On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 4:54 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2009/5/9 Andrew Turvey andrewrturvey@googlemail.com:
I'd suggest for now creating a user template notice and a project of
volunteers who could go around looking at editors contributions and putting this template on their pages if appropriate. Let's see the impact that has first, before we start banning people.
*headdesk*
Templating people who are editing problematically never works, ever.
You can word the template however carefully you like (do we have any under 200 words?) but the message is:
"You are doing something I don't like, this is a threat of blocking."
Result: more sockpuppetry.
I think the results are better than 0%, but they're terrible.
When I spend a couple of minutes with an editor and topic specific writeup asking someone to stop and explaining the policy, it seems to be much more effective on average.
I also template people - but I leave a paragraph or two of custom note nearly every time I template. I template at the bottom so that other admins who review can see "Oh, that's a uw-foobar-3, one more strike" rather than having to figure their way through the note i left to determine how serious it was etc.