Dante-
In the analogy though, the child is Michael, and our
goal is not his
long-term well-being, but getting him to stop vandalizing the Wikipedia.
Therefore, I hold that option 3 (never giving him sweets -> always
reverting everything) is the best way to handle the situation.
Actually, if Michael *responded* to positive feedback and would allow us
to try to get him on the right path, that would be a neat strategy. But as
has been noted already, Michael is very probably a mentally ill person who
is not fully aware of his actions.
The problems we have to address are technical; mainly, we cannot deal well
with vandals who use changing IP addresses. I have proposed a solution
previously: to have automatic expiry on IP blocks. This would allow us to
comfortably ban all the AOL addresses he uses without major harm done. A
ban can last just a few minutes, the vandal will not not know that and
switch the IP address regardless.
The feature freeze has delayed this, and right now I'm a bit busy. It
would be fairly simple to implement, though.
Regards,
Erik