[WikiEN-l] unilateral bans of controversial users

[Erik Moeller]

Delirium-
> 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

I don't care about his so-called "fork". I don't care about his website,  
which has the trollish name "slashdotsucks.com". I have no problem with it  
being listed, as it evidently uses our software. At the time of his  
listing, however, the page on Wikipedia was already deleted, so all there  
was in the list was a red link "McFly". He refused to provide a URL in  
spite of being asked to do so several times in the edit comments. He  
reverted other people's removal of the site. And he added it to the  
official list of "Wikimedia projects" once.

At this point I asked him calmly to stop adding a site without providing  
any evidence for its existence, as information in Wikipedia needs to be  
verifiable and helpful to the reader. His reply:

        "No."

He continued to add his site to the list, so I decided to ban him.  
Evidence for its existence was provided later (a URL added by Tim  
Starling); at that point I immediately unbanned Anthony.

I consider my actions in this matter absolutely justifiable, and I find it  
extremely silly to talk about such a triviality. Anthony plainly only used  
the page for trolling purposes, and I see no reason why we should tolerate  
that kind of crap.

> I also disagree that protection wasn't an option.  Any contributor is
> supposed to be able to edit, say, [[Gdansk]]

That's not quite the same. It's hard enough to get people to list their  
sites on the official list at all. The last thing we need on that page is  
an edit war and a protection notice. If it was at least an edit war about  
something that reasonable people can disagree on -- but his edits were  
pure vandalism, plain and simple.

Regards,

Erik