Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
I detect an anomaly or contradiction in our policies.
An admin is not
allowed to get into a fight with a user over the content of a page and
then protect the page, but the admin *is* allowed to block that user
after having fought with them?
I offer no solution to this; I just pose it as a problem.
I don't see that as an anomaly, because page protection and banning are
two different pairs of shoes. In summary: I think protecting a page when
you're involved in an edit war is essentially declaring your version as
"better" or "more valid". Banning a user is declaring that the user
has
acted against Wikipedia's interests.
In my mind, a sysop should be allowed to ban a user if common sense
tells us that the user is trying to work against Wikipedia's interests
(and not just against the sysop's taste). The Joaquin Phoenix case seems
like a clear breach to me: The user was banned because they were
attempting to circumvent the Wiki process.
In practice, of course, "common sense" and "Wikipedia's interests"
aren't well-defined, so please feel free to substitute rules and
policies for that.
Page protection is different. If the edits in question were clearly
vandalism, the user should be banned, and not the page protected. Hence,
when talking about page protection, we're dealing with edits that aren't
wrong or against Wikipedia's interests. The page should only be
protected if the reason for the edit war is that people disagree on the
content of the article, but both versions are legitimate articles (as
opposed only to vandalism). A sysop has no right to protect the page on
their version, thereby declaring it as "better" or "more valid", if
the
other user did not commit vandalism.
One flaw I can see in my own argument is that if someone *else* protects
the page, they can also be seen as declaring the version they protected
as "better" or "more valid". Yes, I know we explicitly state all over
the place that this is never the intention of a sysop protecting a page;
but why does this only work for sysops that are not involved in the edit
war? The one time that I made this faux-pas (protecting a page where I
was involved in an edit war) it was my genuine intention to discuss the
issue with the user and unprotect the page again later.
Timwi