[Foundation-l] Emergency on Wiktionary

Wed Aug 9 18:08:58 UTC 2006

On 8/9/06, Wildrick Steele <wildrick.steele at gmail.com> wrote:
> Actually not. There weren't any stewards around and the perpetrator remained
> sysopped for a full day, doing hundreds of random blocks and unblocks. We
> had to wait for developer intervention to remove the flag in the database.
> Quite a nonperformance for the otherwise well-functioning steward team.
> We'll take Wikimania as a good excuse :-)

Wikimania may have been part of the problem. Also, the request at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_permissions#Removal_of_access
seems to have been lost amongst the noise of dozens of other requests,
which for some reason, no longer get immediately archived, so it's not
easy to see whether or not there are outstanding requests. Perhaps
moving urgent requests to a separate section at the top would help in
future. There is a (not-very-active) IRC channel at
#wikimedia-stewards, but the #wikimedia channel is often a better
place to find a steward in an emergency. I don't know whether either
of these channels were tried before finding a developer.

This might just be a sign that new steward elections are required.

Angela.