[Wikipedia-l] A related ban issue

[Rosa Williams]

What with the recent discussion of banning "problem" users, I thought I'd
bring this up for discussion/re-discussion.

Our policy on banning people for vandalism is (as I interpret what I've
read) that we restrict it to "repeated and sustained" non-useful alterations
of articles.

However, it's September, the high school and college students are back with
their free school accounts, and inevitably the amount of drive-by vandalism
seems to be on the increase. Several of us constantly check new edits by
unknown contributors, and even then, we're missing vandalism that only turns
up later when paging through via "Random Page" or otherwise coming across an
article. As the number of articles goes up, the chance of locating such
vandalism goes down.

I've tried a few approaches to ameliorating this.   I regularly check "this
user's contributions" for vandals, and even sometimes for unfamiliar IP's
(*thank* you folks for adding that code feature!) I do keyword searches for
common obscenities, et cetera.  (No, Cunctator, I don't remove them if
they're obviously part of the article.)  And, of course, I haunt the "Recent
Changes" page. But I think it's getting harder to keep up.

I would like to suggest we add "obviously malicious vandalism" to reasons
for an immediate (if temporary) IP ban: a single "Ths page is stupid"
should be, in my opinion, enough to ban the address. This saves us from
having to spend time on the next five instances of vandalism from that
contributor, which could be better spent searching for other graffiti or
*gasp* actually adding content.

Sure, one person's vandalism is another person's newbie goof.  I would agree
that if there's any reasonable possibility that a change was just a newbie
goof or something similar, we should err on the side of caution and not ban.
But in the really obvious cases - "PHREAK WUZ HERE!!"  "Louis IV  was a
dirty frog"  "f*ck you all", and similar - I honestly think we should go
ahead and administer a slapdown in the form of a temporary IP ban.  If they'
re just drive-by vandals, they'll lose interest that much faster; if it is a
serious vandal, they'll at least have to go to the trouble of getting a new
IP# for each new instance of vandalism.

Yes, there's the possibility that someone may be too quick on the gun and
ban someone who might, in the fullness of time, have become a useful
contributor. But me, I think... do we really *want* a contributor who is
starting off on the level of adding "This is so gay" to a page?  The time
just bringing them up to speed hardly seems worth it. If they're really
*serious* about becoming a real contributor, they'll just have to wait for
the ban to expire or appeal to the list.

My two cents (approx. $0.03 Canadian).
-- April