Jimmy-
Well, Erik, I'm sympathetic to that, but I'm not sure that a 24-hour ban power for sysops is the minimally intrusive solution.
It's not supposed to minimally intrusive. It's supposed to be effective. Right now we have the situation that there is a set of users who are quite productive, but who use edit warring as a technique to get an article into the revision they want it to be in.
That is so much in contradiction with everything we stand for that we should take immediate countermeasures. It creates a very bad impression for newbies if we let people get away with that kind of behavior without an immediate reaction.
A 24 hour ban is not the same as a regular ban in the effects on the user. We can come up with a nice, friendly standard text, basically telling the user to calm down and when they are ready to respect our policies, please return to editing. It won't develop into the kind of problems we had with Lir, because there's no incentive to create another identity if you can just keep editing under your regular one 24 hours later. We could even add a clause that if they pledge to stop edit warring immediately, they can be unbanned immediately (of course if they break that pledge, they will be rebanned).
Now some people will bring up the issue of "rights" and "speech". But edit warring is an effective method to suppress other people's speech and to abuse other people's rights. It's like shouting over whatever someone else tries to say. The other person can either also start shouting, or give up in frustration.
In any civil discussion in the real world, you would tell someone who tries to shout down everyone else to leave until they calm down. All I, and many others, are asking for is to apply that same principle to Wikipedia.
Regards,
Erik