Anthere-
Another good point in soft banning is that everyone can participate (as Tannin pointed out, I think what he did was proposing people to join the reversion team, am I right ?).
Wikipedia is not meant to be a group experience, it is meant to be an encyclopedia. If you itch to help clean up the mess Michael creates, drop a message to this list and apply for sysop status which as we both know, would be immediately granted. However, blanking pages only creates additional work, since these blanked pages have to be later pruned manually, whereas it is fairly quick and easy to go through Michael's contributions list and just revert/delete everything.
That is good to strenghtening a community.
No, in this case I'm afraid it might accomplish the exact opposite, burdening sysops with unnecessary work for no reason.
Please, would you explain which would be the best form to your opinion ?
I do think that in cases where a banned user is known to sometimes produce acceptable work, we should try to reintroduce them into the community (death threats are pretty much equivalent to burning down your bridges, though). So in cases of petty vandalism or wikiquette violations I find it acceptable to let the "good edits" remain. I think none of us would want all of Lir's pages to be deleted simply because they were written by Adam under one of his nyms.
But users like Michael are a different matter. Here the content is actually a threat in itself, because it is so ridden with errors, but looks like it has been written in good faith by an honest contributor. Someone who comes across such a page would not expect it to be full of errors, and would blame these errors on *us* if they locate them. "So you know this was a user who produced such pages only? So why didn't you ban him and delete everything he writes?"
I know, you are talking about blanking. But not only because of the questionable "group experience", but also because you want to restore the "good edits". I think this is a bad idea, because users not familiar with Michael's "work" could easily mistake bad edits for good ones, and restore them out of good faith. "If all the edits are bad, why didn't you just delete them instead of blanking them" would be the likely reply if a sysop then challenged that user. What should he respond? "It looked like a good idea at the time" ?
In other words, the mass blanking is likely to generate more Michael- related controversy and more Michael-related sysop work for no good reason.
I think blank pages do not need to be corrected for errors. Besides, my comment here was clearly not about content errors. You were saying that I would be responsible for degradation of relationships between sysops and non sysops. I stronly trust the majority of sysops. You included, even if I disagree with you here. However, my survival instinct forbid me to trust everyone just because I am said I must trust them.
Nobody's lives are at stake here. What is at stake, however, is the accuracy of our encyclopedia. This is not endangered by blank pages per se, but by those blank pages that are restored in good faith, in spite of the fact that they are written by a known abuser and vandal. It would be irresponsible by sysops towards non-sysops to allow this to happen -- non- sysops have a right to expect that sysops do what they were assigned to do, keep the vandals out. The only cases where blanking makes sense are pages which contain offensive messages, but can not be deleted by the person viewing them.
Regards,
Erik