For some time by now, I'm thinking about having a "Impact of your block" kind of dashboard. This dashboard would let its users (Wikimedia stewards and administrators; we can restrict the latter to "checkusers" if admins is too broad) to see how many users are impacted by a (range) block.
I'm not sure how about admins, but email queue of Wikimedia Stewards is often terribly backlogged (ATM, we've about 1k of mails to go through). It would be useful to know which blocks (in stewards' case, global) affect how many users. A dashboard would enable us to factor the information in our decision-making processes.
Ideally, the dashboard will be usable in two ways:
- before a block is placed, estimate how many users would be stopped from editing
- after a block is placed, see how many users pressed "Edit", but were met with an error message.
For the first use-case, that should be doable with the currently-available data, I think (the wmf_raw.mediawiki_private_cu_changes should give the information needed for that).
For the second use-case, we'd need to collect new data. Based on a short discussion in #wikimedia-analytics at IRC, that should be done by creating a new stream. I'm not sure where to feed the data at the MediaWiki end of things though. Maybe in PermissionManager::getPermissionErrors, when action is edit? Or should we do it in the editor itself to remove edits made via the API (in that case, we'd need to account for tools using API at direction of the user, like DiscussionTools or Twinkle)?