Incnis Mrsi

I know that you have spoken out about the enforcement of a global lock on Wikimedia Commons before for a user that wasn't locally blocked, so I was wondering on your insight. I can't really contact you on Wikimedia Commons and as this concerns a technical issue as well I will contact you here. But I recently came across this:

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/398572020

While I am by no means a fan of this user or their behaviour, I noticed a somewhat worsening of trends, because while official policy clearly states:

"This list does not include accounts that have been globally locked on charges of cross wiki disruption, spamming, or vandalism. Such users are not globally banned, per se. If they create new accounts and are not disruptive with those accounts, they will not be locked again merely because it is discovered that they were previously globally locked."

It is clear that global locks have become de facto global bans and to some extent the implementation of tools always trumps actual policies. In the case above the user wasn't blocked on Wikimedia Commons but they were globally locked (essentially "steward banned" for abuse on the English-language Wikipedia), successful global locks appeals are EXTREMELY rare and there exists no page that explains how to appeal a global lock, furthermore, appealing on-wiki also isn't possible anymore so users can only e-mail stewards which doesn't work as stewards never real e-mails or reply to them if they come from globally locked users, so it's essentially a "you are now globally banned forever" message on the user pages of globally locked users.

Do you think that these de facto global bans can be stopped by implementing global blocks for Wikimedia SUL accounts or do you think that it will also become standard practice to deny them local unblocks thus making the global blocks the same as global bans? The policy States that it's (global locks) only rarely used against non-bot, non-vandalism-only accounts but cases like the above, Reguyla, and many others proves this wrong.

In fact the only times I see global ban RFC's is after a global lock request was denied, as many users see global locks as "circumventing the bureaucracy of community consensus" and the above Diff also shows how the mentality is, global locks are for years and can only be appealed off-wiki with no scrutiny from the community.

Do you think that global blocks for named accounts could fix this?

Perhaps blocks would be marginally better in certain cases but this option will prompt for yet-unseen spray of abuse and dickishness for some other cases. Anyway what could I do here, Donald? Authoritarianism won and majority of Wikimedians submitted to it voluntarily.

I don't know what can be done, change isn't always a revolution, it can happen slowly and small incremental positive changes may have a long-term good effect. You have always been outspoken about these things, so I was curious if you might know a good software solution, but I am beginning to think that it's the people and not the tools that cause the current state of affairs.