Talk:Stewards/Elections 2023/Votes/Klein Muçi

Discussion under Victor Schmidt's vote

Moved from the voting page. For ElectCom, --Martin Urbanec (talk) 17:22, 25 February 2023 (UTC)

Victor Schmidt (Eligible, checked by Martin Urbanec)2023 •  Not convinced by their x-wiki experience, nor by their responses to some of the questions, including but not limited to the one on lock reasons Victor Schmidt (talk) 16:08, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

Victor Schmidt, hello! May I know what should have been different on my answer according to you on that particular question you mention about lock reasons? Constructive critics make one better and this is a good chance for me in regard to that. — Klein Muçi (talk) 13:57, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

I realized I should've replied here much earlier. Anyway into the questions:

• With regards to the case judgement question, you talk a lot about your philosophy when interacting with small projects (as sotialewiki seems to be), but what I have kind of missed is discussing what you take into account when giving (temporary) local admin rights, e.g. what Superpes15 wrote in their first few sentences, and to some extent also xaosflux.
• With regards to Stewards/Elections 2023/Questions#Lock reasons:

Perhaps I am misinterpreting your response, but your first bullet point (on Longterm Abuse) doesn't seem to hightlight the aspect that LTA locks are generally only handed out for edits of a disruptive nature. There are multiple reasons why someone might end up using multiple accounts at different points in time, including but not limited too forgetting your password without having specified an email adress (and then not learning from it). As long as the edits are not destructive there is no reason to lock them as an LTA. With regards to the second sentence, I don't blieve this case is realistic, and I don't recall ever seeing an example. Seing as in that case the disruption is (so far) limited to one project, this would've been a good case for attempting local solutions first (even if it might be futile beause the vandalism was done intentionally)

With regards to your second point, perhaps this is because my logical home wiki is enwiki where vandalism has a very specific, restricted meaning, but I am not impressed with you stating Same user committed vandal edits on a global scale. because vandalism is not the only thing you can get globally locked for (as crosswiki abuse). I remember the case of Special:CentralAuth/Edgar181 who was locally blocked for socking, first on enwiki, then on commons, and subsequently globally locked.

finally, I'd like to talk about your bullet point about lock evasion, and perhaps also explain a little on where Renvoy below is coming from. You stated: Same user, different accounts opened for the reason to evade a block[emphasis mine] that was given to a prior account. When I initially read your response (before the reply by Renvoy, and before my question), I saw three ways to parse this:

1. Same user, different accounts opened for the reason to evade a Global lock that was given to a prior account.
2. Same user, different accounts opened for the reason to evade a Global block that was given to a prior account.
3. Same user, different accounts opened for the reason to evade a local block [(e.g. w:en:WP:BLOCK)] that was given to a prior account.

Reading Renvoy's vote, I am reasonably certain that they are concerned 3. was meant, but reading your reply to them it seems like that was not what you intended to convey (perhaps they shoul've asked a question before deciding on which option to take). After reading your reply to my question, including specifically [...] I generally tend to use both terms interchangeably in the general sense, [...] I am reasonably convinced that you mean 1., so I have excluded this in deciding on what to vote. I do have to reccomend to you that you avoid this ambiguity in the event that you become a steward. Victor Schmidt (talk) 08:23, 25 February 2023 (UTC)

Victor Schmidt, thank you for a well detailed answer. The ending of your reply about global/local (b)locks also helped me better understand user Renvoy's reaction to my answer (and how my second answer about that matter might have unfortunately kept that confusion ongoing, now that I see it in new light).

In regard to your other points:

Your concern first bullet point (on Longterm Abuse) doesn't seem to hightlight the aspect that LTA locks are generally only handed out for edits of a disruptive nature is well-intended but I (maybe wrongly so) considered that a well-established fact not necessarily worth to explicitly mention it. I am a bot operator so in a general sense I use multiple accounts myself and I've been doing that for quite some years now. I've also seen many users use multiple accounts for testing purposes, different devices and/or for different levels of protections. Beside everything, there is also w:en:WP:CLEANSTART, which would intersect with the vandalism aspect and still be an allowed practice. Considering the SE an avenue the audience of which is mostly experienced users, I've generally tried to tailor my answers according to that.
With regards to the second sentence, I don't blieve this case is realistic, and I don't recall ever seeing an example. This has happened to my local wiki quite some times. It usually tends to happen when local admins are rather passive. Vandalism approaches just get rollbacked or sometimes they just get stuck eternally in edit review (SqWiki has page review active for every page and no new changes by new users can be made public before getting reviewed by an experienced user/admin, a practice shared by some other wikis as well) and in cases of edit warring, pages just get fully protected "until the war has passed". In such cases, when an admin finally decides to be more active on the users themselves, they may go from 0 to 100 and block them for long time abuse even though the user might not even have a single warning on their page by the time of the block. I suspect this to also happen on other small wikis as well, hence the answer. Similar situations of passive adminship are rather common in "small" wikis in which human and technological resources are scarce (warning templates may be absent, bots don't exist and in a list of 10 admins, 9 of them may be dormant). Some time ago I've tried starting a Meta discussion about the differences that exist between different communities, which was supposed to also tackle small wikis vs EnWiki differences but it never received the attention I was hoping for.
Considering all said above, and what I've written here, it is hard for me to explicitly say what I may consider before giving (temporary) privileges beside the general requirements Superpes mentions. My answer came after Superpes' and Mykola's answers so I thought I would user mine (the longer version) to fill in what wasn't already talked about. The language barrier is a concept I've mentioned in some global discussions, starting from here.

As for sockpuppetry, I'll openly admit that I completely forgot about that aspect. In my homewiki, sockpuppets are 99% of the time used only for avoiding detection and sanctions and thus they again lead either to vandalism or edit warring. (There is only one case when one user was found out to be using multiple accounts to affect a RFA about themselves many years ago.)

No matter what, I thank you a lot for taking the time to engage in this thorough discussion with me as, if anything else, it brought new light in the different interpretations my answers might have and reminded me of some concepts I had forgotten. Many times, while answering objective questions in SE, candidates might be left wondering if they ultimately answered correctly or not. — Klein Muçi (talk) 14:13, 25 February 2023 (UTC)

Discussion under Renvoy's vote

Moved from the voting page. For ElectCom, --Martin Urbanec (talk) 17:22, 25 February 2023 (UTC)

Renvoy (Eligible, checked by Johannnes89)2023 •  Thanks for your long-time dedication to the project, but unfortunately that's no from me. I carefully analyzed your answers to questions and, although, I see great competence in some areas, I am worried about your knowledge of stewards' actions that take place most frequently in public view as all your answers include some sort of inaccuracy. reNVoy (user talk) 11:41, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

Renvoy, thank you for the good words! May I have a general idea about the said inaccuracies so I can hopefully better myself in those aspects? — Klein Muçi (talk) 13:53, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi For example, your explanation of Lock evasion was: Same user, different accounts opened for the reason to evade a block that was given to a prior account However it implies that every user which is involved in sockpuppetry anywhere can be globally locked. This is not the case. Global locks are put in place in case of WMF ban evasion or global b(lock) that was already in place. Your explanation of Spambot: User doing disruptive edits of an automatic nature (a lot of the same edit everywhere fast). In most of the cases from my experience, it is different. Take a look a this: account was rightfully so locked but user had only one edit. Higher xwiki activity from your side would be perfect way of learning such things, so I hope you would take it into account. reNVoy (user talk) 14:25, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

@Renvoy:, I'll respectfully disagree with you on both points - the reason I'm replying to this is because I'd like to see if I'm missing something. Regarding your first point, I don't get your reasoning. Regarding your second point, in the above example you linked, (1) a account making a spam edit is not necessarily a spambot, and (2) prior edits could have well been caught by abuse filters. As a result, I don't see Klein's answer to that question as incorrect - other candidates have answered similarly. Leaderboard (talk) 15:58, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

Renvoy, you say However it implies that every user which is involved in sockpuppetry anywhere can be globally locked. It's hard for me to understand where I've made such an implication in my statement. I only answered about the definition of the term. I've talked on multiple answers about the importance of having your decisions taken in an organic manner, not bureaucratically. Equalizing lock evasion (or any other similar concept/term for that matter) with the decision to globally lock an account would be contrary of that expressed ideology. It comes with big surprise to me to read that I might have accidentally made such an implication.

As for spambots, I can't judge properly on the example you've brought because I have no context. I can't see that one edit that account had made or the content of the 2 filters that were activated because of its edits given that their content is private. Extrapolating from the mentioned names of the 2 filters I'm guessing that we're talking about this case. Having a well-known case repeated may explain why it was acted upon rather fast. But still, as Leaderboard mentioned, a lot of the same edit may have still happened and blocked by the filters that are mentioned in the accompanying request. In any case, as a new steward I'd be somewhat reluctant to act quickly on blocks.

All that said, thank you for your answer! If anything else, I'll try to be even more aware of the different interpretations my future replies can have. — Klein Muçi (talk) 17:14, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi: I've touched om the first part on my resposne above, but with regards to the second part: Perts of the edit are still visible in the page creation log there. Victor Schmidt (talk) 08:40, 25 February 2023 (UTC)

Victor Schmidt, I believe you might want to revisit your included link above. It leads to NlWikt. — Klein Muçi (talk) 14:24, 25 February 2023 (UTC)

Perhaps I've should made my meaning plainer: In reviewing the exemple Renvoy provided above (about spambots, here specificially [[Special:CentralAuth/MargaretaArsenau) I've noticed that there is some context about (no longer visible) edits the locked account in question has, by looking at the nlwikt page creation log. The link I've provided (wikt:nl:Special:Redirect/logid/939231) is directly to the log entry in question. I don't understand dutch, but the log entry's summary seems to indicate that this is the same as the edit summary the software generates automatically when you create a new page put leave the edit summary blank, which means that we get an excerpt of what MargaretaArsenau wrote (and /potentially/ considered to be a valid entry for a Dictionary). I agree it isn't much context, but I felt it could've helped you. Victor Schmidt (talk) 16:32, 25 February 2023 (UTC)

Victor Schmidt, oh, it was related to the spambot part! I was expecting the link to be in regard to the block/lock matter we were discussing above.
Yes, considering what you just showed, the content is generic and typical spam/promo. Nonetheless, I would still feel reluctant myself to act on locks with 1 single edit. Not only as a new steward but even as an admin on my everyday duties, I try to use blocking as the ultimate step. (The only cases in which I usually tend to block immediately are when usernames can be utterly inappropriate.) — Klein Muçi (talk) 17:11, 25 February 2023 (UTC)