On Monday 26 January 2004 12:41 am, UB 1 wrote:

Wikipedia:Administrators - As of September 2003, it is now possible for sysops to block usernames. It is important to note that sysops are not authorised to decide whether a particular case of vandalism warrants banning by username. The ability to ban by username has been made available for the purposes of enforcing a ban already approved by Jimbo. It may be used to block obvious reincarnations of hard-banned users.

Special:Ipblocklist - 05:10, 26 Jan 2004, Angela blocked UnbannableOne (contribs) (Unacceptable user name. Please log in with something different. Unacceptable behaviour. Please quit it.)

I'm behind Angela on this one. [[user:UnbannableOne]] is an obvious "boundary-experiment" by an old troll taking advantage of there not existing any officially sanctioned policy enforcing body in order to troll wikipedia, while making themselves "unbannable" by adding legitimate content.

Best, Sascha Noyes

While possibly the ban was unwise to some small degree, Angela is not going to get any grief from me on this one. Anyone who signs in with an id of "UnbannableOne" is just asking for it, and it's hard to muster up much sympathy or concern for the particular case, while at the same time, of course, we must all wave our hands in the general direction of caution about establishing unwise precedents that may cause trouble in the future.

Someone suggested that this character might have been taking advantage of a perceived "gap in authority" because we're now technically supposed to be using an arbitration process, but the details of that process aren't fully worked out yet.

Have no fear, that isn't a viable loophole. If someone is sufficiently annoying, I'll just step in to ban them, end of story. And I trust that my general stock of goodwill in the community, and my cautiousness about doing that sort of thing, will be sufficient to get nearly unanimous consensus that it's o.k. for me to do that.

I want to get out of that business, but of course, we shouldn't imagine that some hyper-legalistic approach to our governance procedures should cause any sort of management crisis during the transition.

---- This part is important! So don't stop reading yet!

It's hard to know for sure, and we should perhaps check the ip logs to find out, but it seems likely that this knucklehead is the same knucklehead who wrote the last entry on this page:

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worst_cases

The strategy of trolling outlined there is to provoke us into a law enforcement response as a way of discrediting our reputation as being open.

It's paranoid ranting in the exact style of 24/142, of course, but the specific strategy is to write "genuinely educational" stuff while being a jerk, so as to get banned, certainly sounds like UnbannableOne's actions.

Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude:

(a) UnbannableOne is likely just a reincarnation of 24/142 and thus a legitimate target for immediate ban and (b) Even if not, UnbannableOne is an open threat to bad behavior, and thus o.k. to ban as an "emergency" measure under existing policy.

I'd say that Angela made a judgment call here, and one that we might not all agree with, but well within the range of respectful discretion that we should give each other. So I hope that those who think that Angela made the wrong decision will just say "Hey, here is what I would have done differently" and *not* in *any way* fall into the vandal's game of trying to turn us against each other with accusations of Angela being a tyrant or whatever.

We're good, nice, people, trying to do something of global importance in a spirit of love and harmony. We bend over backwards to be kind even to people who spit in our faces. So, let's not get too upset if we have to ban people sometimes. Jerks are jerks, we do what we can to heal them, but some psychological problems are beyond our scope of operations.

--Jimbo

In hindsight, banning this user may have been a bad idea. He was asking for it, but I shouldn't have taken the bait.

For those who weren't following the block log at the time, I should point out that it was only this user's username that was blocked. His IP was unblocked, so he was free to create a new account with a more appropriate user name if he really wanted to contribute sensibly. However, the fact that the first thing he did after being blocked was to create the account " User:UnbannableTwo", I expect his intention is to upset people rather than to be part of Wikipedia.

Many people have expressed support for what I did, both on IRC and on the mailing list, but I know that policy wise the decision could be criticised. I agree with earlier comments that this should not be used to establish a precedent of sysops making blocks on user names. Hopefully in future that won't need to happen as the arbitration committee will be available to deal with users who are demonstrating troll-like behaviour and those who are trying to test the system, so the decision won't be left to individual judgement.

I apologise to those who feel I have overstepped my bounds on this one.

Angela.

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