Re: Proposal for new Git Wiki admin

Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> wrote:

Here are my comments on that. For the sake of archive-friendliness, I'm referring to this version of it: https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php?title=WikiIdeas&oldid=8996

(Why am I commenting here instead of on the wiki? Because I think there are few things worse than a wiki for discussing something.)

| Currently there's only one admin (Johannes Schindelin), it would be
| healthy to have more than one.

I agree. Few sites work with one admin; not least because most sites are too much work for one single person to handle.

| Up to now, good faithed users have been blocked immediately, and
| permanently, without a warning. Instead of doing that, a policy like
| wikipedia's one should be followed:

I'd like to point out that this drastically increases the administration effort. For example, issued warnings have to be tracked. Also, this is serious overhead for obvious spammers, and different people will have different perspectives on what constitutes an obvious spammer. To the best of anyone's knowledge, only one false positive has ever occurred until now. I think this approach is overkill. I would suggest, if technically possible, automatically showing banned users a notice that asks them to contact admins via some channel or another if they believe that they have been wrongly blocked.

| Some people might have been wrongly blocked. By changing the blocking
| policy the old blocks might not apply and warnings should be issued instead.

Same reasoning. Also, the deletion logs look very much like only obvious spammers got blocked.

| Allow users to see deleted pages
| This would allow transparency into the action of the admins.

I don't oppose that, but it raises technical issues. Deleted pages should not be indexed by search engines, because doing so would defeat the purpose of removing spammy links. I don't know whether MediaWiki implements that; I do know that it tells robots not to index old versions of pages.

| Up to now, good faithed users have been blocked immediately, and
| permanently, without a warning. Instead of doing that, a policy like
| wikipedia's one should be followed:

Yes, but why use a wiki for communication if you can simply use e-mail instead? To me, all this "using wiki pages for communication and discussions" is a classic case of "when you have a hammer"...

Also, the proposal about patrol groups seems to be about solving the same problem, though I don't know how well it works for dealing with problematic edits in real time. Okay, I guess we'd need a *lot* more admins for that anyway.

All in all, I think it would be completely sufficient to find a way to let users help with reporting spam, and to add a couple of admins... and perhaps notify users when blocking them. I don't think anything else is necessary or useful.

Nobody claimed that you wouldn't be able to work with Jakub, there was only doubt that you might have difficulty working with Johannes (in a way that leaves both of you in a healthy state of mind).

Also, for the record, I'm fine with Jakub and Ram doing the job. I would volunteer myself for additional help but I don't really care about it very strongly, and three people are probably enough for now anyway.

(As a public service, I have cut away the rest of what I was going to write. The discussion is long enough as it is already.)

-Jan