[WikiEN-l] admin abuse

Mon Jan 26 14:58:17 UTC 2004

While possibly the ban was unwise to some small degree, Angela is not
going to get any grief from me on this one.  Anyone who signs in with
an id of "UnbannableOne" is just asking for it, and it's hard to
muster up much sympathy or concern for the particular case, while at
the same time, of course, we must all wave our hands in the general
direction of caution about establishing unwise precedents that may
cause trouble in the future.

Someone suggested that this character might have been taking advantage
of a perceived "gap in authority" because we're now technically
supposed to be using an arbitration process, but the details of that
process aren't fully worked out yet.

Have no fear, that isn't a viable loophole.  If someone is
sufficiently annoying, I'll just step in to ban them, end of story.
And I trust that my general stock of goodwill in the community, and my
cautiousness about doing that sort of thing, will be sufficient to get
nearly unanimous consensus that it's o.k. for me to do that.

I want to get out of that business, but of course, we shouldn't
imagine that some hyper-legalistic approach to our governance
procedures should cause any sort of management crisis during the
transition.

----
This part is important!  So don't stop reading yet!

It's hard to know for sure, and we should perhaps check the ip logs
to find out, but it seems likely that this knucklehead is the same
knucklehead who wrote the last entry on this page:

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worst_cases

The strategy of trolling outlined there is to provoke us into a law
enforcement response as a way of discrediting our reputation as being
open.  

It's paranoid ranting in the exact style of 24/142, of course, but the
specific strategy is to write "genuinely educational" stuff while
being a jerk, so as to get banned, certainly sounds like
UnbannableOne's actions.

Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude:

(a) UnbannableOne is likely just a reincarnation of 24/142 and thus a
legitimate target for immediate ban and (b) Even if not, UnbannableOne
is an open threat to bad behavior, and thus o.k. to ban as an
"emergency" measure under existing policy.

I'd say that Angela made a judgment call here, and one that we might
not all agree with, but well within the range of respectful discretion
that we should give each other.  So I hope that those who think that
Angela made the wrong decision will just say "Hey, here is what I
would have done differently" and *not* in *any way* fall into the
vandal's game of trying to turn us against each other with accusations
of Angela being a tyrant or whatever.

We're good, nice, people, trying to do something of global importance
in a spirit of love and harmony.  We bend over backwards to be kind
even to people who spit in our faces.  So, let's not get too upset if
we have to ban people sometimes.  Jerks are jerks, we do what we can
to heal them, but some psychological problems are beyond our scope of
operations.

--Jimbo