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

[effe iets anders]

2008/2/4, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb op yahoo.com>:

> >
>
> 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

I think that a minimal notification would be to explain the situation
in several languages on the userpage of the username that appears as
the blocker. See for instance the [[user:Proxyblocker]] on several
projects. However, we should do that then on every project of course.
If a user would be "hit" by such a short duration block, (s)he could
easily check why, what and by whom, where to protest and how to opt
out. Of course we would never be able to cover all 250 languages, but
we could of course aim to at least have it translated in 20-30
languages, maybe centralized to have an updated version all the time.
Additional to that a message on the village pumps as far as available
would of course be needed etc.

The blocks would in my view be quite short (long term blocks we would
have to handle in the old fashioned way?) so if a user is frustrated
by it, xe should be able to complain about it the next day.

Btw: about the question what is a bot:
If it sounds like a duck, if it looks like a duck, if it smells like a
duck, you can act as it would be a duck. Of course we don't bother
whether it is *really* a bot, or some moorhuhn that is editing
vandalism very fast, it's about the type of "contributions" I was
referring to of course :)

BR, Lodewijk