[WikiEN-l] Newbie and not-so-newbie biting

[George Herbert]

On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 4:48 PM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
>[...]
> *Any* system relies on people being told how to appeal against admin
> actions, and it depends on them also having the confidence that they
> will get a fair hearing, and that depends on those reviewing the
> actions to genuinely review them, and not just rubber-stamp them.
>
> Again, the trouble is that the vast majority of appeals are rightly
> declined. So the volume overwhelms the few bad blocks and denying of
> unblock requests, and things get missed.
>
> Some of those end up at ArbCom, sent to the arbitration mailing list
> and ending up at the door of BASC (the Ban Appeals Subcommittee), but
> that is only a small fraction of an undoubtedly larger number of
> questionable blocks and actions that never get properly reviewed (and
> that in turn is dwarfed by the very large number of correct actions).

To add in a step - if you're blocked, the block message says to
contact unblock-en-l first, and a few people a day (10 avg?  20?) do.
Some of those are just goofing off and have no intention of
contributing positively.  Most were caught in wider blocks or IP
autoblocks that had side effects.  Some are problem editors we can
reason with.

Sometimes, they're problem editors we can't reason with, and
unfortunately those are the ones we punt to arbcom as the next appeal
step (per policy...).

Unblock-en-l isn't officially a peer review or actions review process
step - it functions as one, to a minor extent, because if we see a
possibly bad block we usually discuss with the blocking admin and
follow up.  But it's not titled as a review per se.


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