I tend to agree with you Little Dan, most of the damage done can be rectified by reverting edits. Sure if someone is really destructive it might be a lot of edits, but then we have a list of all the contributions there only needs to be someone who is willing to revert them all.
If you are too quick at banning someone you may not even have enough material to show that the person should not be allowed to contribute. better that they demonstrate their bad behaviour before they undergo the "arbitration" ordeal.
There might be a really, really rare case that could be done by the Wikimedia board, you will notice that Art III: sec. 4.4. of the bylaws gives the Board of Trustees the right to suspend member privileges in the cases of misconduct. Someone would have to apply to the Board to get them to suspend the member in that case. I guess you have to convince the Board members or make an application to them: http://www.wikimediafoundation.org/bylaws.pdf
Alex756
----- Original Message ----- From: "Daniel Ehrenberg" littledanehren@yahoo.com To: "English Wikipedia" wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2004 5:41 PM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Duck Court
Fred Bauder wrote:
Well, we could have a summary procedure for egregious cases, couldn't call it Kangaroo Court, maybe Duck Court. It could be evoked by Ed Poor and a few others of his status, say also Daniel Mayers. They could then briefly consider the matter and ban the offender until the matter could be considered by the mediation and arbitration committees. Kind of like a preliminary injunction. Grounds would be the likelyhood of permanent damage to the project resulting from serious offenses combined with a general refusal to listen.
Fred
Do we really need temporary bans? We didn't have the need for them before and they would be very damaging to the Wiki principle. Remember: Wikipedia is a Wiki Encyclopedia, not a courtroom. There's no real danger of letting someone off, aside from the chance that they might vandalize a few pages, something which is easily reversible. In the past, we've had a lot of trouble with unilateral bans, and they have always been condemned after the fact by almost everyone.
LDan