[WikiEN-l] Dealing with AOL over vandalism

Sat Aug 30 20:51:40 UTC 2003

While I doubt that this idea will go anywhere, I figured I'd weigh in 
against it anyway.

First of all, the whole idea is somewhat ridiculous.  AOL is the single 
largest ISP in the United States, providing internet access to millions 
of people, including quite a few of our better contributors.  Blocking 
it would be incredibly counter-productive, and do far more damage than 
Michael could possibly do.  Furthermore, it is unlikely to receive *any* 
even remotely good publicity, regardless of what publicity blitz you put 
on.  It will receive good publicity on slashdot, in NANAE, and other 
similar internet-zealot locations, but universally bad press 
everywhere.  Wikipedia will essentially be painted as an elitist 
internet-zealot organization that doesn't allow common folk in, while 
we'd like to be painted as a bit more open than that.

In addition, it's completely unnecessary.  Even if we were to need a 
technical block of sorts (which IMO would require far more vandalism 
than Michael has caused so far to justify), it should be done as 
minimally as possible.  Using something heavy-handed like blocking all 
AOL IPs from editing is certainly not minimal.  A first step I *might* 
possibly support *if* it were a huge problem and all other avenues were 
exhausted would be to allow sysops to ban logged-in users if they are 
currently on an AOL IP (then Michael could simply be banned by any sysop 
each time he pops up by clicking the "ban" button).  However, even this 
I'd prefer not to have, given that other solutions are possible (my 
preferred so far being extending rollback to support rolling back page 
moves).

-Mark