Allan- I want to ban him for 24 hours every time he gets into an edit war. Hopefully, that way he will learn that he has to use the discussion page instead of trying to bully people into preferring his version. As for a permanent ban, I think a quick route to the arbitration committee should exist. But keep in mind that for a ban to be effective, the other person needs to be at least somewhat sane. There are cases like Michael or 142.177, mentally diseased individuals who will not be deterred by a ban and operate under such a wide range of IP addresses that a complete IP ban would affect many legitimate users. There are good reasons to believe that we keep dealing with the same people under different names. It may be more effective to integrate them into a community in some way. The other thing we need is a clearly defined decision making process. I'm thinking about a [[Wikipedia:]] page which defines recommended discussion periods for minor and major issues. After the discussion period any user would be allowed to call for a binding vote. I want to get Jimbo out of the loop for most binding decision, not because I don't trust him but because he simply can't keep up with making critical decisions in a 500K article 50 language project. I hope you will reconsider your decision to leave the project and work with me in establishing these required norms and policies. All best, Erik

At 01:14 AM 2/23/2004 +0000, Allan Crossman wrote: Hopefully that means _every_ time they violate it. I wouldn't exactly say I'm mad as hell, but I'm certainly nonplussed over how the Wikipedia system bends so far over backwards to be "nice" to incorrigibly disruptive people like this. Surely at some point the "cost" in driving away other contributors who can't stand working with them must be outweighing the "benefit" of making sure we don't accidentally ban participants who could potentially be valuable contributors some time down the road? Not to mention the sheer amount of work some of these users create in cleaning up after them.