Requests for comment/Admin role on Commons (inventing or changing unilaterally the community policies)

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The following request for comments is closed. There is a general consensus here that this RfC is not useful and should be closed. TonyBallioni (talk) 03:46, 12 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

This RFC is:

  • not about my own blocking (for one week) on Commons (which I have appealed there, it was caused several days after by my creation of a single page that was not abusing anything and made according to all existing documentations, and Jcb insists by refusing to give any proof his alledged "community procedure") or just about Jcb personnaly (this Rfc can concern any admin) ;
  • it is about the role granted by the community to admins in Wikimedia, and the way this role can be controled (i.e. how they apply the policies and can transform or reinvent them as they want).

Because wiki admins:

  • can effectively transform Wikimedia projects into private properties of their own, and don't want (and don't have?) to justify it.
  • influence directly the community votes by direct threatening or blocking actions against people that may not like what such specific admin decided (for unrevealed personal goals). So they can do all they want (including excluding regular users) to preserve their current role, and then force others to accept a change they made unilaterally in existing policies.
  • (there are already several other open RFC's about the role of existing admins on othe wikis (listed in the right box), taking such unilateral actions applied by brute force, and by threat against regular users that do not violate the community policies, and even massive violation of the existing Wikimedia policies by these admins, including copyright violations by them, or exclusion of users because of their personal opinion, and right of speech on non-Wikimedia sites such as social networks even though they are not bound to Wikimedia policies). So this is not a new concern for my own case: it drastically reduces the openness of Wikimedia that exclude a lot of regular people for unfair reasons. And this is becoming a serious issue if we consider the primary NPOV goal of Wikimedia (and even its legality see below).

I initiated this generic RFC because of a single wiki admin (e.g. Jcb on Commons) can abuse his granted role of admin so that he can:

  • block users illegitimately with false reasons given
  • refusing to justify his action
  • applying their own invented policy
  • refusing to apply the existing community policies
  • changing them silently without any open discussion with the community
  • using only some fuzzy reference to an history of past decisions on some temporary notice board (never summarized and reported to the community before cleaning it completely, and not always archiving it for later inspection) managed by a closed group, instead of actual references to existing community policies
  • massively using the silent destruction of pages complying to the Wikimedia rules and goals
  • threatening users for not creating some kind of contents they don't like
  • hiding these actions to other regular users
  • not allowing other users to even discuss that or challenge their decision (or just even reporting an error of appreciation, when specific a admin used accelerated procedures with no review at all or just personal contacts from one admin to another one of their choice or some selected people that share their opinion; this occurs by private contacts taken by the initial admin and the other selected admins or users in their "friends").
  • not allowing other users to participate to appeals (the community appealing procedures don't work, time pass and no reevaluation is taken when evidences are coming that the accelerated decision was incorrect or biased by unfair reports, users are then expulsed massively and no other wants to defend users as they can be banned too under unfair accusations of "harassment" jsut because they need to give the name of the admin and they don't generalize what they say to apply their comments to all other admins; appeals are only performed by tracking in a closed noticeboard that regular users cannot inspect and follow permanently, due to the huge volume and the absence of summary or generic tracking system, e.g. in Phabricator, where these can be analyzed, sorted/organized by different scopes, or navigated by date/admin name/project/language...) The lack of regular reporting of their very frequent and massive actions is now a problem, because they use brute force technics and a number of automated tools with little human supervision and no way to explore the history to discover their past errors.

The Wikimedia goals are breached, policies are voluntarily not respected, and now Commons can be a personal property of a single admin inventing the rules, out of any community control. And this happens as well in many other wikis.

See the end of my talk page on Commons, where I was blocked unilaterally (and where that admins even blocks the normal appealing procedure (hiding it from other admins) and wants to judge itself his decision (as if the same judge could influence an appeal), even though I did not breach any rule (and Jcb does not give any liable proof, it only justifies it by his own past actions and comments made in private exchanges with some other users he chose). Jcb is currently in the top-3 of page deleters on Commons (see analysis above)
May be I made an error about something I was not aware of (and that could have been siomply discussed and corrected without more troubles, taking into account several views to conciliate them), but I was left without any hint about these "common procedures" (I was just given a direct administrative order). And several days after, that single admin decided that his single notification sent was sufficient to justify a blocking for the editing of a single page that was not even clearly concerned by his order (as it was already existing but misdirected): he deleted that page several days later and then blocked me immediately; he said this was that page that was in fact the reason of my blocking for an alledged "disruptive editing", even though it did not disrupt any one (except Jcb himself for unknown personal goals); now he changes the reasons because I contest his decision. And he invents new reasons, such as pretending that I would refuse to apply the community rules (something I never said, it is only imagined by him), when in fact he does not want to demonstrate which community rules are applicable in his decision.
Note: there's still no "Arbitration committee for Commons, for other global projects, and for almost all "small" wikis. So we only depend on the non-working appeal system used locally on each wiki (which only allows users to post on their own local talk page: the appeal request is seen only by a few existing admins in their temporary "notice board" (which almost never review them, will almost never admit their errors or will never negociate, just contacting one other local admin to get the approval that they give immediately to reject the appeal; they don't care at all about these appeals or the presented justifications, and will invent new reasons like "harassment" just because we need to cite one of them), and does not allow contacting any other Wikimedians on the same wiki to inform them of the situation, that's why this request is also posted here, to get a better exposure, with independant admins or users that need to be aware of what is really happening on their favorite wiki, and with less fear of suffering the BOOMERANG effect, as they will suffer in their favorite wiki). Appeals from admins should be done on another wiki with independant admins and the admins on the local wikis may not decide on the other, only give some non-decisive comments (they should not enforce their adminship if they also have it on the appealing wiki, as it would violate the rules, and should not threaten any visitor coming from other wiki that these admins also control; normally, admins in Meta should have no adminship in any other wiki, they should be completely separate).
So that they won't be judges and parties to the appeals, something that always what happens in the local notice board when users try to post their appeal on their local talk page and make appeal procedures completely uneffective on ALL existing wikis where their admins can do everything they want at any time against any local user (includiung with invented reasons that are kept permanently) and they are completely out of control by the local community. This is a major problem (as seen in the list of RFCs above) as this completely voids the NPOV goal and all other community policies (that these local admin silently rewrite, by directly influencing the local users to force them to approve their changes; these local regular users are then just considered as "slaves" whose patient work is spoliated, damaged, destroyed without any respect, especially on wikis when there are not a lot of other competing admins like English Wikipedia, which is the only place where appeals work sometimes, and where there's an ArbCom as well: this explains that abuses made by admins in EN.WP is exceptional, and is more easily reverted, and why EN.WP admins are following the local policies more scrupulously; this is also a reason why the English Wikipedia is much better respected by independant third parties, like the press, than all other wikis, because its neutrality is better preserved; but the situation everywhere else is dramatic: most Wikimedia projects are directly influenced and "owned" by their local admins which can change or invent the "rules" unilaterally as they want and when they want).

We should protect the community goals and policies, and the community process for building, adapting or changing them.

And if such policies/rules exist, they MUST be promptly documented and explicitly given to those who ask for them (and who contest an administrative decision), and not changed unilaterally without the normal community process and free participation to their elaboration (including with contradicting points of views).

Wikimedia will no longer be an "open" community if it is just administered unilaterally by brute force and becomes a private property of just a few existing admins, abusing their privileges granted only by the community at large, and that can only be kept under scrutiny by the same community at large, and not by a part of that community selected by the admins in place (who will then eject their opponents at any time in order to maintain by force their existing privileged role).

This risk exists because existing admins take a lot of decisions, most of them justified by good common policies. So many remaining users can "thank" them, and may continue to grant them some level of "trust", without being aware of a range of abusive actions taken silently by them, hidden in the mass, and progressively transforming the goals of the project to make it finaly proprietary and only visited by people that accept these new invented rules without challenging them and without participating to their elaboration.

With that power in place, and then left out of control of the community that created it,

  • admins on a wiki will progressively reduce the risk of having their role revoked or limited, they will influence everything that happens on it, and the (officially declared) Wikimedia goals of neutrality and openness are completely lost;
  • they will then severaly reduce the number of people that participage to Wikimedia, whose public reputation is severaly damaged (as described now in other medias that analyze how contents in Wikimedia are under influence, and how it selects the users that are allowed to participate).
  • Because there will only remain users selected by those admins, the neutrality will constantly degrade, and the public participating to it will unavoidably erode (others will have abandoned and will go on other sites: there's no more a large community, rich of their multiple views, and trying to conciliate and to find a way to coexist peacefully)
  • Wikimedia will no longer be the precious worldwide instrument for peace and education, if it ever becomes governed like in a dictatorship (we'll see the same effect that what is seen in official Chinese medias, books, education, news, and complete erasure of all historic tracks for younger people that never lived and never heard about some events in their own country...).
  • Contents on Wikimedia will loose their acquired reputation and trust instead of improving it progressively over time.
  • Financing Wikimedia will become a huge problem (because of lost audience, or it will be under direct influence of a few financial and technical donators, that can remove their support at any time), wikis functionalities will have to be drastically limited (or simply shutdown), before seeing the wikis becoming invisible on the web (replaced by commercial social networks and search engines, but still under non-open, semi-dictatorial, and intrusive governing, and already causing major threats to the civil and legal life and freedom of anyone on Earth).

Thanks for your comments. verdy_p (talk) 04:39, 6 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion[edit]

  • Did you try to address this issue on Commons first? --Rschen7754 18:44, 7 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    @Rschen7754: Yes, at c:User talk:Verdy p/archive14#You have been blocked for a duration of 1 week.   — Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me 19:26, 16 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    No, I mean at c:COM:AN or something like that. --Rschen7754 20:17, 16 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes, no one replied before the end of that week. The appeal simply did not work, and was then archived (commented only on my talk page after fact, so never made visible to others. Most admins did not know this happened, the appeal was rejected after its end (only for archiving purpose on c:COM:AN), even if it was judged correct and I should not have been banned. The reason given was not changed and remained public (just like the old reason given 4 years ago for a valid request I made to admins, that was correctly documented, but applied incorrectly, and then asked again by someone else where it was applied exactly like whatr I requested. But I was banned for unfair "harassment" foir jsut saying that the first admin did not make the edit request correctly (as documented). Sayhing that it was incorrect was used as if it was "intimidation/harassment" against that admin. Time has passed, nothing has changed: even if this was invalid, it is now reused incorrectly by people (including existing admins) that ignore the history and just look at what remains listed publicly in the block history (even if it was false). So in summary I did not make anything wrong, I used the existing procedures, and I was banned for that by a "w:WP:BOOMERANG" effect (which also threatens now anyone that would defend my position: the community process no longer works at all, admins can then do all they want against selected users even if beside that they do a lot of good job, notably for copyright issues; but when there are conflicting guildeines, and no existing policy at all, like in my case, this is really a problem: a few admins have transformed the wiki into their proprietary project, and will compeltely discard all honest efforts, including attempts to conciliate; and thy use accelerated procedures that don't follow the policies, and the common sense that their decision is in fact debatable and not enforcable directly by their privilege; they can make errors, that's why there are appeals, but appeals don't work the way it is published: which includes posting a template on the user talk page, where it is the only place it can be done; this template will then post a notification, in c:COM:AN only because it lists the user pages that have included that special template, creating a tracking category; there's no other way to appeal the decision as we cannot post anywhere else, or contact any other user of the wiki to come to the rescue, and most people fear the BOOMERANG effect they risk if they defend me: see below an example). verdy_p (talk) 12:20, 27 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    Verdy p was blocked over unwillingness to comply with our established procedures after warnings. This block was reviewed by another admin, who agreed with the block. I fail to see the higher goal of persisting to create pages in the wrong namespace. As has been pointed out to Verdy p already, other users have proposed this in the past at various noticeboards at Commons and all of these discussions resulted in the maintenance of the status quo. Jcb (talk) 20:34, 16 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    And I repeatedly asked you for evidences of such decisions/policies of "established procedures" (where they were decided and how). You refused to give them (and you continue to refuse). Your personal claims are invalid and was clearly not justifying my blocking. Decisions made by admins in their own notice boards are definitely not community policies ! Because the only "votes" that count there are those taken by one or two admins, all the rest is ignored. The admins noticeboards are not an open area where regular people can decide the policies, they are not a subtitute for open talk pages. And when regular users ask them for evidence, and they refuse to give it, the community-granted admins role is abused. And I still don't see any rationale about your "disruptive reason" given for these non-disruptive and helpful pages (even if they are not galeries and were not intended to be galeries) What would have happened if, instead of creating a basic disambigation page (like seen in all other wikis), I had created a gallery of related topics? You never proposed that solution (and in fact never proposed anything for what is a frequent and recurrent problem in Commons, where galeries are regularly created for ambiguous topics, then abusively redirected to a single non-ambiguous one, ignoring all other relevant topics). And you've even deleted such disambiguating gallery pages in the past that tried to do that, but that could not be categorized anywhere else than as "Disambiguation pages" because of mixed topics). Such massive deletion in the main namespace for ambiguous topics does not help anyone, it just allows the same problems to reoccur at any time ! You've compeltely dried the Disambiguation category from all pages in the main namespace, even if they did not cause any problem there, keeping only the disambiguation categories. And until now this was done according to all real documentation (and not your alleged "established procedure" for which there's still NO evidence at all that these were community policies). I still claim that you invented the rule yourself of within your small committee to enforce things that were never decided by the community. verdy_p (talk) 09:22, 27 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
This is a nasty attack from Verdy p. The user takes own fantasies for reality. Such situation as (s)he described does not exist, at least in Commons. I can see only personal feeling of being offended by justified block. Verdy p was blocked for short time by two different admins due to two different reasons (intimidation/harassment and project disruption), (s)he appealed both blocks, both appeals were rejected by different admins, altogether four admins agreed with the blocks. Both appeals would be accepted, if Verdy p would apologize and promise to abide Commons policies, but (s)he did not do that. This request for comment is very vague, it does not consist any diffs, only empty baseless accusations. Taivo (talk) 07:09, 17 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
The "intimidation/harassment" was wrong from the start. In fact my request was correctly explained, documented, tested, but applied incorrectly (that's all what I said, it was still not harassment or intimidation). The proof being that: exactly the same request I did was asked again by another user, on the same page I used initially, and applied exactly like I initially asked and documented. But my unfair blocking was kept indefinitely, and reused unfairly recently by some unaware new admin ignoring the real history and just reading the very basic (but inexact) block history kept indefinitely (and now illegally according to GDPR) on Commons. This is a serious concern for privacy reason (and this concerns the WMF).
Now your statement "The user uses fantasies..." is an ad nominem attack (which not only is out of topic here), but also violates existing contributor rules. There's no such "fantasy", because I asked for evidences (that never came when I requested them and even after the end of the blocking period) and there were conflicting rules that could not be enforced simultaneously (and then used selectively). The history of talks on my page on Commons has cumulated a lot of thanks (including on the archive6 that was linked above). the fact that there may be some problems caused in some unsuspected situations can be fixed without invoking the admin noticeboards: the ongoing talks (with several exposed solutions) are there for that: finding a consensus and finding evidences of what is alledged: this takes some time and there's no need to use an emergency procedure especially when there are no harms and just some concerns for some users in some pages with their own preferences settings in the wiki.
Frequently we cannot satisfy everyone because there are technical limitations (that will find a solution later... provided they are discussed and scheduled, not just forgotten by "blind reverts"). I always try to satisfy most users for the most frequent cases but I never forget the minority users that have their place too (just like "minority languages" or cultures).
But there's a ramping monoculture in the small community of admins on each wiki project (including on Commons where it should be much more open). verdy_p (talk) 09:03, 27 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I personally think this RFC should be speedy closed. I will disclose that I do not have a good impression of this user because of the various incidents at User talk:Verdy p/archive6 - and it seems that not much has changed. --Rschen7754 06:41, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I second this. Besides the fact that this is overwhelmingly out of meta's RFC scope, I'm seeing a clear vested interest on Verdy p's part (given the block). If this RFC is really not about this block... then... I legitimately can't consider this possibility because it's so laughable. The block was clearly justifiable, just accept it. I can't see the need for this sort of revenge. Hiàn (talk) 17:24, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Third. This is anger about a block and nothing more. Simultaneously to say "This RFC is [...] not about my own blocking (for one week) on Commons" and "I initiate this RFC because of a single admin on Commons (Jcb) abusing his role of admin [by blocking me]" is to be utterly devoid of self-awareness and intellectual honesty. Verdy_p offers 1) no evidence to support allegations, 2) no evidence of systemic abuses by Jcb, and 3) no evidence of systemic abuses by any other Common admin(s) (which one would think necessary to discuss "Admin role on Commons"). Verdy_p, further, cites no policy on Commons, Meta, or otherwise that has been violated and, accordingly, no evidence thereof. Instead, Verdy_p merely engages in hyperbolic nonsense, personal attacks, and failures of good faith to continue elsewhere the deluge of vitriol. Эlcobbola talk 17:38, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Points 1) 2) 3) are incorrect. But they apply to Jcb that refused (and continues to refuse) to give such evidence and applies his own decisions alone. And I do not make personal attacks but as you want evidences, I have no other choices than naming the persons because my comments (still not personal but only based on facts of what they did) is not applicable to others. But I also cite the other open Rfcs that concerns other wikis for similar reasons: the role of admins and waht they can do is subject to scrutinization and should be discussed openly by the community and not in their own small noticeboard for expeditive actions that could still be appealed when they are errors (excusable by ignorance). verdy_p (talk) 09:47, 27 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
you should expect repeated episodes of anger directed to the unhealthy culture on commons. if you imagine that you can block people with impunity, you are mistaken. Slowking4 (talk) 17:03, 20 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I did not block Verdy_P, have never blocked Verdy_P, and I did not review or even notice the unblock request. I've had no interaction with them whatsoever and, in fact, even opposed Jcb's RfA. I also don't see a diff of where I've blocked anyone with impunity. I do, however, see you've been blocked on numerous projects. Could that be because you too are incapable of respecting community expections and are similarly utterly disingenuous? Эlcobbola talk 21:25, 20 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • To play the devil's advocate (given the comments above): IIRC there is no clear consensus regarding the creation of disambiguation pages in gallery (main) namespace. Commons doesn't have any disambiguation pages in gallery (main) namespace, but the reason for that is because (IIRC) Jcb deleted them all. And after having deleted them, used their non-existence as an argument why disambiguation pages do not belong in gallary (main) namespace. Alexis Jazz (talk) 22:23, 22 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • No, that's not correct. Several different admins have been deleting these pages for over a decade at least, as 'gallery page without a gallery', which has been present as a standard reason for speedy deletion since before I became an admin. The clear consensus does exist. In the past years there has at least been a handful of discussions on this at several notices board, including an unsuccessful UDR, and all of them showed this consensus. Jcb (talk) 13:53, 23 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
      • The "clear consensus" is just "don't create a gallery page that has no images shown in galleries". And the UDR log or noticeboard history is also not qualifying as an approved regular "community policy", it's just a partial track of decisions made by admins (even if theses decisions are wrong, or appeals are rejected by them, not taking care of checking if there's a real policy about it and if the user being blocked was correctly informed of their existence), but most of these decisions are not even tracked there. There's just a global history log of their action, which is unusable (no filter by namespace, no search by keyword in their posted comments), everything is lost within a huge mass of destructions of files for copyright reason). In this case, you won't even find any tag used by Jcb when he massively destroyed the disambiguation page, and no relevant link at all in them (because in fact Jcb had no link to existing community page to provide!). That admin history log is almost unusable, no one can make a decent report of what they made (the different counters shown in the summary page do not allow decent searches not even by "policy tag" that they should use)
      • The "established procedures" used by admins (in their own working group) are also NOT policies, they can be challenged and scrutinized by ANY Wikimedian that will expect from admins that they give at least evidence of these policies (this did not occur from Jcb, after multiple requests to him). He has constantly deleted all disambiguation pages that were consistant and definitely not intended to be any kind of gallery in the root namespace. There's never been any community decision to exclude disambiguation pages from the root namespace. (unless someone can prove it: for now nobody knows if they exist, and even Jcb does not know, so blocking me for that reason when my edit was clearly "helpful" and not "deceptive" or "disrupting" anyone is completely unjustified). So Commons remains full of hard redirects from renamed galleries. Navigation between them does not work as expected (they go to unrelated topics and there's no visible "redish" sign that these links don't go to the correct page, they are just normal links, hardly redirected to the wrong destination, and that are difficult to locate and fix). This makes all galleries on Commons using inconsistant naming, and incorrect navigation from everywhere (with any link they include on their pages) and causes a nightmare for maintenance and fixing these pages (in summary, existing galleries in Commons are almost unusable with all these unfixed links, they may be usable at one time, but then broken later if the target is renamed, or the links will simply disappear compeltely from navboxes if the redirects or disambiguation pages are deleted, like what Jcb did).
      • This does not apply to disambiguation pages that have always existed (and that Jcb deleted completely and massively by reinterpreting that concensus). And those pages were created exactly to avoid all hard redirects to disambiguated galleries from an ambiguous name (this problem is recurrent and frequent!). It was the case for the page that was recreated with a true gallery but an ambiguous name: I was blocked only for only moving that gallery content back to the correct disambiguated name and for making sure it would no longer hardly redirect to it. Also this used exactly the existing documentation (that Jcb changed siently AFTER blocking me unfairly). Jcbn did not solve the problem of hardly redirected galleries, or galleries recreated frequently on ambiguous names.
      • So yes my blocking was unfair: I correctly moved the contents where they should be (galleries kept in the root namespace with their content and containing a gallery of images as expected). And it was certainly not a "disruptive edit" as incorrectly claimed by Jcb.
      • But may be now we can propose that "disambiguation pages" on Commons should take the form of a gallery? i.e. one image by topic, but no classification except as "Disambiguation pages" only, exceptly like standard disambiguation pages on all other wikis? The excuse gallery page without a gallery would not even apply to this case ! But he would find another controversial nad biased reason (like "non sense", or still "not valid gallery page: no relevant topic" to categorize"... This goes nowhere, we need a solution against the recurrent recreation of "true galleries" but with ambiguous names, and then their hard redirect that just breaks all other galleries pages trying to link to a different topic). "Disambiguation pages" are not "Galleries" and I agree, but there's never been any decision to reserve the main namespace only to gallery pages. And there remains lot of incorrect hard redirects from an ambiguous name to a single one (not necessarily the correct one, creating then a NPOV problem, where some topics, msot of them in English-speaking countries, are considered by some to be more important than others; we had the example with a small village in Italy taking over the ambiguous name for a whole State, first subdivision of a country, and containing many cities, towns and villages more important than the Italian one). It was then impossible to correctly link that State without falling on the Italian village (and then no other way from that page to find the homonymous State with its non-evident disambiguation suffix!), in summary this had only the effect of transforming a hard redirect to a soft redirect page, where the initial target of the redirect was still listed (along with other possible targets). All I did was to replace the incorrect hard redirect by a disambiguation page, from which then the relevant topics could be recategorized and linked correctly for each location: do you call this "disruptive edit" ? This solution is not new, it has been used on all other wikis and on Commons since early years. Only Jcb deleted these pages massively without community consent and then created the havoc with broken links spread everywhere in Commons (notably in Galleries, but not only, as it also concerns the file description pages which also embed now link to these incorrect hard redirects; this massive destruction of disambiguation pages by Jcb has created LOT of maintenance work to locate and fix many pages).
      • Another proof that Jcb deleted these pages without any applicable policy, is the total absence of policy tags in the deletion comments (it is then now hard to find these deletions in the main namespace from the Jcb admin log: we cannot select the main namespace, we cannot filter by keyword in the deletion comment). Jcb pretends that it was used by other admins, but in fact only a few ones that followed his "advice" without really reviewing it. Jcb was the main author of these mass deletions that created the havoc everywhere on Commons (making then Galleries almost unusable for navigation as their links are going to arbitrary destinations, and making links in File description pages also unusable: causing later incorrect reclassification of files based on these links). What Jcb made with these mass deletion was really destructive (of relevant information) and damaging to Commons as a whole.
      • Jcb just refused any form of discussion about what is a real, recurrent, frequent problem on Commons (notably in the page for which I was blocked unfairly, whose history should be a clear proof of evidence that these ambiguous names are always a problem!) : the damned hard redirects persisting from ambiguous names to disambiguated names (not always the one expected) and that should all become disambiguation pages (like all other wikis that use this clean solution satisfying almost everyone, without creating surprise). My blocking requested by him was completely unfair as it used all the existing policies and documentation (published since long and never challenged before by anyone, not even by Jcb). verdy_p (talk) 10:05, 27 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Theoretically it would be good to have ArbCom on Commons. But it would be then important to ensure participation from a broad Wikimedia community, not only elect the Committee by the narrow circle of Commons regulars. If Wikimedians were indifferent to Commons ArbCom election envisaged, then the same kind of folks (as Yann and 4nn1l2) would remain policy makers and we’d see no improvement altogether. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 15:54, 27 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Could you speak about the request itself and not my unjustified block (whose appeal was never reviewed before it ended one week later) ? There was a conflict of applicable rules. Even my first initial blocking was unjustified (it was for an request made to admins, that was incorrectly applied, even if it was completely documented, just like the second one unfairly extended using incorrect summary kept parmanently and never fixed). My initial (fair) edit request was later asked again by another user with exactly the same solution I exposed and it was finally applied like what I asked. But this first block was kept indefinitely (and in fact now illegally) for more than 4 years, and reused unfairly to justify a longer blocking and now it is reused again by admins that don't read or don't know the real history (even if it is explained). These permanent and never fixed history is never corrected, it is used now for ad nominem attacks, and it gives a very poor vision of what a user actually did contribute successfully and any attempt to discuss for finding some "consensus" or talk about future solutions to solve existing problems later.

These talks (made by unfairly blocked users trying to find some consensus) are then permanently forgotten (but the existing problems are then never solved and will reoccur... so admins will initiate their own "personal war" to exclude regular users that just follow the existing published policies made by the community, and not the expeditive "procedures" created by admins themselves which can be challenged at any time wihout accusing him of "harassement"), or unfairly distrusted by other users (that trust too much what the admins say, or don't want to expose themselves if they scrutinize their actions).

Over time, the wikis completely belong admins, a very large number (alarmly growing) of users are excluded, and they destroy what is an "open community" (and finally the Wikimedia contents are highly biased, NPOV is no longer respected and Wikimedia contents progressively loose their reputation, users stop visiting it, or will no longer try to contribute because they legitimately feel this is a loss of time and that Wikimedia is now definitely unfriendly/unwelcoming to any newcomers or does not respect any work pateiently made by them: the allowed Wikimedia editors become a small elite governed by admins, that can decide who can discuss or not, and who can vote and participate to the community process, and even who can continue to support these admins that enforce their "seat" with unfair expeditive practices that no regular is allowed to contest or challenge: it's not regular users that "intimidate/harass" admins, but admins that do that against most users). Don't be surprized then if so many users have stopped contributing to Wikimedia which is not friendly to anyone, and why now many Wikimedians stop reading it (and why Wikimedia contents are now highly criticized in the independant press, for its severe but unadmitted biases and for its evident but unfixable errors).

Admins can take very rapid decisions by ignorance (this can be excused). But then these should be erased if this was an error from them. And then this incorrect history should not reused later unfairly by them. And keeping these history indefinitely is also ILLEGAL (for the GDPR) as it contains personally identifiable information about users that never authorized such conservation (and that can still request their deletion after a reasonnable time (but not more than required by law).

Admins can make some errors (this is unavoidable) but their past errors should be fixed so that other admins won't reuse them unfairly to justify a very long blocking of a user that contrivuted fairly but that was blocked for unfair reason or because of conflicting rules that cannot apply simultaneously, and notably when there was an ongoing discussion to find some consensus or equilibrated solutions (which satisfies the NPOV rule of Wikimedia, and not just guidelines subject to frequent changes and adaptation: these guidelines, when conflicting, have to be reviewed globally to see which one will accept an exception: if there are too many exceptions, then these guidelines will need to be updated again to be more focused).

So I've reframed the topic to what it was: my RFC is important for all Wikimedians, and should not be driven by opinions of a few admins deciding who can contribute to it.

And now Wikimedia has a severe privacy problem (the permanent blocking history published publicly is completely illegal, at least now in Europe under the GDPR), and this is a severe legal problem for the WMF: no user accepted to be named permanently in a public space like it: this history should only be open to "IPcheck admins" (or to the WMF itself), under stricter privacy contracts and with direct supervision by the WMF), but not by normal users (which may only have a very limited view for a limited period, never spanning more than the required legal conservation time which is just a few months, after that time the WMF takes legal risks and that's why access to that information should be highly protected, including the edits made related to such adminsitrative actions; the rest can be kept online because it is published under a public CC licence, as long as it does not violate the person rights, including his copyright and licencing statements, and this means keeping a significant part of user pages or user talk pages).

verdy_p (talk) 08:42, 27 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  • Is this an RfC or a manifesto? GMGtalk 15:58, 27 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    Read it as you want. But the problem is real and has multiple other instances (listed at top in the box). I consider this to be a true RFC because the problem is very general and concerns lots of users, and almost all wikis (except posibly EN.WP where admins follow the policies more scupulously given they are much more numerous and are controling each other, but also because it has a independant ArbCom separate from admins, and also separate from all IPcheck users that are under privacy contract with the WMF). But the WMF still has legal problems with privacy. verdy_p (talk) 20:31, 27 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    From what I gather, we have a 2,100 word opening comment that boils down to "admins are bad". We then have several thousand words of additional meandering commentary that boils down to "other stuff is bad too" ... and the proposed solution is "make all the bad stuff go away".
    This should be closed with haste, and you should try again if or when you can condense this down to something smaller than a novella that contains an actual concrete proposal. Meta is not a forum for generic personal rants. GMGtalk 21:18, 27 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
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