[WikiEN-l] Assume bad faith, for banned users.

[joshua.zelinsky at yale.edu]

Quoting William Pietri <william at scissor.com>:

> Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
>> If a banned user considers they are ready now to contribute in a way
>> that is not going to cause friction, they can appeal the ban to
>> ArbCom.
>>
>
>
> It seems like part of the problem here is a chicken-and-egg issue. It's
> hard for banned but possibly reformed people to prove that they have
> changed because they can't do anything on-wiki. And the cost of giving
> an umpteenth chance is generally outweighed by any potential benefit.
>
> Is there some sort of off-wiki work people could to do demonstrate good
> faith in a way that is little burden to us? For example, could we ask
> people to build an external web page with sources for 100 unsourced
> articles as a way of proving that they are serious and worthy of
> consideration for another chance?
>
> Currently, the only way people get unbanned is through pleading, which
> means we get a lot of pleading. I'd love to channel that energy into
> something more productive. Or at least something quieter.
>
> William

There's one obvious way- do good work on another Wikimedia project for a few
months. I've made this comment to a number of banned users, but so far 
none (to
my knowledge) has done it. If we can see that someone works out ok in another
Wikimedia project I'd be much more inclined to consider unbanning them. Now,
different projects have different goals and community types, so this wouldn't
work perfectly. For example if someone's issue was say repeated insisting on
certain types of original research be included in articles (such as with
Awbrey), then the user doing original reporting at Wikinews isn't the best
demonstration that they could work with us. So it has limits. But as a basic
rule of thumb, it might work (contrast for example Jason Gastrich who after
being banned from the English Wikipedia proceeded to try to spam meta and the
Spanish Wikipedia as well).