On Sun, 26 Nov 2006 17:23:39 -0800, Luna lunasantin@gmail.com wrote:
I think the idea with community bans is that the person in question is believed to be *beyond* any significant hope of rehabilitation or compliance. In practice, though, is there really much difference between one-year and indefinite blocks? Few accounts return from either, and both can be evaded with socks.
Indefinite <> permanent. The former can be lifted if there is credible evidence of intent to reform, the latter comes I think only from ArbCom or Foundation. A community ban is defined for practical purposes as a ban which no admin is prepared to lift; the real problem here is RFA, which tends to ensure that the "cabal" remains a cabal and is not diluted by "dangerous" inclusionists.
Ultimately, though, I think that if somebody returns under a new alias and *avoids* the same sorts of disruptive behavior that led to their initial block, then nobody will even have a reason to check if they might be the same person, and they won't get "caught." If the person is truly reformed, they'll be able to get away with block evasion, because no one will even realize they're a problem user evading a block. Or something like that, anyway. You get the idea.
Sure. And a new account which causes no problem *is* no problem, so why would we care if it is the same individual. All we want here is to keep out those who are intent on abusing the project for their own ends; clueless aggressive newbies who realise what the problem is too late to save the account (or want a fresh start) are not, to my mind anyway, a pressing problem.
The profile of Wikipedia is now such that we have a significant number of aggressively tendentious editors. These go well beyond the occasional "characters" like SPUI and cause massive wasted time and effort.
Guy (JzG)