Wikipedia:RedWarn/Requests for comment

The RedWarn team is currently in the process of renaming to Ultraviolet. Some documentation pages are still in the process of being written/transferred. Read the announcement here.

RedWarn has been involved in multiple community discussions since its original introduction in April 2020. This page documents these discussions and the steps taken by the RedWarn team in order to resolve the concerns of the community.

Community discussions

June 2020 - Usage of an external CDN

RedWarn was brought to the attention of users on the Administrator's noticeboard for using scripts that were hosted outside of websites controlled by the Wikimedia Foundation. These included Google Fonts for the Roboto font and JSDelivr for UI libraries and polyfills. Administrators saw privacy concerns given that browser and request data were made available to third-party sources outside of the Wikimedia foundation's scope. This was the first on-wiki discussion which also brought up the topic of RedWarn's involvement in inexperienced recent changes patrol – which was discussed in a later thread.

Resolution: RedWarn's dependencies were fully moved to a Toolforge static content host: redwarn.toolforge.org, and this was later reflected in this GitLab commit.

July 2020 - Introduction of a blacklist

Following a discussion regarding an editor's misuse of RedWarn to edit war, Nosebagbear contacted Ed6767 regarding the creation of a blacklist page, which led into a discussion regarding the authority of such a blacklist, and whether or not it would be interpreted as a pure TBAN or akin to removing user rights from a user.

Resolution: No clear consensus.

Aug 2020 - Preventing abuse with restrictions to use RedWarn

Following the previous thread on ANI, SuperGoose007 proposed the addition of restrictions in order to prevent inexperienced users from using RedWarn. The RfC ran for almost 2 weeks, garnering !votes from multiple users.

Resolution: RedWarn's rapid reversion and automatic user warning template selection features were disabled for non-extended confirmed users, and additional tamper protection techniques were introduced to prevent abuse of the tool at a technical level.

Nov 2020 - Proposal to make RedWarn a gadget

On November 2020, a proposal to make RedWarn a gadget was introduced on the village pump. During the five-day duration of the proposal, mixed opinions led to many supports and opposes, with the most contending point for opposition being RedWarn's usage of off-wiki sources, which are unmonitored by interface administrators.

Resolution: The proposal was withdrawn and RedWarn was subsequently permanently moved to a dedicated role account (previously controlled only by Ed6767, now only by Chlod): User:RedWarn.