[WikiEN-l] unilateral bans of controversial users

[Erik Moeller]

Jimmy-
> I know nothing about what was going on with Anthony Del Pierro and
> Eloquence.

I banned Anthony after he repeatedly vandalized the same page, even though  
I had told him to stop. I immediately unbanned him after the matter was  
resolved. I am 100% positive that this was a perfectly appropriate action  
to take, with arbitration committee or without, and is backed up by  
precedent (BuddhaInside, RK etc.). Protection was not an option, because  
the page in question, a list of sites using our MediaWiki software, is  
supposed to be openly editable at any time so that sitemasters can add  
their site to the list.

That being said, it would have been preferable to use a per-page ban in  
this case, but that feature is not yet available.

As others have also pointed out, Anthony has a long history of trolling  
behavior. E.g. Maximus Rex wrote: "Anthony has frequently engaged in  
troll-like behavior (examples include inserting Bill Gates' social  
security number in the opening sentence of his article (repeatedly),  
nominating articles for deletion that he admits he does not believe should  
be deleted (perhaps to prove some sort of point?), and making outrageous  
claims about copyright (for example at Al Gore he removed a sentence he  
wrote under the guise that he owned the copyright to that sentence...),  
and others)." In conversations with me on IRC, Anthony has also defended  
trolling on other websites like Kuro5hin and Slashdot.

One thing I have always been missing in the Wikipedia community is trust.   
There's nothing wrong with some healthy paranoia regarding all forms of  
authority. But I'd appreciate a little more awareness of the very real  
threat that persistent and annoying trolls represent to the coherence and  
productivity of our community. And no, these people do not have a "right"  
to test our defenses.

Trolls sometimes pretend to be working against "groupthink", but in  
reality their only goal is to disrupt things, to see how much damage they  
can do. Trying to deliberately sabotage the construction of a free  
encyclopedia takes a special, even more disgusting type of troll.

Trolling will often be very hard to prove in practice. My proposed  
solution is to simply give admins some leeway in enforcing the rules -- we  
have over 100 admins who can clean up after each other if necessary.  
Trolls should be treated like normal users, only that I find it fair to be  
especially watchful about whether they are breaking any rules, and more  
swift in enforcing them.

Of course I'd love to see the arbitration committee be quick in making  
decisions in such cases, but work by committee is rarely fast or  
efficient.

Regards,

Erik