Alex R. wrote:
Indeed it is Jimbo that must do the banning not Hephaestos
This has always been our rule, and it likely will be for some time to come, but I want to be on record as a critic of this method who only grudgingly accepts that it's the best way that we have right now.
1. It's a bit dangerous to have a custom where a single person makes the final decision, in case that person acts capriciously.
2. I can make decisions, but in order for them to really mean anything given the state of the software and our intense desire for openness, those decisions have to have _credibility_, i.e. people have to be prepared to say "Well, I didn't agree in every detail with that decision, but the decision had to be made and Jimbo does a very good job of it."
3. The combination of (1) and (2) mean that I have to act deliberately, fairly, cautiously, and too slowly for many people's tastes. Doing so is the only way for me to avoid the dangers of (1) and to maintain the personal credibility that I need in order to make these bans "stick" in (2).
4. I find it all fairly unpleasant. Part of it is that each ban is a cause for sadness, sadness that someone is so incredibly anti-social that there's just no way for us to continue working with them. We can be cheered by the fact that they are 1 in 10,000 or rarer. I would have guessed before Wikipedia that we'd see many more jerks. But even so, the weight of the responsibility of balancing competing interests is not fun. (It'd be more fun to be a tyrant and ban everyone who doesn't agree with me. But then my vision of a free encyclopedia would not be possible!)
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The bottom line is that I think that in the future, not right away, but after we've slowly taken some cautious steps towards organically creating some more 'collective' decision making methods (voting, that sort of thing), we will move towards a system of banning that's very different from what we have now.
There's actually a great irony here. Most people who get banned likely feel that I've been unilateral and unfair, and that if only we had true democracy (or true X, whatever that person prefers), they would have succeeded in the Wikipedia community. But the truth is, if we voted on these things, I suspect we'd have a lot more banning overall, and a lot faster than my tedious and timid way of doing it! :-)
--Jimbo