On 7 July 2014 13:00, Daniel and Elizabeth Case <dancase(a)frontiernet.net>
wrote:
2) the reasons
that people enforcing the rules on Wikipedia ignore
incivility, harassment, and
trolling is because that >approach is often the
best way to stop attention seeking behavior. The idea to "not feed trolls"
is well engrained into the >culture and advise given by mature and
experienced people on the Internet.
Or you can just block them firmly when they deserve it, escalate if and
when you need to block them again, revoke their talk page access if they
continue to use it to troll or harass (they can still use OTRS to request
unblock; however, it’s amazing to see how much humbler they get when denied
an audience), semi-protect pages they continue to use IPs to make the same
problematic edits to and generally make it clear to them they are being
eased away from the community. I realize there *is* a small percentage of
such users that this will not stop, but in seven years as an admin I *have*
seen this approach work much more often than not, regardless of whether
said trolls were harassing me or someone else.
Interesting to hear your experience, Daniel. It doesn't parallel mine at
all, but then perhaps we're looking at different groups of problem
users. I've never seen anyone "humbled" by a "behaviour" block, in
my
experience they're usually gone for good (those ones, I suppose, were
humbled) or come back worse behaved but usually in a much sneakier way.
Of course, on enwiki we do eventually manage to ban a significant
percentage of really bad players over time; not all of them, but a fair
number once they've pushed enough buttons and annoyed enough people and
lost their supporters. On some projects, it is essentially impossible to
ban community members (as opposed to one-off vandal accounts).
Risker/Anne