Stewards' noticeboard

While the page says that this is a proposed policy, it appears that stewards are already following (examples: 1 2 3). I don't know whether the community have commented on this but this doesn't seem to be the case.

And while I'm here asking about whether this is actually a policy, I have to ask, what is actually the point of this? It adds unnecessary bureaucracy and w:WP:BITE to what was previously a very simple process – someone tells you that you have a bad username, and maybe blocks you for it, then you ask to change it, someone changes it and we move on. Now under this policy/proposed policy/whatever... if you have a username that states a political belief, you will be instantly globally locked losing all preferences and contributions you had made under the account. If you want to get your old account back, you'll have to email stewards at least a couple of times, one to appeal the lock and another to say which new username you prefer. If you are unable to access email then you have no way of getting your old account back and you have to start a new account because you didn't read the global username policy... that isn't linked anywhere at the moment. And I imagine stewards already have to deal with tons of emails about editors having to use proxies and other stuff. Why add this on?

I completely understand locking genuine abusive account names, but locking all the accounts that fall under this criteria seems wrong to me, and I would appreciate other people's input on this. Thanks. --Ferien (talk) 21:08, 30 January 2023 (UTC) Reply

I've just copied the above from what I posted on Talk:Global username policy and added a few more examples following some discussion on #wikimedia-stewards ^connect . --Ferien (talk) 21:49, 30 January 2023 (UTC) Reply

Hi Ferien, I'm happy to provide more context for this. The policy proposal created by ~riley in 2020 is not the impetus for locking accounts with abusive usernames. If there is a steward who has cited the proposal for an action, please let me know, because it would be incorrect. Stewards have been locking accounts with abusive usernames looooooong before that proposal, as with other forms of abuse. This isn't an addition, this has always been the case.

The three accounts you linked, however, imo did not need to be locked. The usernames were not abusive, and their issues could have been solved with renames, or by allowing local projects to determine if the usernames are appropriate. I'll raise it with the stewards who locked those accounts. Best, Vermont (🐿️—🏳️‍🌈) 23:49, 31 January 2023 (UTC) Reply

To effectively solve the problems involving Chinese Wikisource, may I request allowing any limited bureaucrat just for emergency deadminship per local guideline, please? If yes, I know whom to nominate as a candidate, so we will mostly be much happier once solving the issues. I would like to also ask any disinterested stewards about Stewards/Elections_2023#Election_Committee exceeding the tasks [1] [2] [3] [4] as Stewards/Confirm/2023 will be soon.--Jusjih (talk) 22:34, 31 January 2023 (UTC) Reply

I'm not sure what you're asking in the latter part of your above comment (to me, it seems like a thinly veiled threat against the election committee stewards who took actions against your inappropriate questions). Is my assessment correct, and if so do you believe that to be appropriate behaviour for a Meta-Wiki administrator? — TheresNoTime (talk • they/them) 23:17, 31 January 2023 (UTC) Reply

Seeing Bureaucrat#Removing_access that bugzilla is now phabricator, I am withdrawing this topic for now.--Jusjih (talk) 03:20, 1 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

@Jusjih: I expect a reply to the question I asked you above. This section is not resolved — your conduct has been subpar to say the least. — TheresNoTime (talk • they/them) 04:55, 1 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

Why is Jusjih still an admin on this wiki? There have been problems going back years [5] [6] Requests for comment/De-adminship for Jusjih in certain projects. --Rs chen 7754 06:53, 1 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

I thought they were still a steward, lol. As to why no removal, hasn't been inactive 8) – Ajraddatz (talk) 22:13, 1 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

@TheresNoTime: Your desire for a reply has nothing to do with any limited local bureaucrat just for emergency deadminship, i.e., off-topic. See also w:Wikipedia:Don't remind others of past misdeeds#How this essay works with requests for adminship. I disagree that my conduct has been subpar. What I have said would have nothing to do with the adminship, just like your talks involving the election committee and being a steward, rather than adminship. Acknowledge that I avoided edit war. Stewards/Elections 2023#Election Committee means responsibility, not to excessively suppress the community asking reasonable questions. If Stewards/Confirm is not a good system, or if certain questions for potentially new stewards are undesirable, find any reasonable ways to change, rather than arbitrarily acting on.--Jusjih (talk) 02:37, 3 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

Thanks to Ajraddatz with a good post. May I remind all users, whether stewards, administrators, or others, to fairly and impartially judge any disputes? Otherwise, stay out of them or equally ask all involved parties to cool down, like "double or nothing". Thus I disagree how Rschen7754 would hound unfairly with an unactionable yet hateful RfC to retaliate an SRP filed by someone else. A local discussion is still on to depend on it just as the evidence.--Jusjih (talk) 21:48, 6 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

There are no consensus among the local community about creating such a post. I strongly condemn Jusjih for bypassing local procedures on this issue, especially that Chinese Wikisource have no local bureaucrat since about a decade ago, thus clear consensus should be needed for pushing any changes related to bureaucrats forward. And, I have some real concern about whether they are capable of governing a wiki and representing a community as an administrator well enough. —— Eric Liu _{(Talk )} 10:04, 22 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

In the past, When someone who is blocked in a wiki this user mainly edited and also globally blocked appeals global locks, Stewards may consider letting the user appeal the local block first (especially there are off-wiki way to appeal such as UTRS in enwiki). Recently a user who want to appeal a ban was directed to first appeal the global lock. What a buck passing. GZWDer (talk) 15:33, 2 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

Yeah this is an open discussion. It depends on the lock reason and context, in many cases. I'll try to explain my understanding of this question.

If there's a lock that hinges on a local block on a specific project (who may be interested in maintaining the lock), it's often beneficial for stewards to direct users to appeal to that specific project first, especially if there's been ongoing abuse there. If the appeal is successful, the project can ask stewards to unlock, who will optimally review if there's other projects who may have a stake in maintaining the lock. This is generally for the more long-term or higher-profile cases, such as of locked users who were formerly established. People locked for generic cross-wiki vandalism, spam, etc. generally can appeal directly to stewards before making local appeals, as there are unlikely to be local projects who are invested in maintaining the lock.

There's a high degree of nuance in handling who hears appeals first, which is difficult if not impossible to write some sort of global guidance for. The TL;DR is, if there are local projects who are interested in maintaining the locks to prevent abuse, an unlock should generally require input both from stewards (in terms of identifying if there's ongoing global abuse/threats) and the interested local projects. The question of who provides that input first is difficult, especially considering that both require volunteer time: local input generally requires either some sort of local discussion or arbcom action, and steward input requires steward review. In other words...in my view, contact stewards first, and if the lock would hinge on a local project's approval (which is a call stewards can make), the appealing user can be redirected to whatever processes exist there. If the local processes would be okay with either a local unblock, or possibly a global unlock while maintaining the local block, the appealing user can be sent back to stewards who can do a final review of the case and finalize the appeal. This is my understanding of how these are best handled, and I hope the explanation helped :-) Best, Vermont (🐿️—🏳️‍🌈) 01:01, 3 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

This year, I thank you who a few valuable stewards are taking the process. Since a small number of these stewards aren't unavailable from time to time, it may be helpful for this process who are volunteer non-stewards -for example, me- to inform affected inactive users and their communities. I present it for your information. --Uncitoyen ^talk 09:41, 4 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

I did a few this morning, but did mostly processing. I wouldn't object to the assistance, but please wait for other stewards to comment. -- Amanda (she/her) 12:10, 4 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

This has been done in the past [7] [8] so it is certainly possible. --Rs chen 7754 17:07, 4 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

Apologies for the off-topic, but thinking out loud I believe AAR needs some redesign.

The process is far too manual nowadays (manual notify here, manual notify there, add a date here, post an update there, etc...) and cumbersome. Can't at least the notification process be scripted so it doesn't take forever to complete? MassMessage now supports sending translatable pages, which means MediaWiki automatically selects the language in which the message has to be posted based on the local wiki language (if we don't have it translated, it'll look for the fallback language and, in there's no translation or fallback, English will be used).

I am not sure we need to keep using Admin activity review/Notice to communities to notify the village pumps (a message we have to modify for each wiki notified to add the names of the inactive users... and every year is quite a number of wikis we have to notify) when AAR does not seem to require us to do so (See AAR#Policy, section 4; it is the responsability of the notified user to ask the community to keep their rights).

I think we could speed the process a lot by:

a) Every year, build a MassMessage list with the names of the inactive users according to policy (I guess Openbk script/bot can create it in addition to the /Data page).

b) Use the MassMessage List to send these users Admin activity review/Notice to inactive right holders (as mentioned above, MediaWiki picks which translated version to post based on the wiki local language, if there's no translation, then the translation for the configured fallback language(s) and, if there's no translation for either, it'll use English).

c) The clock starts ticking as MassMessage is logged.

d) Stewards then can keep an eye on SN, and verify if after one month there has been some activity/community discussion, and act accordingly.

If you think the community notification may still be useful, I think it needs to be more generic so we don't have to manually change it for each wiki in which we have to use it.

Sorry for the wall of text, —MarcoAurelio (talk) 17:52, 4 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

What if the community notification was scripted to link to stewardry or some other tool? In the past at that stage in the process some communities have decided to create their own policy or otherwise object and I do not think that opportunity should be removed from them. As far as the individual messages, when I used to send them out I had to keep looking and guessing what language to use. Eliminating that would speed up the process. --Rs chen 7754 18:42, 4 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

That'd be great, or "some advanced right holders of your community will soon receive a message on their talk pages about ..." - I agree with you that the community has to have a say of course, as AAR is subsidiary to local processes; but as we talked a while ago if the user does not ask the community to keep their permissions it does not seem that they can keep 'em, but perhaps this should be clarified in the policy. It does not seem reasonable to force a removal when the community do not agree, even if the user remain inactive and/or silent about it. —MarcoAurelio (talk) 19:00, 4 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

@Uncitoyen: I think we've left this long enough with no objections, but if you could go ahead and assist with the notifications for this year, it would help and save some time. Feel free to ping me on my talk on dates where action is needed and i'll go through and pull flags. Obviously for next year we can consider a different process, but let's get this years over with. -- Amanda (she/her) 19:52, 16 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

Thanks for comments of all you. I started sending notifications slowly. I hope these helps you stewards. Other hand, MediaWiki's notification is little difficult for me (however I think easy for @MarcoAurelio:). Marco, you had listed WMF employees separately in Mediawiki previous years already. I would like to remark that Brion VIBBER has both a personal and a foundation account. Only locally him personal account has been authorized as sysop on mediawiki. Maybe other accounts like it that work for WMF. So I want to leave Mediawiki's notice to the stewards. --Uncitoyen ^talk 10:20, 20 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

The trick is to guess which of these are work accounts . For example: Brion VIBBER ; while Brion Vibber (WMF) exists he doesn't seem to be using it. Similarly Eloquence was Erik Moeller (WMF) , and so on. Yes, this needs to be sorted out first. —MarcoAurelio (talk) 14:10, 21 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

Hi all. When I was drafting Requests for comment/Global ban for PlanespotterA320 (2), I found this user edited on 452 wikis. It's so hard for me to drop a note on all wikis manually, is there any better ways?--Lemonaka (talk) 19:43, 6 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

@Lemonaka they appear to have only "edited" on ~141 projects, and it would only apply to projects that have a community. In 2012 a policy rewrite changed the notification from only ones where the contributor was "recently active" to the current wording - it seems that some sort of cut-off could be reasonable here, but I'm not the decider! Suggest excluding at least projects where there are both <10 edits and no edits in the last 3 years. — xaosflux ^Talk 20:39, 6 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

Hello @Lemonaka, generally, those notifications can be handled via MassMessage. Feel free to request it being sent at M:RFH (ideally, with a prepared message and a list of pages where it should be posted; Wikidata MassMessage tool can help with getting that list ready). Hope this helps, Martin Urbanec (talk) 21:22, 6 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

@Martin UrbanecThank you. I will have a try ASAP Lemonaka (talk) 21:26, 6 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

I was directed here by an administrator to put forth a global ban for "Ben Bilal" and also his IP address

Here is the discussion between me and the administrator Unfortunately9018M (talk) 12:27, 11 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

@Unfortunately9018M: => global ban page. If we are just talking about an out and out troll, then global lock may be easier via SRG.  — billinghurst sDrewth 21:41, 12 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

@Unfortunately9018M and Billinghurst: Ben Bilal was globally locked by AmandaNP yesterday. --Ferien (talk) 21:47, 12 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

Hello, it seems like Ben Bilal's IP address was not also globally locked, as he is still editing on his ip address "88.255.159.106"

https://guc.toolforge.org/?by=date&user=88.255.159.106

Unfortunately9018M (talk) 15:54, 16 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

This is not the place to be reporting this. Please see SRG. -- Amanda (she/her) 19:47, 16 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

QRNKS (talk · contribs) was last month promoted to an admin at kaawiki. The permalink to the RfA can be found here. The result was 3 supports and 1 oppose. The promotion here at Meta did not go smoothly as the single oppose was not discussed fully (as required by the minimum voting requirements).

Now I know QRNKS from one thing: cross-wiki creation of Akilbek Allan (Q114743080), a non-notable Uzbek musician. It was sent to AfD on enwiki and was deleted. There is a catch, however. He used sockpuppets to !vote keep at the AfD. Per the SPI, KzWikimen (talk · contribs) is also one of those. KzWikimen has voted at the kaawiki RfA of QRNKS, so the result is actually 2 supports and 1 not discussed oppose. This alone is a huge problem that puts the idea of an emergency desysop forward.

What has QRNKS done on kaawiki with the admin tools? Well, created kaa:Aqılbek Allan and immediately indef full protected it. Other than that he has two blocks, both of which I'd consider abuse of tools. On 17 February, QRNKS indef blocked ДолбоЯщер (talk · contribs), who I know does basic maintenance (merge/redirect duplicate articles, add categories, revert vandalism etc.) in a lot of Turkic projects and ruwiki, with the reason being "For the fact that it does not give freedom to edit". His last edit was on 2 January, and there is nothing in the deleted contributions that shows anything remotely disruptive (last deleted contrib was in December and consists of adding a CSD tag). Yesterday, TPA and email was also revoked by QRNKS, for no apparent reason.

The second block is an IP. Also indef with TPA and email revoked (can IPs send emails anyway?). The sole contribution of the IP is to create kaa:Talqılaw:HTML (no deleted contribs), which can be considered disruptive, but an indef is a clear overreaction, especially given that the page in question wasn't deleted nor fixed.

So to recap, we have cross-wiki spammer who socked at a controversial RfA and is now abusing the admin bit. ~Styyx ^Talk? 08:20, 21 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

Thank you for pointing this out. Apologizes to @Zzuuzz: for missing their ping on the SPI. I granted the flags, so I have now cleaned up the mess. -- Amanda (she/her) 08:59, 21 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

Dear Styyx, thank you for your support. Actually, we (kaawiki admins) were watching also his (QRNKS) last activities and trying to understand, what he was doing. Because after he had been selected as admin (sysop) in December 2022, we asked him to join to our Kaawiki Admins Team (we created a Telegram Application group for Admin Discussions), but he didn't reply to us. And then he was inactive for a long time. And suddenly he appeared recently and blocked two users. We were waiting for some clarification from @QRNKS side, but you have already pointed it here for Global Admins. Thank you for your quick action. Qaraqalpaqpan (talk) 05:38, 24 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

This user is currently vandalizing de.wikivoyage by reverting correct edits and engaging in edit-wars because he does not understand the edit comments (written in German). Please remove global rollback immediately. 2A02:908:121:.&checktime(6600,0,0,':'):0:2142 13:49, 21 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

You're right i made a mistake about reverting some legitimate edits because i didn't see the edit summary properly, however given my experience and situation i can prove that i do understand what i am doing and i do participate against vandalism not only on de.wikivoyage but dozens of other projects. 🌸 Sakura emad 💖 (talk) 13:56, 21 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

Per Global rights#Abuse of global rights, Abuse is the willful violation of a local or global policy, or consistent violation of local or global policies through ignorance or an inability (through a language barrier) to understand the local policies. I don't believe this is willful or consistent, but stewards make the decision whether to remove or not. --Ferien (talk) 14:00, 21 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

@Ferien i am participating against vandalism and abusing my rights is on another level, plus i just given GR even without GR i still could do the same thing because i didn't notice. 🌸 Sakura emad 💖 (talk) 14:04, 21 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

Moreover this IP implies that i reverted their edit because it was written in German and i couldn't understand, which it's not true, how i participated on other projects then if it's the case?, how these people who voted on my GR Request trusted me, didn't they check my cross-wiki activity? how could i be GR in the first place if i was misusing my editing rights? i participated on French, Dutch, Arabic, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Russian, Ukrainian among many other projects. 🌸 Sakura emad 💖 (talk) 14:19, 21 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

It's best to avoid wikivoyage projects all together if you aren't a local editor. Just a WMF fuck up where spam is in the project's scope. ~Styyx ^Talk? 16:36, 21 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

@Styyx-san i got your point but i really don't like to limit my vandalism combat just because i am promoted to GR, i will Give up on my GR status if it limits me to participate widely against Vandalism and Vandals. i would like to remind all my fellow Wikimedians including the ones who trusted me with GR, i originally asked for Captcha Exempt why? because i wanted to comfortably revert vandalism without any prevention by captchas. and i always check edit summaries in any projects before reverting anything; sometimes double check to triple checking to ensure everything goes smoothly. but as i said on my GR Request:

i am someone with flaws and imperfections, i do mistakes, and i learn from them

i can't guarantee that i will be perfect but i can guarantee that i will try better next time, i try to learn as much as possible to avoid any conflicts. 🌸 Sakura emad 💖 (talk) 17:13, 21 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

Checking some of your edits in de-projects I would suggest being a bit more careful when reverting edits you consider not useful.

Rollback is intended for edits that are „blatantly counterproductive, such as vandalism and nonsense", furthermore Global rollback#Guidelines explicitly says „Users should avoid rolling back legitimate or questionable edits if at all possible, and the rollback feature should never be used in a revert war".

The IP gave reasons for their edits [9] [10]. Even if one might disagree with those reasons, these edits are not vandalism. You might have prevented the following edit-war [12] -> a newbie tried to point out a possible mistake or [13] -> a newbie tried to insert helpful links, not knowing that only wikilinks are allowed.

Please make sure to provide an edit summary unless the edit is clearly in scope of GR policy --Johannnes89 (talk) 17:34, 21 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

@Johannnes89 to check vandalism i mostly use SWViewer, as for Global rollback#Guidelines i make sure to follow the GR Guidelines and Policies.

That's true The ip gave reason for each edit, but at the time i didn't notice, and when i noticed i immediately stopped, apologized for my actions , if you see my explanations above; i always check every edit summaries before doing anything (if provided). 🌸 Sakura emad 💖 (talk) 18:05, 21 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

I know you're mostly using SWViewer, but especially when dealing with newbies (like in the examples I gave above) I would like to see you using the „rollback with summary" option more often. That being said, I don't think any of these mistakes should lead to removal of GR which was just granted hours ago. Johannnes89 (talk) 18:12, 21 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

As i am also a Mentor on ckbwiki mentoring newbies. i see your point, maybe i was hard on new commers, so maybe instead of only undo/rollback an edit summary can guide them better, unless it's spam and they intend to repeatedly add it back. 🌸 Sakura emad 💖 (talk) 18:29, 21 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

Not done. After discussing this issue with some other stewards, I am closing this request as not done. @Sakura emad: Here are a few things I would like to point out:

• Assuming good faith also means not reverting edits unless we know they are unconstructive or bad.
• Many wikis have rules like 3RR, which tells you to stop at certain point and discuss the issue. You clearly didn't stop to look back, which is a problem. I hope you keep this in mind moving ahead. Communication is very important in roles such as GR.

Mistakes can happen, but we need to be cautious. I hope you will keep these things in mind and will be more cautious with your reverts moving ahead. Thank you.--BRP ^ever 00:05, 22 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

i will keep this in mind thank you. 🌸 Sakura emad 💖 (talk) 00:09, 22 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

Hello to everyone. I received a message from Wikipedia today stating that I requested to change my account password from IP address 37.107.49.97. This IP address does not belong to me, and I did not request a password change, indicating a hacking attempt. Please take the necessary steps before I lose my account.Cyclone605 (talk) 10:29, 24 February 2023 (UTC) the message which I recevied is as follow: " Fri, Feb 24 at 1:26 PMReply

Someone (may be you, at 37.107.49.97) has asked to reset your Wikipedia password (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B5%D9% 81%D8%AD%D8%A9_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B1%D8%A6%D9%8A%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%A9>). The account below has been associated with your email:

user name: Cyclone605

Temporary password:

The temporary password will expire in 7 days You can login and choose a new password. If this request was made by someone else, or if you remember your original password and no longer wish to change it, you can ignore this message and continue using your old password.

However, if you do not create this request and want to block emails unwanted items, you may wish to update your email options at <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%AE%D8%A7%D8%B5:%D8%AA%D9%81%D8 %B6%D9%8A%D9%84%D8%A7%D8%AA#mw-presection-personal-email>.D, You can require both a username and an email address to create a password reset emails, this may reduce the number of such incidents." 2001:8F8:1621:3EF1:6836:4272:18D8:C60F 10:27, 24 February 2023 (UTC) Reply

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