[WikiEN-l] more active censorship

Wed Jul 6 01:26:05 UTC 2005

On 7/5/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> Nathan J. Yoder (njyoder at energon.org) [050705 23:24]:
> 
> > And no, saying you "should go cool off for a day" doesn't actually
> > address them if you read them and it's also imposing a requirement on
> > the person to counter a BUG. You REALLY keep avoiding this and
> > absolutely insist on using examples (e.g. sock puppets) that aren't
> > applicable to this.  Ther is no "disguise" and logs can easily prove
> > that.
> 
> 
> As I pointed out to you before, this isn't the dev list, and people here
> don't determine whether this documented behaviour is a bug or a feature.
> So making your case here, however eloquently, isn't going to do one dot of
> good in achieving the change you want.
> 
> I note you haven't tried asking on the dev list, mediawiki-l. Perhaps if
> you do, someone will explain why the feature works the way it does.

Hang on. This is a matter of policy. Developers shouldn't determine
policy, just implement it. As a developer myself, I can predict that
developers wouldn't tell you WHY a software process works, but rather
HOW it works. A discussion would contain all sorts of interesting
material, but what it wouldn't contain is some sort of ultimate
authority as to why something works the way it does.

Developers would just shrug and say, that's the way we were told to do
it - go ask management.

As I see it, extending the block of a logged-in editor is
indefensible. And pointless, as they can always ask for the block to
be removed at the correct time, citing whatever excuse they want.

Extending the block of an anonymous or sockpuppet editor has more
merit, as it can be argued that this is an attempt to evade the block,
though I think that there should be some sort of supervision to make
sure that it is really the same editor, and not just someone
accidentally sharing an IP address.

-- 
Peter in Canberra