Stewards' noticeboard/Archives/2010-04

Please advise

I regret to report that one member of the community of stewards seems to have lost his bearings and embarked in a personal vendetta under false pretenses. Please forgive my audacity, but I would like to know if it is possible to have a fair hearing in this community. I would like to be properly advised on this matter since I have been accused of such monstrous deeds that I have been banned for life from the Portuguese Wikipedia.

Sincerely

Virgilio A. P. Machado

Vapmachado 22:58, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

The Portuguese Wikipedia community is entirely large enough to make its own decisions in this regard. I doubt a community as large as theirs would ban a user without cause or justification. I suggest you be very careful as to your claims, and what you are claiming the community did to you, as this project's community members have very little patience or tolerance for people who come to Meta in an attempt to circumvent the decisions of an active, mature project community. bastique ^demandez! 17:33, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Much obliged. China has close to 1.5 billion inhabitants and I would not touch some of the decisions of its leaders with a ten foot pole. It is my unwavering conviction that a community as large as that bans citizens without cause or justification, according to The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and that most sovereign governments choose to look the other way in order to keep business as usual, considering that a small price to pay. Governments, however, do not have a conscience or memory. Human beings do. I find the above comment to a request for advise to be a crude attempt to intimidate and discredit. It defends impatience and intolerance. It alleges an intention that it cannot prove, nor can be deducted from a justified request for advice. It emphasizes qualities of a project that were not brought into question, while failing to address the question made, leading to the unfortunate indirect conclusion that the answer is: NO. Returning to the initial example. China is an active, mature community, and being one of the world's oldest continuous civilizations it's way beyond the stage of being a project. Vapmachado 15:11, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Protection of 3 namespaces for the ru:wiktionary

Moved from Steward requests/Global permissions - though stewards still can not do nothing on this. — Dferg (talk) 12:29, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

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Herewith we request to protect from unregistered users (UUs) three most important namespaces of the Russian Wiktionary (Викисловарь) - the Main namespace, Categories and Templates. We've discussed the issue in our community and agreed upon such a measure. Our considerations:

1. At this stage the Russian Wiktionary (as have many other language domains of the project) has evolved into a very complicated system with rather strict rules. Being a multi-lingual, multi-functional dictionary means that it has to strictly maintain uniformity of article structure - otherwise it cannot be reasonably considered dictionary, but merely a disorganized pile of information. Unlike what can be observed in Wikipedia, the representation of the content in Wictionary in not less important than the content itself. Even well-intentioned UUs generally fail to read, understand and/or comply with the rules of the Wiktionary and thus expose the articles to the risk of disfiguring.
2. More than 95% of edits made by UUs end up requiring admin attention, whether it involves brushing up the added (usually in miniscule amounts) content, reverting or deleting the changes immediately. To date, according to the estimates, about 40% constitute outright vandalism, about 20% - spam, and the remainder, being well-intentioned, does not comply with the rules adopted for the project and thus deteriorate the articles rather than improve them; moreover, a significant part of it constitutes copyvio.
3. Over 90% of useful edits to the Wiktionary are made by Registered Users (RUs), including both creation of the new articles and enhancing the existing ones.
4. About 20% of the time many of the most active and productive RUs contribute to the project is dedicated to simply tracking down and undoing or improving the edits of the UUs, which we have started to consider an undue waste of time and effort, not to mention an added wiki engine overhead (dozens and sometimes hundreds of useless transactions every day). Thus, securing the main namespace from occasional unqualified newcomers will very likely accelerate the development of the project rather than slow it down.
5. The registration procedure is not at all complicated, while imposing some responsibility onto the users. Besides, all the talk/discussion pages and many other namespaces of the project will remain open to UUs, so restriction will not be excessive. Also, most of the active users of Wikimedia projects use the Single user login feature.

The same goes for the Belorussian Wiktionary (be:wiktionary). There was no discussion there - since there actually is no community at present; so being pretty much the single user and the same time the single sysop of be:wikt I confirm the necessity of the same measure for be: as well. --Al Silonov 10:35, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Stewards cannot protect whole namespaces. You should asl developers for it on http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org.--Anatoliy (talk) 12:26, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

What Anatoliy said. We can protect individual pages but not whole namespaces. Please ask on bugzilla for this. Thank you, — Dferg (talk) 12:30, 15 April 2010 (UTC)