G'day mboverload,
[top-posting fixed]
On 6/16/06, Sean Barrett sean@epoptic.com wrote:
mboverload stated for the record:
Screw that. If it shoot someone by accident once, I get a light
sentence if I'm lucky.. If it "accidentally" shoot someone TWO TIMES, I get 20 YEARS.
Are you having trouble understanding the difference between an inappropriate edit and murder?
I'm making a comment about how you don't get 4 chances of deliberate vandalism in the real world. Fine, I'll change it to shooting out windows. If a cop tells you to not shoot out another window, you DON'T get another chance. You get TASERED.
It sounds like you have very violent cops where you are.
Your analogy still doesn't work. It costs me less to revert vandalism (assuming it's a case where rollback would be appropriate) than it costs the other fellow to make his edit in the first place. Someone shooting out windows is causing potentially very expensive property damage, and he knows it; someone fiddling with a bunch of pixels which represent text in a file on the other side of the world may not even realise what he's doing is *wrong*.
I will block only after I'm sure the vandal knows (or has been told clearly): a) He's damaging other people's work, however briefly, and b) He's being dealt with by real people, not bots whose limits are fun to test, and c) He is on his last warning
Sometimes this can be done with one warning. Sometimes it requires four. Often someone who meets the above three conditions *also* decides to stop vandalising, and doesn't require a block. If so, bonza. We don't just block people out of the blue, if they don't understand the consequences of their actions.
There *are* times I'll block without warning: i) The editor knows he's not welcome, and edits not because he genuinely wants to improve Wikipedia, but because he thinks it makes us mockable (such as a certain stalker who, I understand, even Wikipedia Review now refuse to accept), or ii) The vandal clearly knows what he's doing and is using the account/IP as part of an orchestrated campaign (Willy on Wheels, for instance, or other sock attack vandals), or iii) Open proxies
As one might expect, these three occur very rarely.
Warnings Are Important, and it's quality, not quantity, that counts.