Wikipedia talk:Block protocol

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For your consideration. Gerardw (talk) 21:17, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'm confused, what if anything substantive this adds to WP:BLOCK that isn't covered. The purpose appears to be a proposal to make block logs subject to oversight. (is it even technically possible to hide block log entries without a software alteration?) Although I understand that misinterpretation of the block log can have long range negative consequences, as long as unblocks are carefully worded and dummy blocks are used as necessary to update the log, this seems like a solution in search of a problem. ~~If this is addressing a wider concern of which I am unaware, forgive me, otherwise this looks creepy to me.~~ Crazynas^t 21:52, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

This is in response to Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests#Unblocks_and_enabling and Wikipedia:Ani#User:WebHamster_block_and_unblock.3B_possible_wheel_war_-_leaving_it_to_the_community_to_judge_me_and_others. The issue of past blocks is a recurrent, and usually irrelevant, theme at WP:WQA. Gerardw (talk) 22:05, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the relevant reading, I'm still confused why this needs a separate page (as opposed to an amendment to official policy) however. Crazynas^t 22:17, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Me too. You might want to look at some of the contemporary discussion at Wikipedia Talk:Blocking policy. In case this is the intention (though I'm not yet sure that it is), we do not want to make blocking policy more prescriptive, and we definitely don't need a "prescriptive fork" of policy. causa sui (talk) 23:41, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Expunging the record would require software changes. Rich Farmbrough, 00:28, 19 November 2011 (UTC).

I started a separate page for the purposes of discussion -- if the proposal is accepted, it could be merged into the existing one, if it fails, it's moot. Gerardw (talk) 00:46, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I do not think it represents the consensus at those discussions linked to above. I certainly do not think it was agreed that "a previous administrator statement to the effect that a block isn't appropriate shall not be considered an "action" in the sense of wheel war reversal" What I think was agreed was in this particular situation the block was a good block and should not have been unblocked. Most of the discussion concerned these special aspects. It is a very poor idea to make elaborate codified provisions on the basis of a special situation--it leads to unpredictable results and can create more disturbances in practice than anyone realizes at the time. That's why we have IAR, so we don't have to do this sort of general proposal. The admin involved knew and said he knew he might have done what amounted to a technical wheel warring violation and came just as he should have to ANI to discuss it. (and his decision was widely though not uanimously supported, not on the technicalities, but on the basis of the best way of handling the specific situation. DGG ( talk ) 01:40, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]