On 6/22/06, Mark Gallagher m.g.gallagher@student.canberra.edu.au wrote:
We've all seen users completely blocked because of a regrettable tendency to upload copyvios or create POV forks or move-war. Now, they could be otherwise intelligent people who think they know about copyright law but don't; or useful contributors when they're being supervised by other people on controversial articles, but who feel free to let rip on their "own" fork articles; or people who insist on treating the "move" button as a toy and causing unnecessary work for admins and unnecessary stress for non-admins. In that last case, Curps' bot caught at least one offender, but that's hardly reliable.
It would be nice to be able to prevent certain people from doing obnoxious things without blocking them completely. We shouldn't have to block otherwise sane users because of a minor foible.
While this sounds like a good idea in theory, I think the model of having a class of users *less* empowered than the default class is unworkable. They would obviously simply create new accounts when they had these priveleges taken away from them. The only way to do it would be to provide these privileges after some number of edits/days with the project, and revoke them as needed. I suppose it *could* work with editors who have invested a lot in their username...
Steve