Erik Moeller wrote:
I banned Anthony after he repeatedly vandalized the same page, even though I had told him to stop. I immediately unbanned him after the matter was resolved. I am 100% positive that this was a perfectly appropriate action to take, with arbitration committee or without, and is backed up by precedent (BuddhaInside, RK etc.). Protection was not an option, because the page in question, a list of sites using our MediaWiki software, is supposed to be openly editable at any time so that sitemasters can add their site to the list.
I'm not sure I'd call it "vandalism". He was adding an obscure site to the page that you did not think should be listed, and linking to the Wikipedia article on the site (which was listed on VfD) instead of to the site's URL (which may or may not have actually existed). This is a poor edit that shouldn't be on the page, but not quite to the level of what I'd consider *vandalism* (especially since it later turned out that the site did in fact exist). It may or may not be trolling, but I don't think it's vandalism.
I also disagree that protection wasn't an option. Any contributor is supposed to be able to edit, say, [[Gdansk]], but that doesn't stop us from protecting it when necessary. Sure, it's inconvenient when someone happens along that has information on Gdansk that we don't have, and they cannot edit because it's protected, but that's how it goes. I don't see why this one page should be special in that regard, especially since, unlike [[Gdansk]], it doesn't even hold information that's part of the encyclopedia.
As others have also pointed out, Anthony has a long history of trolling behavior. E.g. Maximus Rex wrote: "Anthony has frequently engaged in troll-like behavior (examples include inserting Bill Gates' social security number in the opening sentence of his article (repeatedly), nominating articles for deletion that he admits he does not believe should be deleted (perhaps to prove some sort of point?), and making outrageous claims about copyright (for example at Al Gore he removed a sentence he wrote under the guise that he owned the copyright to that sentence...), and others)." In conversations with me on IRC, Anthony has also defended trolling on other websites like Kuro5hin and Slashdot.
On the copyright issue, I happen to agree with his interpretation, and it seems one or two other people might as well. The issue is that if I create a GFDL work, and you make a derived work of it, you *must* license *all* your edits under the GFDL. If you add a fair use image to which you do not own the copyright, your edit is not under the GFDL, so you are violating the GFDL's terms (and thus my copyright). You might even add a fair use image that my company isn't allowed to redistribute, which would put me in the position of not being able to distribute a derived work of my own text! Which is exactly what the GFDL was written to prevent.
See [[meta:Do fair use images violate the GFDL?]] for additional discussion on this point.
As for whether he's a troll, that you may have a point on. I'm not sure, since I've only encountered him on Wikipedia once or twice, but I'm quite willing to believe that there are people here who are up to no good, and he may well be one of them.
Trolling will often be very hard to prove in practice. My proposed solution is to simply give admins some leeway in enforcing the rules -- we have over 100 admins who can clean up after each other if necessary. Trolls should be treated like normal users, only that I find it fair to be especially watchful about whether they are breaking any rules, and more swift in enforcing them.
I guess I don't like that solution much. In my experience, allegations of trolling are just as often false as they are true, and I think implementing some undeserved bans is more damaging than neglecting to implement some deserved bans. They're both bad, but the former makes us enemies (who may become long-running persistent thorns in our side) and damages our reputation of "anyone can edit here and the admins aren't a power-wielding cabal". That's not to say we shouldn't ban anyone, we should just avoid doing it a lot, and make sure that we only do it when really necessary.
FWIW, I also think we should go a little easier on banning anonymous users than has been done lately. Certainly if somebody vandalizes a bunch of pages they should be banned, but I don't think it's necessary to ban an IP that's had two minor vandalism edits, especially if they're the sort that might be unintentional (just adding "hi" or something, often done by newbies to test if you really can just edit any page, as advertised). We can end up discouraging potential contributors with stuff like that, and the downside of having to revert a few more edits isn't really a big one (it's pretty easy to revert, after all). I personally tend only to ban users who insist on vandalizing the same page, or have vandalized somewhere more in the range of 8-10 pages; the rest usually either turn into good users or give up and leave before banning them is necessary.
-Mark