[WikiEN-l] Re: unfair blocking

Wed Aug 4 12:07:14 UTC 2004

Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

> I detect an anomaly or contradiction in our policies.  An admin is not
> allowed to get into a fight with a user over the content of a page and
> then protect the page, but the admin *is* allowed to block that user
> after having fought with them?
> 
> I offer no solution to this; I just pose it as a problem.

I don't see that as an anomaly, because page protection and banning are 
two different pairs of shoes. In summary: I think protecting a page when 
you're involved in an edit war is essentially declaring your version as 
"better" or "more valid". Banning a user is declaring that the user has 
acted against Wikipedia's interests.

In my mind, a sysop should be allowed to ban a user if common sense 
tells us that the user is trying to work against Wikipedia's interests 
(and not just against the sysop's taste). The Joaquin Phoenix case seems 
like a clear breach to me: The user was banned because they were 
attempting to circumvent the Wiki process.

In practice, of course, "common sense" and "Wikipedia's interests" 
aren't well-defined, so please feel free to substitute rules and 
policies for that.

Page protection is different. If the edits in question were clearly 
vandalism, the user should be banned, and not the page protected. Hence, 
when talking about page protection, we're dealing with edits that aren't 
wrong or against Wikipedia's interests. The page should only be 
protected if the reason for the edit war is that people disagree on the 
content of the article, but both versions are legitimate articles (as 
opposed only to vandalism). A sysop has no right to protect the page on 
their version, thereby declaring it as "better" or "more valid", if the 
other user did not commit vandalism.

One flaw I can see in my own argument is that if someone *else* protects 
the page, they can also be seen as declaring the version they protected 
as "better" or "more valid". Yes, I know we explicitly state all over 
the place that this is never the intention of a sysop protecting a page; 
but why does this only work for sysops that are not involved in the edit 
war? The one time that I made this faux-pas (protecting a page where I 
was involved in an edit war) it was my genuine intention to discuss the 
issue with the user and unprotect the page again later.

Timwi