[Foundation-l] Global ban - poetlister?

[George Herbert]

On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 3:00 PM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 8:30 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 4 June 2011 15:42, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I think it's a fairly dangerous precedent to have the Wikimedia Foundation
>>> involved in making individual decisions about who can and can't edit.
>>
>>
>> They certainly can determine who can and can't use the servers they
>> are custodians of.
>
> Frankly, it's not just a question of who has the power to press the
> BANNED button; who at the WMF do you think should or has time to sit
> around and review the actions of every cross-project problematic user
> in every language and decide? We do need to have some sort of clear
> mechanism to make and review complaints, and there's simply not those
> processes (yet) on a global level. As both a community member and
> someone who needs to worry about WMF resources, I want to see a
> distributed and scalable process for this sort of thing, one that
> involves, serves, and is transparent to the community. If having WMF
> office actions to do global (b)locks is helpful or necessary,
> especially for these few totally bad actors, fine; but I don't
> personally see that as the starting point for a sustainable system. Do
> you?
>
> However, as Sue stated earlier in this thread, the WMF is concerned
> about this issue, wants to help, and I think further ideas about the
> areas in which the WMF could help would be super, especially in
> conjunction with community efforts.
>
> -- phoebe

These are all good questions, and I think that it's healthy to be
careful about this.

With that said, we ban (block) people by the unfortunate hundreds a
day on en.wikipedia, ban (community ban) them once every few weeks,
ban (arbcom ban) once every few months.  We ban (BANNINATE- Poetlister
grade) less than once a year.

I would be appalled if anyone tried to escalate any of the "normal"
bans we do to the Foundation for global action.  But in the very rare
special cases...


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com