David Gerard wrote:
Nicholas Knight (nknight(a)runawaynet.com) [050206
03:51]:
Contact her ISP. If you can't get them to drop
her, call the upstream
provider(s). If that doesn't work, block every IP range associated with
the ISP and tell anyone affected to complain to the ISP. Wikipedia is
getting big, it's time to start throwing some weight around when users
are engaging in wildly abusive activities.
Contacting ISPs is a step I'm really not comfortable with. Even in the case
of Michael, when he was vandalising continuously, the only reason for
contacting AOL was that their network was effectively one large anonymiser.
CD is nothing like at that level. Also, there really is no reason to
presume an ISP will necessarily give a shit. We're not paying her fees.
The one situation in which I could imagine an ISP being willing to
cancel the account of a banned user is if it's being used for something
illegal. A simple example would be uploading child pornography. So it
might work against the likes of Brother Larry (or whatever name the
diaper guy was using last), but not against CheeseDreams.
Complaining to an ISP that they're allowing somebody to edit Wikipedia
while banned would only produce incredulous responses like, "Well, you
do let anybody edit, what did you expect?" They won't think it's any of
their business to enforce our internal rules for us. Nor do I think
Wikipedia has any real weight to throw around here; if we tried to make
a public issue out of it, the publicity would do more damage to
Wikipedia than to the ISP.
--Michael Snow