ask to opt-in
> for such a measure; I think the same thing needs to
> be said here.
> Mike.lifeguard
> 
> [1]
>
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Drini/daylog&oldid=861810
> [2]
>
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Metapub&diff=prev&oldid=773117
> 
> 

As I said before [1], stewards should be allowed to
opt-in the wiki's with no community.  Disscussions
only need to happen if there is an active community. 
I also don't mind opt-out if everyone gets
comprehensible notification about the system and how
to opt-out.  

The idea that people check the wiki's block logs on a
regular basis and would even know what such block
would signify if they saw them is unreasonable.  The
only time people completely uniformed about this
system are going to discover it, is when they are
already experiencing a problem.  And they will
speculate amoung themselves about what these blocks
mean and come up some strange bad faith ideas.  And
once they are alll worked up about this, they will
confront the stewards with these bad faith
accusations.  And it will be quite hard to explain
things to them at that time.  Do none of you remember
all the other times we have been through situations
like this? 

The recent messages on this thread show that those
responding to me are twisting what I say without even
considering the compromises I suggest.  So I am done
commenting on this.  Just don't pretend I was
suggesting something as foolish as a wiki with no
community come to a local consensus on opting in,
because I was not.

Birgitte SB

[1]http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2008-February/038322.html1 


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