Should Wikipedia administrators be required to cite offending diffs when they indefinitely block an account?

This resource is a wikidebate, a collaborative effort to gather and organize all arguments on a given issue. It is a tool of argument analysis or pro-and-con analysis. This is not a place to defend your preferred points of view, but original arguments are allowed and welcome. See the Wikidebate guidelines for more.

Should Wikipedia administrators be required to cite offending diffs when they indefinitely block an account, whether in the block log or on the talk page? For the simplicity of formulation, the question is stated for Wikipedia, but applies to Wiktionary, Wikisource, etc. as well.

Disclaimer: This argument analysis exercise was written by a single author (more authors can come later) based on the linked sources and imagination. It may reflect the author's biases. It does not aim to replace each project's decision making processes (it can't anyway). Given the strength of the opposing side, it is very unlikely the debated putative policy would be acceptable anywhere, except perhaps with appropriate refinement/modification.

Wikipedia administrators should be required to cite offending diffs when they indefinitely block an account

Pro

• Argument for This would greatly increase the reviewability/auditability of the blocks. And indefinite blocks are of the level of severity that justifies the requirement of simplified reviewability/auditability.
• Argument for The added administrative/proof/evidence collection burden for indefinite blocks would provide incentive for admins to use e.g. one-year-long blocks when sufficient, a good thing.
  • Objection For clear spam or cross-wiki vandal accounts, this burden is not justified, even if it would be justified for less clear cases.
    • Objection Using one-year-long blocks in spam or cross-wiki vandal cases would address the issue sufficiently. And if the account would wake up and spam/vandalize again, the block could increase to two-year-long block, and then further exponentially up (and exponential increase is rather severe).

Con

• Argument against This would add administrative overhead when in fact the reasons for the block are usually relatively easy to find in the edits that preceded the block.
  • Objection It is not clear why administrative overhead for an indefinite block (as opposed to e.g. one-year-long one) is a bad thing; see also above "The added administrative/proof/evidence collection burden for indefinite blocks ...".
  • Objection Usually is not good enough. In administration of law, one would not be satisfied with the statement that the decision of the judge or jury is usually well justified and substantiated; one requires nearly always or in all but vanishingly small number of cases.
• Argument against When an account is blocked that attacked e.g. by revealing the physical address of the target or threatened violence, driving the block, pointing to the offending diff is problematic.
  • Objection The physical address has to be oversighted (hidden) anyway. And therefore, pointing to the diff can cause no harm.
• Argument against The requirement that all such blocks get preemptive substantiation in the form of diffs is excessive; an alternative would be to provide the offending diffs only when the blocked account requests so on the talk page, and that alternative would surely reduce the administration burden greatly compared to providing the diffs always.
  • Objection Indefinite blocks should be so rare that the burden of preemptively building the case should be accepted.
• Argument against "While diff links are useful, we must also note that diff links cannot explain everything. For example, username issues (WV:IU) can be explained by usernames itself rather than diff links, and open proxies (m:NOP) would never be explained by diff links. In addition, some spambots can only be explained by abuse filter logs, and block evasions can be explained by specifying the username (or an enwiki SPI page if applicable) rather than diff links."
• Argument against Providing diffs would be against W: Wikipedia:Deny recognition.
  • Objection It is not clear how a list of diffs in the block log somehow lead to recognition.
  • Objection The page does not contain anything actionable; it waffles.
  • Objection The page is merely an essay and is not vetted by consensus, possibly because it is bad or weak.
• While requiring citing of diffs would provide some hurdle to bad indefinite blocks, it seems unlikely that this intervention would really prevent the kind of administrators who derive nontrivial pleasure from abuse of the block tool and exercise of arbitrary unchecked power from abusing the tools. It seems more likely that the power-junkies would accept the additional pain of collecting diffs as being more than compensated by the power trip.
• Argument against I suppose I am old school but as I recall the way this used to work, the onus was on the complainant to provide diffs when reporting behaviour requiring admin intervention. Thus a link to a community discussion was more than sufficient. Now it seems you can be sanctioned by community consensus if sufficient editors denounce another; even when there is clearly no evidence to support a complaint. We need to go back to requiring evidence before an admin will act.

Other

• Abstain: I do not feel comfortable discussing a sister project's administrative policies on an alternate site. This discussion should occur in an appropriate forum on en-wp where those who have a vested interest in the outcome can be aware of, and express an opinion. The contributions here lack attribution to participants. We shouldn't have to dig through diffs to discover who has expressed an opinion. That history clearly shows that that this so called "debate" is a single user having a conversation with themselves. --mikeu ^talk 02:10, 19 June 2024 (UTC)

Further reading

• Wikiversity:Colloquium#RfC - Admins/sysops issuing a block should be required to cite the offending diff(s) and the specific (official) rule/policy violated in the block log messageg
• Meta: Requests for comment/The block log lacks useful information - basic requirements for sysop/admin accountability