On Thu, 15 Nov 2007 18:41:12 -0500, "Daniel R. Tobias"
<dan(a)tobias.name> wrote:
> Which neatly proves that we need sockpuppeting
banned users like a
> hole in the head.
But we have no power to make them go away, short of
going the
Citizendium route and limiting editing to approved accounts under the
editor's real name. We only have power over what we do when they
show up, and if what they crave is attention and drama, the more
excessive and exaggerated our response to them is, the more we're
playing into their hands.
[[WP:RBI]] is not an exaggerated response. Revert, block, ignore,
unblock, wheel war, revert again, drama - that is the problem.
If they send sockpuppets to take both sides of a
contentious issue,
then a policy of never reverting to the version that was the result
of an edit by a banned user is a nonstarter, since *both* versions
under contention were edited by banned users. Instead of a knee-jerk
revert, one is compelled to actually consider which of the versions
best serves the encyclopedia. Hopefully, this can be done through
calm and rational discussion that doesn't give the trolls the drama
they crave; this means that anybody who gets in a state of anger as a
result of the trolling (it's immaterial whether it's anger that a
link was added, anger that a link was deleted, anger that one or more
banned users edited, or anger at the response of admins to this)
really should step back from their keyboard and calm down before
proceeding. Yes, that means me too. We were all suckered into
taking the trolls' bait on this one; you, me, and everybody else who
involved themselves in that issue.
No, one removes all edits by both sides and then forgets about them
and decides if the article actually needs editing.
Admittedly the waters get a little muddy when the abusers plant
their harassment on outside websites that are already linked, but
this is not exactly a common occurrence.
Another troll tactic (as I think you pointed out
yourself) is to
purposely make good edits such as fixing typos and reverting
vandalism, from an obvious sockpuppet account, in the hope of
provoking admins into reverting them (and thus putting vandalism and
typos back in) in the name of absolutism when dealing with banned
editors. In these cases, the absolutists are giving the trolls what
they want, compounded even more if the admins actually insist that
nobody else is allowed to revert to the banned user's verion either,
and the error is forced to be kept indefinitely.
As David Gerard has previously said, checking the edits and making
them again in your own name is the way to do that. Yes, tedious and
to an outside view somewhat silly, but when we ban people *we ban
them*, if we think they should be allowed to come along and edit
some then *we should not ban them*.
You need to remember that the source of this problem is not our
behaviour, it's theirs. They are the ones evading a ban. They are
the ones deliberately gaming the system and disrupting Wikipedia to
make their point. Sockpuppets of banned users correcting typos as a
way of building up an edit history is *not actually a good thing*
because the aim is to do some damage that is massively greater than
the benefit of the trivial typo fixing.
Policy on banned users says that we should revert all edits made by
banned users after banning. And we should, even if (as with Arch
Coal) we then go and rewrite a whole article from scratch, from
sources. I do not subscribe to the idea of being "a little bit
banned".
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG