Jimbo has added a great deal to this discussion. As he points out the proposed formulation provides what in securities law is called a "safe harbor". That is, if certain, pro forma rules are followed, namely citing some provision of blocking policy, which in your good faith opinion applies, you stand blameless, absent a complaint from the person blocked or some other administrator that the representation you made was not proper, not supported by the facts or in bad faith.
That would have to go through the whole laborious dispute resolution process before it would come home to roost.
Fred
From: John Robinson john@freeq.com Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2004 08:30:55 -0500 To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: Blocking policy
Then I'm still confused, because according to Fred Bauder's reply to that post I "summed it up pretty well."
Although I admit I like your version better; I've never had a block reversed when the person doing the reversing actually told me on my talk page that they had done so.
- Hephaestos
So let me see if I have this straight.
As long as a user holds strictly to written policy, he/she may cause as much disruption, damage and hell as possible, and community consensus on a matter is secondary to ill-thought-out and often unenforced legalistic jargon.
Does that pretty much sum it up?
No, I'd say that's exactly backwards of what's going on. I don't really understand why you're saying those things.
I think there's a misunderstanding here, and an ironic one at that.
It has always been true that sysops could reverse blocks done by other sysops. You could always do that, and you can do it now. What this ruling proposes is that if a sysop blocks *and gives a proper reason*, then the burden of proof would be on another sysop to say why they reverted it.
This enhances the ability to block and have the blocks stick.
--Jimbo
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