User talk:Awilley

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Welcome to my talk page. Please click here to leave me a message.

Picture of the day

Wilson Square is an urban square and roundabout, located in the Żoliborz area of Warsaw, Poland. Constructed around 1923, close to Sokolnicki Fort, part of the Warsaw Citadel, the square was designed by Józef Jankowski, Antoni Jawornicki, and Tadeusz Tołwiński. Initially named after Polish novelist Stefan Żeromski, the square was renamed in 1926 in honour of the recently-deceased US president Woodrow Wilson. The buildings around the square were partially destroyed in 1944, during World War II, and it was remodelled in 1955. The modern square features a lawn and greenery with a road running through it, as well as tram tracks and the Plac Wilsona metro station. This photograph shows an aerial view of Wilson Square from the south-east.Photograph credit: Emptywords

Your opinion on my AE action

I completely disagree. The page was protected while the editor was online, they refused to discuss their edits on the talk page during the protection and then jumped to casting aspersions in their edit summary of a strict 1RR violation. I'm not sure if you're aware of how 1RR is applied, as I can see you aren't the most active administrator we have here, but it specifically does not require "talk page warnings" for one very big reason: you can pull off way more than 2 reverts in the time such a message is being typed out, and such a requirement has always been looked at as "wikilawyering" and an opening for gaming of the system. That aside, they had already been warned just last month on their talk page regarding the WP:AC/DS system, as is required if the editnotice hadn't been there (of course that was too). On top of all of that, I even pinged the user at the talk page of the article with a very clear message. If you find that to not be enough warning before taking action, then I'm not quite sure you have ever once in your time here enforced an arbitration ruling the way it is written in their policy to do so. If you wish to discuss this further I'm all ears, but as of yet you've made a very poor argument that seems to be based in your lack of experience yet you were fine with verbally chopping my head off without ever doing research first. I don't take kindly to that type of behavior, especially from someone who is an administrator. — Coffee // have a ☕️ // beans // 20:18, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

@Coffee: I apologize again for my tone in that post. It was written in haste and annoyance, and I definitely should have done that thing where I sit on it for a few hours before submitting. My problem with your actions was not that the block was unjustified, but that it was avoidable. I don't actually expect to be able to convince you to change your AE approach, but since I've got your ear let me see if I can't make a few points. Specific to the current case:

1. It isn't clear to me that User:Anthony22 saw that the page had been protected. There was a gap in their editing from 3:10 to 13:39 (presumably for sleep and stuff). The protection lasted from 8:00 to 14:00, so while it technically expired while the user was active they would have had to either try to edit the page itself during the 21 minutes of overlap or examine the page's history.

2. I don't consider a "ping" sufficient notification for "Hey if you do this I will block you" for the same reasons that pings are not sufficient to notify someone that they are being discussed at WP:ANI.

And a couple more general points:

A. Blocks are blunt tools, and you can often get better results with less collateral damage using other methods. (*insert scalpel sledgehammer analogy*) AC/DS in particular puts a lot of handy tools in your box.

B. I believe that you will get the better results from users when you give them a clear choice and then allow them to choose to modify their behavior. There is something powerful about having somebody make a commitment of their own rather than having one imposed on them by force. One way I've done this in the past is to approach the user on their talk page with something similar to the following:

Hey <username>, <behavior x> (<supply diffs>) is a problem, and it's happened repeatedly despite warnings. At this point you have the following options: 1: I block you for <x number of days>. 2: I impose a topic ban from <problem area> for <x number of months>. 3: You take a "voluntary" break from <problem area> for <x number of months> and limit yourself to 1RR elsewhere. 4: You come up with your own solution sufficient to convince me that <behavior x> won't happen again.

They will often come up with something a little less harsh than #3, and it's more effective at modifying their behavior than if I had simply blocked them.

Note that all of the above only applies to long-term productive editors... if you're dealing with vandals, trolls, people being disruptive to make a point, POV warriors, etc., block away by all means.

Anyway, I realize this isn't your style, and I don't expect you to change your style based on my inexperience, but I do hope you'll think about it. And I do think the page protection was a step in the right direction, even if it didn't work quite as intended in this particular instance. ~Awilley (talk) 04:53, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

I highly appreciate the change of tone. It severely helps me to be able to understand where you were coming from, but to that end I actually think we both agree: this block didn't need to happen. I just think where we disagree is that I place the onus for why it happened on the user who is now blocked, whereas you appear to be stating that administrators are at fault for users not following Arbitration rulings they are well aware of. I am given quite a bit of room on what to do with these things, but this user had a history of not responding to warnings (look at their talk page) and poor communication. So my intuition says that a short 24 hour block is the best way. Perhaps that's because I handle things a bit more firmly than some of my colleagues (such as yourself) but that's likely because of my military background. I have been pulling away from the old "letter of the law" enforcement however, and that is what I tried to do today with Anthony. It didn't necessarily work as I had hoped, but I feel they still had an ample chance to not screw up again, but chose to anyway. You seem to see that differently based soely on the fact that I used a ping, but you may be forgetting that pings and talk-page messages function exactly the same now in MediaWiki, except that they're on different pages (and you can allow yourself to customize notification settings for both). I literally cannot tell the difference between them when I receive one or the other, besides the page link/specific notification message itself. As such, I figured trying to start the discussion on the article talk page rather than the user talk page would be best. Why? Because it would hopefully begin a thread between the two users who I both pinged, regarding the article content itself rather than comments on editor behavior (which are allowed at user talkpages but not article talkpages). I do wish to try to find new and better ways to get people to want to follow the policies on the site intrinsically, but I currently also still feel there are times for strict consequences for refusal to obey policy: specifically when dealing with Arbitration Enforcement (a place with little gray area). I have in the past attempted 24 hour topic bans instead of blocks... but I literally have had more complaints about those actions than anything else, so at a point you stop sticking your head out when you think an axe is waiting right outside. I am still pondering on ways to lessen the weight of the hammers I choose however, so don't think all of your thoughts here are going to be discarded by me or whatnot. I still respect you as a colleague even if I originally wanted to make it clear that I didn't appreciate being told off out of the blue. — Coffee // have a ☕️ // beans // 05:19, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

Thanks, I appreciate the consideration and your response. Your experience with pings may be different than mine. I get the little red bell for pings, reverts, and talk page messages, and I don't always check them right away. For talk page messages I also get a prominent orange notification in the toolbar, and I do check that when I see it. (Apparently that can be turned off as well. I learned something today.)

I'm certainly not saying that you, not Anthony22, were solely responsible for the block. But I wouldn't say the opposite either. Both of you had choices along the way.

Re "gray area" I think AE actually has more of it than other areas on the wiki. It includes the messiest topics where most of the editors are entrenched and admins are deputized to enforce whatever the heck they want, including weird/confusing rules like "if you make a change to the article that has been reversed before without getting consensus then you get blocked" (paraphrasing). How far back do you look in the history to see whether something has been reversed before? How old does something need to be before it becomes status quo? If you looked closely enough at the edits and interpreted the rule narrowly enough you could almost block anybody who edits. And that can be helpful if you're blocking experienced POV warriors skilled in "borderline" behavior, but at the same time I believe a conscientious admin should try to help WP:WikiGnomes avoid getting trampled in the process. I'm not exactly saying that I hold gnomes to a different standard of behavior than POV warriors, but I do go out of my way more to make sure they understand those standards, and that includes going beyond the standard AE templates.

Re the 24 hour topic bans, I actually like the idea in principle as sort of a softblock against specific pages, but I think part of the reason you were getting complaints was that they were perceived as an excuse to rack up negative marks against users on the DS logging page, perhaps as ammunition/rationale for longer blocks and topic bans later on. I think that's part of the reason we are discouraged from recording warnings in the block log via very short blocks. Slightly related to that, somewhere I got the impression that you also log your warnings in the DS log. I suppose that could be helpful if you really want to impress upon a user that something is a very serious warning, but it seems overkill to me in most circumstances. A sternly worded and specific warning from an admin is not something most editors take lightly, logged or not. Back to the 24-hour topic ban, a creative workaround might be a "warning" similar to my example above that carefully says "either you take a break from this topic or I will issue a topic ban that forces you to take a break." Here's an example where I did something similar to a user, who if I remember correctly recently took you to AN/I over one of the 24-hour topic bans. This was back in November 2016, and while the exercise was apparently lacking in long-term effects, this normally revert-happy user voluntarily followed 1RR in American Politics for 3 months during a politically heated season. And there was zero blowback. Anyway, thanks again for listening to my ramblings. ~Awilley (talk) 07:21, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – February 2018

News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2018).

Administrator changes

None

Blurpeace • Dana boomer • Deltabeignet • Denelson83 • Grandiose • Salvidrim! • Ymblanter

Guideline and policy news

• An RfC has closed with a consensus that candidates at WP:RFA must disclose whether they have ever edited for pay and that administrators may never use administrative tools as part of any paid editing activity, except when they are acting as a Wikipedian-in-Residence or when the payment is made by the Wikimedia Foundation or an affiliate of the WMF.
• Editors responding to threats of harm can now contact the Wikimedia Foundation's emergency address by using Special:EmailUser/Emergency. If you don't have email enabled on Wikipedia, directly contacting the emergency address using your own email client remains an option.

Technical news

• A tag will now be automatically applied to edits that blank a page, turn a page into a redirect, remove/replace almost all content in a page, undo an edit, or rollback an edit. These edits were previously denoted solely by automatic edit summaries.

Arbitration

• The Arbitration Committee has enacted a change to the discretionary sanctions procedure which requires administrators to add a standardized editnotice when placing page restrictions. Editors cannot be sanctioned for violations of page restrictions if this editnotice was not in place at the time of the violation.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:51, 4 February 2018 (UTC)

Notification

Kindly check out discussion at User talk:Dlohcierekim#Ayurveda. Anmolbhat (talk) 11:57, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

11 years of editing, today.

Hey, Awilley. I'd like to wish you a wonderful First Edit Day on behalf of the Wikipedia Birthday Committee! Have a great day! Chris Troutman (talk) 21:00, 10 February 2018 (UTC)

Wow, thank you :-) ~Awilley (talk) 19:36, 11 February 2018 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – March 2018

News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2018).

Administrator changes

Lourdes†

AngelOfSadness • Bhadani • Chris 73 • Coren • Friday • Midom • Mike V

† Lourdes has requested that her admin rights be temporarily removed, pending her return from travel.

Guideline and policy news

• The autoconfirmed article creation trial (ACTRIAL) is scheduled to end on 14 March 2018. The results of the research collected can be read on Meta Wiki.
• Community ban discussions must now stay open for at least 24 hours prior to being closed.
• A change to the administrator inactivity policy has been proposed. Under the proposal, if an administrator has not used their admin tools for a period of five years and is subsequently desysopped for inactivity, the administrator would have to file a new RfA in order to regain the tools.
• A change to the banning policy has been proposed which would specify conditions under which a repeat sockmaster may be considered de facto banned, reducing the need to start a community ban discussion for these users.

Technical news

• CheckUsers are now able to view private data such as IP addresses from the edit filter log, e.g. when the filter prevents a user from creating an account. Previously, this information was unavailable to CheckUsers because access to it could not be logged.
• The edit filter has a new feature contains_all that edit filter managers may use to check if one or more strings are all contained in another given string.

Miscellaneous

• Following the 2018 Steward elections, the following users are our new stewards: -revi, Green Giant, Rxy, There'sNoTime, علاء.

Obituaries

• Bhadani (Gangadhar Bhadani) passed away on 8 February 2018. Bhadani joined Wikipedia in March 2005 and became an administrator in September 2005. While he was active, Bhadani was regarded as one of the most prolific Wikipedians from India.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:00, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – April 2018

News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2018).

Administrator changes

331dot • Cordless Larry • ClueBot NG

Gogo Dodo • Pb30 • Sebastiankessel • Seicer • SoLando

Guideline and policy news

• Administrators who have been desysopped due to inactivity are now required to have performed at least one (logged) administrative action in the past 5 years in order to qualify for a resysop without going through a new RfA.
• Editors who have been found to have engaged in sockpuppetry on at least two occasions after an initial indefinite block, for whatever reason, are now automatically considered banned by the community without the need to start a ban discussion.
• The notability guideline for organizations and companies has been substantially rewritten following the closure of this request for comment. Among the changes, the guideline more clearly defines the sourcing requirements needed for organizations and companies to be considered notable.
• The six-month autoconfirmed article creation trial (ACTRIAL) ended on 14 March 2018. The post-trial research report has been published. A request for comment is now underway to determine whether the restrictions from ACTRIAL should be implemented permanently.

Technical news

• There will soon be a calendar widget at Special:Block, making it easier to set expiries for a specific date and time.

Arbitration

• The Arbitration Committee is considering a change to the discretionary sanctions procedures which would require an editor to appeal a sanction to the community at WP:AE or WP:AN prior to appealing directly to the Arbitration Committee at WP:ARCA.

Miscellaneous

• A discussion has closed which concluded that administrators are not required to enable email, though many editors suggested doing so as a matter of best practice.
• The Foundations' Anti-Harassment Tools team has released the Interaction Timeline. This shows a chronologic history for two users on pages where they have both made edits, which may be helpful in identifying sockpuppetry and investigating editing disputes.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:23, 2 April 2018 (UTC)

Entre nous

I know you were trying to help here [1], and you did, but perhaps the phrase "... allow him to rest in peace" was not the best choice of words? - MrX 🖋 17:05, 7 April 2018 (UTC)

I meant it literally (lay off and let him take his wikibreak) and figuratively (stop WP:GRAVEDANCING). I hope there wasn't an alternate connotation related to life circumstances I'm not aware of. In any case thank you for closing the thread. ~Awilley (talk) 19:56, 7 April 2018 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – May 2018

News and updates for administrators from the past month (April 2018).

Administrator changes

None

Chochopk • Coffee • Gryffindor • Jimp • Knowledge Seeker • Lankiveil • Peridon • Rjd0060

Guideline and policy news

• The ability to create articles directly in mainspace is now indefinitely restricted to autoconfirmed users.
• A proposal is being discussed which would create a new "event coordinator" right that would allow users to temporarily add the "confirmed" flag to new user accounts and to create many new user accounts without being hindered by a rate limit.

Technical news

• AbuseFilter has received numerous improvements, including an OOUI overhaul, syntax highlighting, ability to search existing filters, and a few new functions. In particular, the search feature can be used to ensure there aren't existing filters for what you need, and the new equals_to_any function can be used when checking multiple namespaces. One major upcoming change is the ability to see which filters are the slowest. This information is currently only available to those with access to Logstash.
• When blocking anonymous users, a cookie will be applied that reloads the block if the user changes their IP. This means in most cases, you may no longer need to do /64 range blocks on residential IPv6 addresses in order to effectively block the end user. It will also help combat abuse from IP hoppers in general. This currently only occurs when hard-blocking accounts.
• The block notice shown on mobile will soon be more informative and point users to a help page on how to request an unblock, just as it currently does on desktop.
• There will soon be a calendar widget at Special:Block, making it easier to set expiries for a specific date and time.

Arbitration

• The Arbitration Committee is seeking additional clerks to help with the arbitration process.

Obituaries

• Lankiveil (Craig Franklin) passed away in mid-April. Lankiveil joined Wikipedia on 12 August 2004 and became an administrator on 31 August 2008. During his time with the Wikimedia community, Lankiveil served as an oversighter for the English Wikipedia and as president of Wikimedia Australia.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 07:05, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

A drive-by thank you

My apologies for being overly descriptive with the hatting reasons, and thank you for making it better. I have since created a little list of appropriate reasons to use in the future. Also thank you for contributing with properly weighed and measured reasoning...I found it both refreshing and a bit of a relief. Happy editing! ^{Atsme📞📧} 18:54, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the note! ~Awilley (talk) 04:37, 16 May 2018 (UTC)

I have to ask...

From my perspective, your comment appears to sympathize/excuse bad behavior but quite frankly, this edit did not lift me to higher ground, much less equal ground. Last time I checked, I didn't have any balls...and that includes the kind one juggles, hits with a baseball bat, throws through a hoop, or putts...and I have no "busybody crew"...I only see injustices and imbalance...so what about my feelings, or don't they count? ^{Atsme📞📧} 22:19, 18 May 2018 (UTC)

If I correctly understand what you're asking, no I do not condone MrX's outburst. ~Awilley (talk) 00:18, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

I've just noticed your block of Factchecker while the AE concerning their behavior was open. I wish you would have commented there. This gives me the impression that the standards are not equally enforced, given your lenience regarding the issue just above and your words to SPECIFICO after their AE was recently closed. I do, however, appreciate your attempts to help administrate the topic area. Mr Ernie (talk) 18:14, 23 May 2018 (UTC)

Sure, I can comment there. The big difference in my mind between the Specifico and Factchecker cases was that Specifico showed a recognition of what the problem was and made a commitment to fix it. Factchecker seems to have no awareness that their behavior is problematic and is externalizing all the blame. ~Awilley (talk) 18:31, 23 May 2018 (UTC)

Ernie, I'm hoping you will revise your reference to me which first of all is irrelevant Whataboutism since you could have documented your concerns about Awilley's block here without referring to a different time place and set of facts AND which secondly just puts on the record some sort of insinuation that AE made the wrong move in not blocking me or that some real real bad stuff happened with SPECIFICO. Somebody someday will stumble on this page and that diff and it can prejudice them against me or for that matter against Awilley in a way that our WP:ASPERSIONS policy is intended to prevent. So, since you and I have always gotten along fine I hope you'll consider revising or striking the reference to yours truly. Thanks SPECIFICO talk 18:40, 23 May 2018 (UTC)

It seemed a fair question to me. If this diff is the worst anybody can dig up on you you're in pretty good shape. ~Awilley (talk) 18:53, 23 May 2018 (UTC)

SPECIFICO I'm happy to revise my post - no insinuations intended. Mr Ernie (talk) 19:02, 23 May 2018 (UTC)

Thanks Ernie, and for anyone who doesn't know, Atsme, Ernie and I are 3 editors who often disagree on content but always interact civilly and collaboratively. This puts the lie to those who carelessly claim that misbehavior is based in ideology or whatnot. SPECIFICO talk 19:11, 23 May 2018 (UTC)

More bile during block

It continues, even after the block has started. He hasn't even read, and fully absorbed, my statement at AE, or, worse yet, believed it and changed his mind about me. Now even a topic ban isn't enough. -- BullRangifer (talk) PingMe 20:05, 23 May 2018 (UTC)

Your best move here is to try to disengage from the user as much as possible. They already have a 1-way topic ban. Trust the community to enforce that and keep in mind that personal attacks are more harmful to the attacker than the attacked and that stridently defending yourself is unnecessary and may actually hurt your own credibility. That's been my observation at least. ~Awilley (talk) 20:38, 23 May 2018 (UTC)

Good advice. -- BullRangifer (talk) PingMe 20:42, 23 May 2018 (UTC)

Re: comment

Hi, Awilley. I'm one of those old-fashioned Wikipedia editors who generally respond to people on their pages, not my own, but feel free to respond to this in either page. Also, I wanted to clarify that my topic ban is "Donald Trump, broadly construed," and not all American politics since 1932 or anything like that. I didn't respond directly to all of the admins who commented on my page, either, in this case, but I did read and heed the advice. Anyway, I don't want to get into an argument with you, but I think the admin oversight of these articles has been disgraceful, and frankly, my intervention (in this case, as an editor opining on the talk page) was sorely needed. Obviously, I didn't go about it in the right way. That being said, I stand by the point that Wikipedia policy is being disregarded and made a mockery of on these articles. Furthermore, individuals assisting in the whitewashing campaign of Trump articles are endangering our collaborative editing process and our neutral point of view. I am not the first admin who has raised these warnings. Also, please note that my topic ban does not preclude my own future case filings to address POV pushing, admin failure, COI, etc., so not being able to edit the Trump article will give me time to do that. Finally, I agree with SPECIFICO regarding some of your own comments, behavior, and demeanor. I am an old school WP:ROUGE admin but I am not acting as an involved unbiased admin. I question the current admin oversight of these articles as ignoring violation of policy, and it's not "both sides are good people." Andrevan@ 18:17, 29 May 2018 (UTC)

👆 That is the problem you are unable to see. You just mentioned "individuals assisting in the whitewashing campaign of Trump articles". That was the problem before. Now it's a violation of your topic ban and will lead to blocks on your account. I'm trying to help you with your blind spot. I'm rushing out the door right now so I can't reply in full, but I'm interested in having a conversation with you. I'm the type who likes to have conversations in one place instead of spreading them across multiple pages, so let's do it here. Here's a ping: @Andrevan: ~Awilley (talk) 19:25, 29 May 2018 (UTC)

Sorry, I've never been topic banned before, but is mentioning the reason for my topic ban itself a violation of the topic ban? If so, we should probably stop discussing it now and let it lie. I can find other things to edit. Andrevan@ 19:27, 29 May 2018 (UTC)

Talking about the reason for the ban is treading very close to the line. Your post above and your post on Jimbo's talk page cross the line. If you knew how dangerously close you were to a block you world definitely stop discussing it. The fact that it is your first topic ban is probably the main reason you aren't blocked yet, as admins are cutting you some slack. But seriously, just take the day off and stop editing if you aren't sure what is a topic ban violation or not. ~Awilley (talk) 19:51, 29 May 2018 (UTC)

Discussing it with you here and on Jimbo's talk page are defensible in the immediate aftermath of the imposition of the topic ban. Obviously, if I am still here arguing and stuff in a few days then it's an issue. But, as I said, I'd rather drop it and not interact with you on it. I don't think we agree on this, and that's fine. I will not be editing Donald Trump or related pages or talk pages, or pursuing disputes with users Trumpian. Blocking me for having a conversation with Jimbo, who I haven't talked to in years, would be over the line on your end, in my opinion. Andrevan@ 21:45, 29 May 2018 (UTC)

OK, I'm home for the evening and can afford a longer reply to the above. If I thought that blocking you were in the best interest of the encyclopedia I would have done it already, and if I had wanted to see you blocked by someone else I could have led you on by chatting about the pro-Trump cabal, waiting for Winkelvi to report you to WP:AE. I had two goals: in the short term I wanted to prevent that trip to AE and block, and in the long term I wanted to help you understand exactly what went wrong. As I said earlier, it wasn't the outing. On the subject of the former, yes there is traditionally some discretionary leeway for "appeals to Jimbo" and such, and users often get a first strike, but that's very much up to the admin that happens to be watching. For the purposes of you not getting blocked it would be best for you to simply stop saying the word "Trump" altogether. (Impeachment jokes are definitely out of bounds.) For the second issue, I'm not going to force it on you and if you don't want to talk that's fine. If it's an issue of not being able to discuss it without mentioning Trump or Trumpian editors feel free to shoot me an email. As a side note, I get it that Wikipedia used to be more of a wild west than it is now, and there are aspects of that I wish we had more of (humor, IAR, less bureaucracy). At a certain point, though, you have to accept that things are different and adapt yourself. ~Awilley (talk) 00:00, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

I'm not here to violate my topic ban, so if you perceive that this comment does, I ask you to please remove it instead of reporting or blocking me. Consider my description that follows to be abstract and not specific. This isn't my first rodeo, for example someone posted some 2014 diffs of mine recently. I'm responding to your above comment because it is thoughtful and well-considered, and you deserve some sort of explanation - in fact, you offered to help me find my own blind spots. You and NeilN managed to become an admin here, and a well-regarded and well-respected admin, by being such. In the old days we relied a lot more on blunt talk, intuition, and embracing contradictions with dispensing judgments and justice, remembering that some principles, like NPOV, verifiability, consensus, reasoned argument, logic, etc. are more important than the letter of policy, and so we can act as judge and executor of the constitutionality. Because my embrace of the core principles is strong (usually), I may sometimes violate the specifics in the ultimate service of the goal. Because administrator was always conceived as a "janitor," but in fact is more of a "policeman"/"lawman"/"sheriff", it's kind of a real life Stanford prison experiment. To lighten the load we would use humor and surrealism, to blunt the violence of enforcement. Also, Wikipedia has always been something of an anarchistic, populist-oriented project which "punches up." And of course the free culture, self-organizing decentralization is an anarcho-syndicalist idea on some level. So what I'm saying is that there were always cabals on Wikipedia, contrary to the truism, lots of little self-organizing cabals on IRC and elsewhere. There's nothing inherently wrong with cabals -- except when there is. Admins need to get involved and be a little aggressive, especially on major targets. Trusts need to be busted, rackets need to be broken up. You're like the FBI after mob bosses. We also used to have a Mediation Committee that was functional, the Association of Member's Advocates, etc. That's enough on the subject of cabals, and again please redact if you determine that to have been a topic ban vio.

Some will say that my actions were a violation of WP:POINT. I will contend that I didn't show up to the articles I've been banned from with an intent to prove a point. All I did, was show up to the articles and honestly post what I thought at the time or that day, just as most casual editors, and not admins, are doing on these article talk pages. "Straight talk express," I "told it like it is." Until I found myself on the precipice of undisclosed CLI-land and I stepped over the edge. For example, I noticed some people reading up about "advocacy duck" vs "coot". I am a pure coot, you can call it temporary insanity or self-destruction. My girlfriend was concerned, as I had complained of not sleeping well and back pain, and seemed to be overly concerned about Wikipedia. So it's completely justified that I am now topic-banned, as Jimbo says, I couldn't write unemotionally on that topic anyhow, and I didn't. The system worked in my case. There were many ways my entire editing career, of a week or so, on those articles could have gone. Things escalated pretty quickly. I contend that my actions served a purpose in illustrating a significant problem with the articles, the enforcement of reliable source policy on the article talk pages, etc. You can review the discussion yourself and see if I was off my rocker and ranting for most of the time, or if I was talking hard content talk most of the time. I won't get into the specifics here. I also believe that the admins need to get into the trenches and be a neutral 3rd party checking the sources and what they say, confirming that NYT is reliable and not biased, academic sources are different from op-eds, etc. Andrevan@ 19:34, 1 June 2018 (UTC)

Administrators' newsletter – June 2018

News and updates for administrators from the past month (May 2018).

Administrator changes

None

Al Ameer son • AliveFreeHappy • Cenarium • Lupo • MichaelBillington

Guideline and policy news

• Following a successful request for comment, administrators are now able to add and remove editors to the "event coordinator" group. Users in the event coordinator group have the ability to temporarily add the "confirmed" flag to new user accounts and to create many new user accounts without being hindered by a rate limit. Users will no longer need to be in the "account creator" group if they are in the event coordinator group.
• Following an AN discussion, all pages with content related to blockchain and cryptocurrencies, broadly construed, are now under indefinite general sanctions.

Technical news

• IP-based cookie blocks should be deployed to English Wikipedia in June. This will cause the block of a logged-out user to be reloaded if they change IPs. This means in most cases, you may no longer need to do /64 range blocks on residential IPv6 addresses in order to effectively block the end user. It will also help combat abuse from IP hoppers in general. For the time being, it only affects users of the desktop interface.
• The Wikimedia Foundation's Anti-Harassment Tools team will build granular types of blocks in 2018 (e.g. a block from uploading or editing specific pages, categories, or namespaces, as opposed to a full-site block). Feedback on the concept may be left at the talk page.
• There is now a checkbox on Special:ListUsers to let you see only users in temporary user groups.
• It is now easier for blocked mobile users to see why they were blocked.

Arbitration

• A recent technical issue with the Arbitration Committee's spam filter inadvertently caused all messages sent to the committee through Wikipedia (i.e. Special:EmailUser/Arbitration Committee) to be discarded. If you attempted to send an email to the Arbitration Committee via Wikipedia between May 16 and May 31, your message was not received and you are encouraged to resend it. Messages sent outside of these dates or directly to the Arbitration Committee email address were not affected by this issue.

Miscellaneous

• In early May, an unusually high level of failed login attempts was observed. The WMF has stated that this was an "external effort to gain unauthorized access to random accounts". Under Wikipedia policy, administrators are required to have strong passwords. To further reinforce security, administrators should also consider enabling two-factor authentication. A committed identity can be used to verify that you are the true account owner in the event that your account is compromised and/or you are unable to log in.

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:59, 1 June 2018 (UTC)

Hello!

Are you still interested in helping coordinate WP:WER's efforts? Cheers, JustBerry (talk) 20:40, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

Hi, I would like to help but I'm currently juggling so many things IRL that I don't feel up to coordinating anything new at the moment. Sorry! ~Awilley (talk) 23:09, 5 June 2018 (UTC)