Well said Nemo Bis. There is an ever increasing autocratic approach to
what used to be community decisions. Societall matters used to be
discussed openly on wiki, or in list, then to have the technical
components on phabricator. Now it seems that the societal are taking
place in phabricator, away from the society and predominantly with the
technical. That is undesirable IMNSHO.
I would think that the easiest and means to apply this is for large
wikis only, and run some checks on the medium sized wikis to understand
the size of the issue, and the consequences prior to implementation.
Leave the small wikis alone.
-- billinghurst
------ Original Message ------
From: "Johan Jönsson" <[email protected]>
To: "Wikitech Ambassadors" <[email protected]>
Sent: 29/11/2018 3:06:34 AM
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-ambassadors] Removal of unblockself rights on
wiki
On Wed, Nov 28, 2018 at 4:34 PM Federico Leva (Nemo)
<[email protected]> wrote:
Brian Wolff, 27/11/18 18:45:
> I'm still open to communities who want to continue to have the old
> behaviour to opt out of the new behaviour - The primary thing here
is
> that the default has now changed, so that anywhere that was using
the
> old behaviour for no other reason then it was the default is now
using
> the new behaviour.
The problem with this is that the right to unblock yourself is clearly
something of use in unforeseen emergencies, not something for which
you'd usually write up a consensus discussion or a guideline 5 years
in
advance.
I understand the feeling of urgency in doing such changes by fiat in
response to apparent threats, but I hope you do appreciate the
potential
for such permission changes to alter the power structure and social
workings of the wikis in ways we don't fully anticipate. This change
may
seem small, but it does dismantle one component of the reciprocality
of
administrative powers on the wiki.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Administrator
In particular, such a new default means, on wikis with 2 sysops, that
one sysop has the capacity to unilaterally and irreversibly block the
second sysop, and that in any last-resort controversy the permissions
encourage and give a prize to whoever shoots first. (Which is already
a
common problem in online communities, see StackExchange with their
"fastest gun in the west" dilemma.)
I think it would be wise for such a default to be changed only on
wikis
which have at least 3 administrators *and* a bureaucrat.
There's an ongoing discussion about reaching out to wikis and ask them
if this will be a problem, and how to solve the problem of one admin
blocking the other(s) on small wikis, in this Phabricator task:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T150826
//Johan Jönsson
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