[WikiEN-l] Community Sanction

Mon Nov 27 19:07:05 UTC 2006

On Sun, 26 Nov 2006 17:23:39 -0800, 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.

Indefinite <> permanent.  The former can be lifted if there is
credible evidence of intent to reform, the latter comes I think only
from ArbCom or Foundation.  A community ban is defined for practical
purposes as a ban which no admin is prepared to lift; the real problem
here is RFA, which tends to ensure that the "cabal" remains a cabal
and is not diluted by "dangerous" inclusionists.

>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.

Sure.  And a new account which causes no problem *is* no problem, so
why would we care if it is the same individual.  All we want here is
to keep out those who are intent on abusing the project for their own
ends; clueless aggressive newbies who realise what the problem is too
late to save the account (or want a fresh start) are not, to my mind
anyway, a pressing problem.

The profile of Wikipedia is now such that we have a significant number
of aggressively tendentious editors.  These go well beyond the
occasional "characters" like SPUI and cause massive wasted time and
effort.

Guy (JzG)
-- 
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG