Sascha Noyes wrote:
On Monday 26 January 2004 12:41 am, UB 1 wrote:
Wikipedia:Administrators - As of September 2003,
it is
now possible for sysops to block usernames. It is
important to note that sysops are not authorised to
decide whether a particular case of vandalism warrants
banning by username. The ability to ban by username
has been made available for the purposes of enforcing
a ban already approved by Jimbo. It may be used to
block obvious reincarnations of hard-banned users.
Special:Ipblocklist - 05:10, 26 Jan 2004, Angela
blocked UnbannableOne (contribs) (Unacceptable user
name. Please log in with something different.
Unacceptable behaviour. Please quit it.)
I'm behind Angela on this one. [[user:UnbannableOne]] is an obvious
"boundary-experiment" by an old troll taking advantage of there not existing
any officially sanctioned policy enforcing body in order to troll wikipedia,
while making themselves "unbannable" by adding legitimate content.
I haven't looked into this particular case so can't say (yet) whether I
think banning was correct or not, but I don't like the precedent of
sysops banning logged-in users based on individual judgment calls (even
if that call was right in this case). Given that our procedures are
still in flux I'm not particularly upset about this one, but I feel
fairly strongly that future cases should be probably be sent to the
arbitration committee. That's of course still a judgment call, but at
least it's a judgment call by multiple people instead of one.
On the other hand, probable reincarnations of already-banned users are
fine (in my opinion at least) to ban on sight. Though I do think our
ban message should provide some sort of contact address (wikien-l?) so
people accidentally banned as a reincarnation of a logged-in user can
email to inform us of that fact.
-Mark