[WikiEN-l] the elephant in the room

[Gwern Branwen]

On  0, Joe Szilagyi <szilagyi at gmail.com> scribbled:
> On 6/17/07, jayjg <jayjg99 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > But you continue to attack me.
>
> Jay, before your voting on my RFAR--where, I'll point out, there was not one
> singular finding of fact compared to any other RFAR that warranted my
> blocking (Fred blocked me directly for linking to ED on-wiki and then
> someone Oversighted my edits)--I never dealt with you on-wiki. I'm sorry you
> feel I'm attacking you. Like everyone else, I simply want a straight answer
> or two from you and others.
>
> Should all policies, rules, and enforcement of them apply evenly to all
> members? CIVIL, NPA, no proxies, etc.? If not... why not?
>
> Regards,
> Joe

As I recall, don't we already have a well-appreciated loophole (quite aside from IAR), the community ban? My understanding of the community ban was that it was when someone was indef blocked outside-of/unsupported-by any policy, but the ban stuck simply because the person who was blocked had made such a nuisance of themselves that no other administrator was willing to enforce policy and unblock them.

But really, I think the important issue here is one of active vs. passiveness:

I don't think anyone here would argue that it would be a bad thing if an admin who disagreed profoundly with our NOP policy simply never hunted down and blocked open proxies, and instead occupied their time closing AfDs and doing page moves and that sort of thing - so long as they didn't go around undoing blocks or whatever. Similarly, I don't think anyone would blame an admin who disagreed with our stringent fair use policy and refrained from deleting orphaned images etc. so long as that admin didn't also go around uploading needless fair use images.

But it's different if they actively work against the policy. As an editor, CW isn't really working against the policy, since she couldn't undo blocks or make new exit nodes; she apparently was just patient enough and reloaded until edits went through. But as an admin, she could semi-block the nodes if she wanted.

--
gwern
virus ISCS ISPR anarchy rogue mailbomb 888 Chelsea 1997 Whitewater MOD York
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