charles matthews wrote:
"Steve Bennett" wrote
Could we agree
not to ever again block people for what they are?
Easy to say that in the context that Wikipedia is not under siege, and has its reputation pretty much intact. What about the guy who arrives in the middle of an election and annouces "I'm being funded to remove all your bias on candidates' pages"?
I don't see why that would require preemptive banning. If he makes problematic edits, they can be reverted; if he starts ignoring usual community standards, e.g. by refusal to discuss on talk pages or excessive reverts, he can be banned.
There are cases where preemptive banning makes some sense, mainly obvious reincarnations of banned users and malicious bot-created accounts. In the latter, this is mainly because the potential damage a botnet can inflict in a short amount of time is quite large, so waiting around and cleaning up afterwards is an unappealing option.
In a case like the one you described, though, the potential damage to Wikipedia's reputation from being too ban-happy far outweighs the relatively minor inconvenience of waiting a bit to see if banning is really necessary. The clean-up there would consist of reverting a handful of pages.
-Mark