UDWiki talk:Administration/Policy Discussion/Off-Site Requests for Admin Actions
In case that any of you have missed the drama that has created the need for such a policy: Izzy's sig SD discussion and related Misconduct case against Cheese for overturning an off-site request.
As should be obvious, I am not a fan of off-site requests - they are easy to falsify and hard to be made accountable without massively hurting privacy.
However, I recognize a few cases where off-site requests might be valid:
- Actions requested on behalf of a banned user (especially for, but not necessarily limited to Permaban appeals).
- Banned users have technically no other way to get anything done but to use non-banned users as proxies.
- Deletions of copyrighted material requested by the copyright holder.
- When The Man threatens us with his lawyers over copyright, we would be terminally stupid to not act on it just because The Man can't be bothered to use the petty bureaucracy of our petty fiefdom.
- Actions that would have been considered to be scheduled anyway (particularly, but not limited to Scheduled Deletions and Scheduled Protections).
- No-Brainer that hopefully doesn't need further explanation.
- Sys-Ops may temporarily tolerate other off-site requests. As such a requested is merely tolerated, it may be overturned at any time by any sys-op, unless the user himself shows up on-site to confirm it.
- This is the carte blanche for extreme cases - like, when an user's home connection breaks down and he can't access the wiki at work. As it is merely tolerated until the user shows up, there is a strong built-in incentive to show up ASAP and thus create the necessary accountability. Obviously, this would require to put some trust into sys-ops to not do instant overturnings on sight - but likewise, users would need to put trust into them anyway to recognize their off-site request.
Discuss. --Oh, and vote on Project Funny, by the way. -- Spiderzed█ 20:06, 17 May 2011 (BST)
Works for me… mostly.
Remove the whole “tolerate” section and require any other sysop to show cause for anything to be overturned. I remind you that these are sysop-only actions and thus subject to Misconduct proceedings if any impropriety is found to have taken place. ᚱᛁᚹᛖᚾᚨᚾᛏ 02:27, 18 May 2011 (BST)
- Regarding the "show cause" idea, I would disagree to the greatest degree possible. The onus should always be on the sysop who is accepting an offsite request, rather than on the rest of the team, to provide evidence supporting their side. After all, by virtue of being an offsite request, we can only guarantee that the sysop accepting the request would have access to any form of evidence at all. Putting the burden of proof on the team would mean that any sysop could claim to have had an IRC chat or received an e-mail but not kept it, allowing them to do virtually anything in anyone's name. Unless the person showed up later to contest whatever happened, the team would have no way of showing cause. —Aichon— 06:27, 18 May 2011 (BST)
- ^ to every possible degree, seriously. Keeping in mind the catalyst for this, iscariot, is someone notorious for forging off-site logs in order to prove things in issues on-wiki -- ϑanceϑanceℜevolution 10:49, 18 May 2011 (BST)
I very much agree with basic policy but I'm not entirely happy with the ability of Sysops to entirely unilaterally overturn the decisions of other Sysops with any discussion or cause. I believe there should be at least some sort of discussion before doing so (I.e something put-on A/SD].--The General T Sys U! P! F! 09:11, 18 May 2011 (BST)
