Tony Sidaway wrote:
A purported "community ban" has been
asserted by some editors, but
community bans only operate insofar as no administrator is prepared to
unblock, after contemplating the matter, the banned editor. Jimbo has
been in discussion with Daniel Brandt and several other administrators
have co-operated on the technical side of unblocking Brandt, which
turned out to be quite difficult, so no community ban applies at this
time.
The cooperation may come not from a desire to see him unblocked (which few
people expressed during the discussion), but more to the typical "What
Jimbo says, goes" mentality of way too many Wikipedians. I would not use
their compliance in helping Jimbo unblock properly as any sort of actual
approval of his actions outside of "Jimbo did it, thus it's good."
The community ban you speak of came *before* the massive discussion at the
community noticeboard - no one dared unblock him, thus it was a de facto
community ban. Once ArbCom declined the matter (still a mistake, IMO),
the discussion to unblock him occurred and was soundly and decisively
rejected.
I'm willing to give Jimbo the benefit of the doubt that he may not have
been aware of the discussion, but if he was and did it anyway, that's
really, really troublesome. There's certainly nothing to indicate that he
intended to invalidate the consensually-approved ban, and he's shown some
approval (perhaps not explicit, I can't be certain at this point) of
community-based measures for problem users.
-Jeff
--
If you can read this, I'm not at home.