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IP editing de facto blocked 
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Joined: Mon Feb 26, 2018 8:50 pm
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It it not about time the small number of Wikipedia Administrators who have made it so with their incredibly wide and increasingly long range blocks, admit that it is now the case that IP editing on Wikipedia is de facto banned? It is pretty obvious that you don't need to actually ban anonymous editing from a large percentage of IP addresses or apply those bans for very long before you hit the point where, from a probabilistic standpoint (and therefore a false advertising standpoint), it is a de facto ban.

Examine the logs and their other attempts to justify themselves, and you will see the cowboy nature of these actions. IP blocking is considered undesirable in policy by default, it is supposed to be rare, there doesn't need to be any actual proof it is causing collateral damage in terms of actual complaints, and it matters not that affected IP editors have alternate means to edit. The presumption of damage exists precisely because of how unlikely it is that the vast majority of innocent people affected by these cowboy range blocks is going to either complain and/or register. On finding the are unable to edit the encyclopedia "anyone can edit", they just go and do something else with their lives.

As you look at these blocks, you realise there are good reasons to believe that in the case of persistent abuse from an identifiable and predictable threat, a single person with bad intent in other words, that the incredible power of range blocking is being treated as a measure of first resort, not a last resort. You also realise that in cases of routine vandalism, they are being used as a very big hammer to crack a very small nut, and the blocking Administrators are either deliberately, or through sheer incompetence, assuming all vandalism spread across a range, is coming from one person.

The Wikipedia Administrators doing this, despite claiming they are being conservative, are basically out of control at this point. There is even a disturbing flippancy, with Drmies doing his usual and just making a joke of it. You can tell they know they are colouring outside the lines by the fact they often try to justify their actions as if they are emergencies, or an attempt to protect Wikipedia from the gravest of threats. Which as anyone with a brain can tell, is garbage.

They will often even happily acknowledge that they are pushing the limits of their authority, certainly as unilateral agents (one log entry reading "castrate me if you need to, but this needs to happen"), but rather than seeking prior approval, they place the block unilaterally and then basically dare one of their peers to be seen as the Weak Liberal Pussy by removing it. In the male dominated Wikipedia environment (where literally having BALLS is a means of self-justification), and where even most of the women Administrators are basically strong arm bullies due to the effects of natural selection (Queen Bishonen for example), unsurprisingly there are few among them willing to accept this invitation.

The sheer lack of perspective as to the disproportionate nature of their acts, the weakness of their threat/risk assessments, probably comes from the fact these Administrators aren't the ones dealing with the far more serious things that can cross their desks, largely due to their personal limitations. Deep thinkers, possessed of wisdom and judgment, they are not. Blocking entire ranges appeals to their ultimate reason for being an Administrator, the gamification factor.

Not one of these cowboys seems to realize, much less accept, that they are not the Unilateral Saviours of Wikipedia. If they think something they are doing is so urgent they can ignore long standing policy, they are suppose to say "I am invoking WP:IAR". And if they find themselves doing that repeatedly, so much so it ceases to be the exception and becomes the de facto rule in terms of both incidence and effect, then they are supposed to put it to the community to give them a chance to say whether or not it becomes the rule.

This sort of cowboy Administration is not new. These Administrators are the same people who routinely apply pre-emptive protection without the necessary probable cause, and talk of protection as if the burden of proof rests on those wishing to lower it. Shit, you can pretty much guarantee they have all at one time or another openly stated their support for mandatory registration, an actual ban on IP editting. These range blocks are clearly the next best thing to achieving that objective.

These cowboys are the real threat to Wikipedia. It is a mark of the utterly dysfunctional nature of the Wikipedia governance model, that the wider community seems powerless to stop it. Assuming they even think it is wrong. Policy unequivocally says it is, but that has always been the issue, has it not?


Fri May 31, 2019 3:57 am
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