Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
"Status quo" ban? Discussion needs to come
before any
sort of banning.
I think that Alex was talking about emergency bans for simple
vandalism. There's some controversy in the current RK case as to
whether what he was doing constituted an emergency or not, and I think
that reasonable people can differ about that. (I think I would have
judged that it wasn't, but as I've said, I'm not going to bother with
second-guessing Erik on this, because like yourself and many others,
he's proven himself to be good in so many ways.)
The best example to illustrate the need for the power of sysops to
temporarily impose emergency bans is the case of the infamous MIT
Vandal who kept switching ip numbers and logging in to go on a real
old-fashioned vandalism spree, blanking articles and writing curse
words in their place, and so on.
If the MIT Vandal had not logged in, the sysops could have banned him
easily enough. But because he was logging in over and over, the
sysops were rendered powerless, so that only developers could do
anything. Since no developers were online at first, this meant that
hours were spent battling him. It wasted a lot of time for a lot of
people!
People didn't join our noble project to gift humanity with a treasure
of knowledge in order to combat drunken Bosnian misogynists at 5AM!
Where I do agree with you is this: unilateral banning decisions by
sysops should always be *emergency* and *temporary* unless quickly
ratified by the official process, which *right now* is just me, but
which will soon be formalized into something else more scalable.
--Jimbo