Delirium wrote:
Sascha Noyes wrote:
On Monday 26 January 2004 12:41 am, UB 1 wrote:
Wikipedia:Administrators - As of September 2003, it is now possible for sysops to block usernames. It is important to note that sysops are not authorised to decide whether a particular case of vandalism warrants banning by username. The ability to ban by username has been made available for the purposes of enforcing a ban already approved by Jimbo. It may be used to block obvious reincarnations of hard-banned users.
Special:Ipblocklist - 05:10, 26 Jan 2004, Angela blocked UnbannableOne (contribs) (Unacceptable user name. Please log in with something different. Unacceptable behaviour. Please quit it.)
I'm behind Angela on this one. [[user:UnbannableOne]] is an obvious "boundary-experiment" by an old troll taking advantage of there not
existing
any officially sanctioned policy enforcing body in order to troll
wikipedia,
while making themselves "unbannable" by adding legitimate content.
I haven't looked into this particular case so can't say (yet) whether I think banning was correct or not, but I don't like the precedent of sysops banning logged-in users based on individual judgment calls (even if that call was right in this case). Given that our procedures are still in flux I'm not particularly upset about this one, but I feel fairly strongly that future cases should be probably be sent to the arbitration committee. That's of course still a judgment call, but at least it's a judgment call by multiple people instead of one.
On the other hand, probable reincarnations of already-banned users are fine (in my opinion at least) to ban on sight. Though I do think our ban message should provide some sort of contact address (wikien-l?) so people accidentally banned as a reincarnation of a logged-in user can email to inform us of that fact.
-Mark
UB1 was basically attempting to bait people into banning him, by choosing the username "UnbannableOne", and by getting into an edit war with five different sysops over awarding himself a "barnstar". Angela was more than happy to take that bait, and so predictably enough, UB1 made a complaint.
If Angela didn't block the user, I'm sure someone else would have, in short order. It wasn't exactly an individual judgement call, there was some IRC-related encouragement.
-- Tim Starling