That means that you're clever enough to spot not just the obvious, but the reasonably subtle. The ones who are really good at it are the ones you won't catch. or do you assume that nobody is that good?

"We don't have to make it impossible, just difficult. This is helped by the fact that most obsessive enough to disrupt Wikipedia to that extent are not stable, sensible individuals."

All editing is a result of the user's cost/benefit analysis. Wikipedia is built upon the hopeful assumption that most of the people who take time to contribute will act for altruistic reasons. It reinforces that presumption with some coding and policies to give useful edits an advantage over disruptive and exploitive edits. That's an average assumption and based upon the site's progress over less than a decade it's overall a sound one.

A few peaks and valleys occur on the ends of that statistical curve. One question usually posed by outside critics is *who in heck would devote enough energy to become an administrator?* I'd like to think we're idealists and that opinion gets reinforced a lot among sysops. Yet it's no joke that Wikipedia pages about edit count also link to obsessive-compulsive disorder. Wikipedians tend to focus on the individuals who don't operate within site standards and outside observers direct greater scrutiny on the Wikipedians. Some of the latter scrutiny is logically or facutally flawed and some of it reveals naive misunderstanding of how the site works, which makes it very tempting for a Wikipedian to dismiss the criticism out of hand. I don't think it's all invalid; it's just very challenging to parse.

At the other end are the bell curve are the long term vandals. I propose that most of these people are less effective than the administrators. Whatever criticisms people may lodge against us (power hungry petty tyrants who skip sophomore high school classes to pursue ideological vendettas), the undeniable fact is that administrators have succeeded at working within Wikipedia's structure while banned editors haven't. Of course some long term vandals aren't banned yet. The Joan of Arc vandal operated for two years before getting community banned, although thirteen months of that occurred because I was new and it took time to earn enough clout to get taken seriously when I presented my report and requested a siteban. Many of his edits got reverted during that time and he broke some more policies that I documented to make it easier for the community to agree on the solution. I'm tracking some other long term vandals quietly who've been operating for similar time frames; it takes a while to establish a case under certain circumstances. Usually they're not very successful at getting their edits to stick and they do appear to fit a similar personality profile. They also exhibit a lot of characteristic mistakes. There are certain specific reasons why some vandals last longer than others. I won't outline those reasons because I know my posts get wached, but the bottom line is the long term vandals aren't much different from the ones who get banned quickly.

In the case of ideological or profit-motivated disruption - the two kinds that are hardest to persuade someone to stop - sitebans don't need to happen if the editor is wise enough to change strategies. In less time than it takes to engage in a lengthy edit war, a person could publish several articles in a reliable small venue or get some press releases planted in the mainstream media. Then, quite legitimately, the editor could propose those pieces as reference sources. This is the most obvious of a variety of policy-friendly methods for achieving the goals that otherwise result in banning. A successful editor is one whose edits become durable and whose talk posts persuade the community.

-Durova