On Sat, 2002-09-07 at 10:36, Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen wrote:
- The IP banning is more a signal than an actual enforcement, and we've been
lucky that these people seem to have accepted that signal.
Believe me, IP bans will only last so long. The "wiki miracle" could easily collapse - just looke at some of the IRC networks.
This is an important point that needs to be addressed. There *is no effective way* to ban someone from wikipedia, given the way it currently runs. Changing your IP address is trivial, happens all the time to most users, and can be done manually even for those on a fixed link (just use any of the hundreds of available web proxies). The only way to have a remotely effective ban system would be with a much stricter login system, and even that is dubious because of authentication (the standard way to deal with login systems is to tie login to email address, but then it's hardly difficult to obtain as many email addresses as you like). So unless we sign up for Micro$oft Passport or something of the sort (*watches ball of dust fly across deserted marketplace*), we *can't* ban any sufficiently determined troll / vandal / kook from Wikipedia. And trying to do so when it's not effective could just make the problem worse.
A simple question to those who demand Helga should be banned...how? What do we ban? Her username? She posts without one. Her IP address? It changes the next time her internet connection drops, almost certainly. Her entire domain? This catches a bunch of innocent potential Wikipedia contributors, and she can merely relay a connection through a proxy, by which time she's really annoyed with the continual attempts to ban (my guess is that "ban" in the minds of some bannees would become "censor") her and ever more determined to post her opinions. This issue needs to be thought out more...