Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
"Status quo" ban? Discussion needs to come before any sort of banning.
I think that Alex was talking about emergency bans for simple vandalism. There's some controversy in the current RK case as to whether what he was doing constituted an emergency or not, and I think that reasonable people can differ about that. (I think I would have judged that it wasn't, but as I've said, I'm not going to bother with second-guessing Erik on this, because like yourself and many others, he's proven himself to be good in so many ways.)
The best example to illustrate the need for the power of sysops to temporarily impose emergency bans is the case of the infamous MIT Vandal who kept switching ip numbers and logging in to go on a real old-fashioned vandalism spree, blanking articles and writing curse words in their place, and so on.
If the MIT Vandal had not logged in, the sysops could have banned him easily enough. But because he was logging in over and over, the sysops were rendered powerless, so that only developers could do anything. Since no developers were online at first, this meant that hours were spent battling him. It wasted a lot of time for a lot of people!
People didn't join our noble project to gift humanity with a treasure of knowledge in order to combat drunken Bosnian misogynists at 5AM!
Where I do agree with you is this: unilateral banning decisions by sysops should always be *emergency* and *temporary* unless quickly ratified by the official process, which *right now* is just me, but which will soon be formalized into something else more scalable.
--Jimbo