Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Admins and stewards/Extend global blocks to named accounts

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Extend global blocks to named accounts

  • Problem: Currently global locks are enforced as if they were de facto Global bans, this is despite the official policy stating “This list does not include accounts that have been globally locked on charges of cross wiki disruption, spamming, or vandalism. Such users are not globally banned, per se. If they create new accounts and are not disruptive with those accounts, they will not be locked again merely because it is discovered that they were previously globally locked.” Yet in reality they are enforced as global bans with Stewards locking them upon discovery and local admins of projects where there are no active blocks reverting the addition of educational content merely on the accusation of “lock evasion” (which doesn't exist) even if the content is wanted by the community, this inherently doesn't benefit any project. Although officially global locks 🛅 aren't global bans they unofficially are, and stewards also treat them as such. This can most recently been seen with Virajmishra who is globally banned all but in name, the same goes for Diegusjaimes who has requested an unlocking since July 27th, 2017 and still hasn't had their main account unlocked (as of November 8th, 2017), in fact they may believe that they’re globally banned.

Also note 📝 that global locks have always been meant to be a temporary measure until global blocking to named accounts would be implemented, however after (I think) around seven years this still hasn't been enabled.

  • Who would benefit: The communities, as wiki’s would be given local autonomy, the globally “banned” users (“owners” of locked accounts), and probably the Stewards too because then they won't have to deal with unlock requests.
  • Proposed solution: Extend the global blocking tool to named accounts, this would generally be used how global locks are done now, global locking would still be the preferred method for malicious bots (such as spam bots) and accounts with malicious usernames, but all other named accounts would then be automatically blocked on every new Wikimedia project they attempt to edit in, generally talk page access should be allowed unless abuse has proven too severe, then the user should be advised to kindly request talk page access (on wiki's where this hasn't been locally revoked) for wiki’s where the block reason is “Steward Global block-account”. Of course as one can see with my example a certain local admin doesn't want me to edit Dutch Wikipedia regardless of what positive contributions I could do there, so community discussion should be advised for local unblocking or an assumption of good faith where a chance should be given before bad faith is assumed, or that global block appeals should show the intent of what they would do locally rather than appeal based on the behaviour of other wiki’s. After the user has sufficiently proven that they’re not an immediate menace to the projects where they haven’t been blocked as a “Stewardblock-account”, then they could request a global unblock that doesn't override local blocks.

In this scenario User:Example is blocked on German Wikipedia locally and blocked on the German Wiktionary as a global block, if a steward removes their global block the block on German Wikipedia would stand but for the German Wiktionary would be lifted.

  • More comments: The global locking of Graaf Statler prior to their Foundation ban was unnecessary, and the Stewards shouldn't have locked him again after he edited as a good faith user on projects where he wasn't locally blocked, for this reason a global lock 🔒 has proven to be a de facto global ban.

Discussion[edit]

  • The reason why global blocking for named accounts does not exist is because it has no advantages over global locking. That's because almost all global locks are for troublemakers that aren't usually worth a second chance, such as spammers, LTA sockpuppets, globally banned users and the like. I also don't think that block evasion is usually tolerated. Everything else you are pointing out here seems like a policy question especially since you were in fact unlocked. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 17:27, 9 November 2017 (UTC)Reply[reply]
    The one benefit would be a global autoblock of the IP(s), saving us a couple of seconds running CheckUser on loginwiki (and being more effective than that). – Ajraddatz (talk) 17:30, 9 November 2017 (UTC)Reply[reply]
    phab:T19929 seems like a task for making autoblocks be triggered by locking, although it's apparently not so simple? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:29, 9 November 2017 (UTC)Reply[reply]
    It's an absolute nightmare. An autoblock feature would need to be purpose built for global account blocking anyway, so it could be easier to just include it with locking instead. I think that's what past me was thinking anyway :P – Ajraddatz (talk) 20:45, 9 November 2017 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • phab:T17294. MER-C (talk) 04:00, 13 November 2017 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Voting[edit]

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