Tim-
Wikipedia will forever be haunted by problems such as
these, since, at
Anthere's request, I turned username blocking off by default. I'll turn
it on at meta. Are there any other wikis you want it enabled at, while
I'm at it? How about simple, wikibooks and wiktionary?
I sympathize with Anthere's concerns. If there are no clear policies on
banning in one language, sysops might feel encouraged to ban signed in
contributors for non-vandalism. This would clearly be problematic and
difficult to resolve from outside.
However, I think the right thing to do is to inform all Wikipedias about
this pending change, and to set a clear policy on banning that is valid
across all Wikipedias. Having inconsistent configurations is a very bad
thing for a multitude of reasons.
To this end, I think it is absolutely necessary to merge the wikipedia-l
and intwiki-l mailing lists. intwiki-l is effectively a ghetto for the
non-English lists, and people from the non-English wikis complain that
they haven't heard about policy decisions on wikipedia-l. There's really
no good reason to have two different lists here.
Regards,
Erik