[WikiEN-l] Community Sanction

Mon Nov 27 01:53:18 UTC 2006

On 11/26/06, Luna <lunasantin at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think the idea with community bans is that the person in question is
> believed to be *beyond* any significant hope of rehabilitation or
> compliance. In practice, though, is there really much difference between
> one-year and indefinite blocks? Few accounts return from either, and both
> can be evaded with socks.
>
> Ultimately, though, I think that if somebody returns under a new alias and
> *avoids* the same sorts of disruptive behavior that led to their initial
> block, then nobody will even have a reason to check if they might be the
> same person, and they won't get "caught." If the person is truly reformed,
> they'll be able to get away with block evasion, because no one will even
> realize they're a problem user evading a block. Or something like that,
> anyway. You get the idea.
>
> Just my thoughts on the matter.
> -Luna
>
> On 11/26/06, M Roget <mroget at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > If the benchmark for a community ban is being lowered then the ban should
> > not be indefinite but no more than a year. If there's a desire to make the
> > ban permanent the community should ask the ArbComm to extend it.
> >
> > Indefinite bans are like sentencing a criminal to life imprionment without
> > parole - it encouraged ban evasion and bad behaviour and does nothing to
> > rehabilitate or encourage compliance.
> >
> > Michel

I think that part of the concern is that it's gone from "beyond
carefully thought out and argued Arbcom judgement of hope of
rehabilitation or compliance" to "beyond the opinions of the next 4-10
AN / ANI readers who bother to engage and respond's hope of
rehabilitation or compliance".

I agree that the threshold has gone down; the question of whether that
was a bad thing or not is a valid and open one, but so far nobody
seems to worried about it.

It would help if the "how many admin(s) does it take to overturn a
community indef block" question was more clearly answered.  We have
seen instances were admins were felt to be wheel-warring over a
block/unblock, and the unblocking admin was blocked themselves.

So far the proposed community bans haven't been that controversial,
but it's going to happen eventually.

-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com