[Wikipedia-l] A related ban issue -- IP probation

[Daniel Mayer]

On Saturday 07 September 2002 07:51 pm, April wrote:
> I would like to suggest we add "obviously malicious vandalism" to reasons
> for an immediate (if temporary) IP ban: a single "Ths page is stupid"
> should be, in my opinion, enough to ban the address. This saves us from
> having to spend time on the next five instances of vandalism from that
> contributor, which could be better spent searching for other graffiti or
> *gasp* actually adding content.

Hum, you just made me realize that the closest thing I'm aware of that is a 
policy on when to lable something as vandalism is at:
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/VANDALISM_IN_PROGRESS

Which states in part: "However, please do not lable isolated instances of 
text deletions, replacements or odd additions as VANDALISM unless they are 
overtly lewd or offensive." and continues; "More often than not, this is just 
a visitor to the site experimenting with how to use it -- labeling them as a 
VANDAL is a sure way of ensuring they will not become contributors."

I would say that abusive cursing or displaying the oh so clever image at 
www.goatse.cx would be an objective case of "overtly lewd or offensive" but 
the gray area starts with things like; "This is so gay", or "this is stupid" 
added to or replacing articles.  I generally don't consider these non-overtly 
lewd statements worthy of a ban (block is a better word) unless there is a 
systematic posting of these idiotic statements on several pages.

As the previous most active vandal stalker, it is my experience that IPs who 
are responsible for these single "gray area" acts do their thing and just 
leave never to return. In fact for a few months I was tracking these types of 
isolated "gray area" additions/replacements and found the majority of them to 
/remain/ isolated -- the IPs didn't return in the majority of cases (and some 
that did return actually contributed positively to articles). However, most 
of the idiots that did return came back with slightly different IPs -- thus a 
block would have been useless anyway.

Instead of blocking I would much prefer an IP watchlist -- whereby a warned 
IP is watched for a specified period (perhaps by bolding their IP address in 
Recent Changes and having a log of IPs on probation). This is in the spirit 
of the page I created at: 
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IP_probation_watchlist

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)