User talk:Bilby
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Contemporary fantasy deletion discussion
[edit]Administrators' newsletter – August 2024
[edit]News and updates for administrators from the past month (July 2024).
Technical news
- Global blocks may now target accounts as well as IP's. Administrators may locally unblock when appropriate.
- Users wishing to permanently leave may now request "vanishing" via Special:GlobalVanishRequest. Processed requests will result in the user being renamed, their recovery email being removed, and their account being globally locked.
Arbitration
- The Arbitration Committee appointed the following administrators to the conflict of interest volunteer response team: Bilby, Extraordinary Writ
Smallbones from WP:Signpost here to ask you a probing question or 3 about COIVERT, for publication (Sunday?) probably in a short blurb in the News and notes article. Some questions (answer here, on my talk or via email, as you like) I may just select one sentence, a couple of pithy phrases, or what ever I think is most interesting:
- What the heck is COIVERT and why did it just come into existence?
- What do you expect to do there?
- How can Signpost readers help there, or maybe at WP:COIN instead?
- Anything else you want to say?
As always,
Smallbones(smalltalk) 16:55, 6 August 2024 (UTC)
- Hi Smallbones! If it is ok I'll write a reply in the morning. I'm suffering from a mild flu, and have this urge to curl up in bed and hope to be well by tomorrow. :) But I will definitly write something first thing in the morning. - Bilby (talk) 13:13, 8 August 2024 (UTC)
- Hi! Sorry for taking so long. I think I may have run into a bout of covid after all. On the plus side, I have the option to hide at home and not share, so it worked out ok. (Well, it did, but now my eldest is complaining that I made her ill).
- As to your questions. I suspect you know much of this better than me, but to give my understanding:
- For many years private evidence regarding conflicts of interest have been requried to be sent to functionaries. This was clarified in 2022 with Special Circumstances Blocks by the Arbitration Committee when they made it clear that administrators should not block editors based on off-wiki evidence. There was an RFC not long after that which sought to carve some exceptions but it failed to get sufficient support. As a result, if anyone - admin or otherwise - had evidence that someone was editing with a COI and it risked outing (which is generally the case) it needs to be sent to functionaries to handle it. The problem as I see it is that these cases are hard to work though - like CCIs, they take a lot of effort to investigate and need to be carefully considered. This created a backlog at the paid-en queue, and I know from my own experience that even what I thought were clear-cut cases could take a very long time to be processed. (Well, that, or I wasn't as good at expressing the evidence as I thought I was).
- Anyway, when you have a bottleneck, as was the case with COI reporting, you need some solution that allows you to process the reports quicker. One solution is to have more people process the reports, but given that it was limited to functionaries, and functionaries are limited to ArbCom members (past and present), checkusers and oversighters, that would mean increasing the size of those groups, which feels a bit like overkill if we don't actually need more oversighters, checkusers or ex-ArbCom members. Thus after the Conflict of interest management case, ArbCom solved the problem by creating a new queue and creating a new type of "functionary" in administrators who sign all of the privacy agreements but do not gain CU/Oversight/ArbCom status. As a result: WP:COIVRT!
- Mostly what we do is look at evidence sent by editors of possible COI and paid editing, evaluate it, and try to work out how best to proceed. That might mean doing nothing, but it also might mean a block. From what I have seen so far the reports are always carefully considered by editors before they send them and they provide a good account of their evidence. The difficult part is following it up, working out if it is actionable, and being very certain that an action is justified. I can only speak for myself, but as blocks made via private evidence are hard to appeal (only a functionary can view the evidence) you want to be very certain of your decision. That said, we've always been clear that we must respect editor's privacy, so any case which involves private evidence should be sent to [email protected] rather than handled on-wiki. I would still like to see anything based on public actions and information handled here, and thus WP:COIN should be the first choice if it is possible, so we should continue to rely on WP:COIN - it is just that we should also be very aware that we have another path that maintains the privacy of all involved. - Bilby (talk) 14:32, 12 August 2024 (UTC)
The Signpost: 14 August 2024
[edit]- In the media: Portland pol profile paid for from public purse
- In focus: Twitter marks the spot
- News and notes: Another Wikimania has concluded
- Special report: Nano or just nothing: Will nano go nuclear?
- Opinion: HouseBlaster's RfA debriefing
- Traffic report: Ball games, movies, elections, but nothing really weird
- Humour: I'm proud to be a template