[Foundation-l] Stewards acting locally

Sun Aug 8 17:17:06 UTC 2010

While I've had my own issues with Stewards reaching into local communities I
actually think these blocks are important and very useful for our xwiki
abusers. While the transparency reasoning that Pathoschild mentioned is true
and important just as if not more important is the autoblocks (where at
least a day or so block makes sense).

Global locking does not have any autoblock like feature and we have a large
portion of our xwiki abusers (and even a growing number of those who only
attack only one or two sites and have figured out the global login system)
who will take advantage of this and go to another wiki, create the account
and SUL over to whatever project they want to attack. This is also the issue
with abusive names (they often don't even edit, that isn't the point).

If the stewards can't implement these autoblocks it is easier for abusers to
use wikibooks as a starting point for abuse, just because they didn't edit
there doesn't mean that they didn't use the project as a spring board or
that they couldn't in the future since it is obvious they know the project
exists and will now try it when they go trying to create new accounts.
Globally locking active xwiki vandals is almost useless if they are able to
just  recreate accounts continually or at least until they SUL onto a wiki
without local CUs so that a Steward can check and a global IP block can be
implemented.

James Alexander
james.alexander at rochester.edu
jamesofur at gmail.com

On Sun, Aug 8, 2010 at 12:40 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki at gmail.com>wrote:

> Jesse (Pathoschild), 08/08/2010 16:53:
> > On Sun, Aug 8, 2010 at 9:04 AM, Aaron Adrignola
> > <aaron.adrignola at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> It is irritating to continually see stewards making local blocks at the
> >> English language Wikibooks with the comment "crosswiki abuse <!
> --globally
> >> locked[1]; about bot[2]-- >".
> >
> > These local blocks are made when the account has been globally locked
> > by a steward (see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/SH#lock ). There can
> > be no further undermining of local community autonomy, because the
> > local account is blocked with or without an explicit local block. The
> > local blocks are implemented automatically as a way for local
> > communities to know the user is blocked, since there is no other local
> > indication of the implicit block.
>
> I'm ok with those block, but if this is all you want, why isn't a short
> block enough? It would leave a trace in the local logs, although it
> wouldn't be displayed on [[Special:Contributions]].
>
> Nemo
>
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