[WikiEN-l] unilateral bans of controversial users

[Delirium]

Erik Moeller wrote:

>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.
>  
>
I'm not sure I'd call it "vandalism".  He was adding an obscure site to 
the page that you did not think should be listed, and linking to the 
Wikipedia article on the site (which was listed on VfD) instead of to 
the site's URL (which may or may not have actually existed).  This is a 
poor edit that shouldn't be on the page, but not quite to the level of 
what I'd consider *vandalism* (especially since it later turned out that 
the site did in fact exist).  It may or may not be trolling, but I don't 
think it's vandalism.

I also disagree that protection wasn't an option.  Any contributor is 
supposed to be able to edit, say, [[Gdansk]], but that doesn't stop us 
from protecting it when necessary.  Sure, it's inconvenient when someone 
happens along that has information on Gdansk that we don't have, and 
they cannot edit because it's protected, but that's how it goes.  I 
don't see why this one page should be special in that regard, especially 
since, unlike [[Gdansk]], it doesn't even hold information that's part 
of the encyclopedia.

>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.
>  
>
On the copyright issue, I happen to agree with his interpretation, and 
it seems one or two other people might as well.  The issue is that if I 
create a GFDL work, and you make a derived work of it, you *must* 
license *all* your edits under the GFDL.  If you add a fair use image to 
which you do not own the copyright, your edit is not under the GFDL, so 
you are violating the GFDL's terms (and thus my copyright).  You might 
even add a fair use image that my company isn't allowed to redistribute, 
which would put me in the position of not being able to distribute a 
derived work of my own text!  Which is exactly what the GFDL was written 
to prevent.

See [[meta:Do fair use images violate the GFDL?]] for additional 
discussion on this point.

As for whether he's a troll, that you may have a point on.  I'm not 
sure, since I've only encountered him on Wikipedia once or twice, but 
I'm quite willing to believe that there are people here who are up to no 
good, and he may well be one of them.

>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.
>  
>
I guess I don't like that solution much.  In my experience, allegations 
of trolling are just as often false as they are true, and I think 
implementing some undeserved bans is more damaging than neglecting to 
implement some deserved bans.  They're both bad, but the former makes us 
enemies (who may become long-running persistent thorns in our side) and 
damages our reputation of "anyone can edit here and the admins aren't a 
power-wielding cabal".  That's not to say we shouldn't ban anyone, we 
should just avoid doing it a lot, and make sure that we only do it when 
really necessary.

FWIW, I also think we should go a little easier on banning anonymous 
users than has been done lately.  Certainly if somebody vandalizes a 
bunch of pages they should be banned, but I don't think it's necessary 
to ban an IP that's had two minor vandalism edits, especially if they're 
the sort that might be unintentional (just adding "hi" or something, 
often done by newbies to test if you really can just edit any page, as 
advertised).  We can end up discouraging potential contributors with 
stuff like that, and the downside of having to revert a few more edits 
isn't really a big one (it's pretty easy to revert, after all).  I 
personally tend only to ban users who insist on vandalizing the same 
page, or have vandalized somewhere more in the range of 8-10 pages; the 
rest usually either turn into good users or give up and leave before 
banning them is necessary.

-Mark