[WikiEN-l] Brandt unblocked by Jimbo - community support?

[Andrew Gray]

On 19/04/07, Jeff Raymond <jeff.raymond at internationalhouseofbacon.com> wrote:

> He went to ArbCOm to get unblocked.  ArbCom declined the case, some citing
> that it was a de facto community ban since no one had the stones to
> reverse it.  Someone brought it up at the Community Noticeboard, where the
> block was overwhelmingly endorsed.  I was in the minority on that.  Thus,
> the block was endorsed as a legitimate community ban.
>
> Now that doesn't matter.

But the point people have been trying to make here is that that's not
how a community ban works. A community ban isn't "a block by decision
of the community"; it's "a block the community doesn't oppose".
Originally, a community ban was just a user who was so annoying no-one
could care enough to unblock them; later, it became a bit more common
for people to say "look, I'm thinking of blocking X indefinitely as a
community ban - will anyone object to this?" just to test the waters.
But the idea remained -

----

There have been situations where a user has exhausted the community's
patience to the point where he or she finds themselves indefinitely
blocked by an administrator . . . and no one is willing to unblock
them. A user banned under these circumstances is considered to have
been "banned by the Wikipedia community."

----

quoth the blocking policy. It's pretty implicit from that that if
someone is willing to unblock you, you're no longer community-banned.

> or even years.  These things matter, and, frankly, if it were someone who
> isn't Jimbo who did the unblocking, they'd likely have been trotted in
> front of ArbCom by now.

And I have confidence that the arbcom would take one look at that
trotting and say "no, this is silly, he may have done a very idiotic
thing but he did it legitimately". We've had this before with
particularly contentious users, unblocked after private mentoring
attempts to resolve their particular objectionableness... they don't
usually work well, but we do try, and I don't recall any lynchings of
would-be mentors before.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk