[Wikipedia-l] A related ban issue

[Andre Engels]

> What with the recent discussion of banning "problem" users, I thought I'd
> bring this up for discussion/re-discussion.
> 
> Our policy on banning people for vandalism is (as I interpret what I've
> read) that we restrict it to "repeated and sustained" non-useful alterations
> of articles.
> 
> However, it's September, the high school and college students are back with
> their free school accounts, and inevitably the amount of drive-by vandalism
> seems to be on the increase. Several of us constantly check new edits by
> unknown contributors, and even then, we're missing vandalism that only turns
> up later when paging through via "Random Page" or otherwise coming across an
> article. As the number of articles goes up, the chance of locating such
> vandalism goes down.
> 
> I've tried a few approaches to ameliorating this.   I regularly check "this
> user's contributions" for vandals, and even sometimes for unfamiliar IP's
> (*thank* you folks for adding that code feature!) I do keyword searches for
> common obscenities, et cetera.  (No, Cunctator, I don't remove them if
> they're obviously part of the article.)  And, of course, I haunt the "Recent
> Changes" page. But I think it's getting harder to keep up.
> 
> 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.

I would be against this. In the first place, you mention fresh students - what
if student #1 does something funny, leaves, student #2 takes the computer and
just happens to want to contribute to Wikipedia? It might be too rare an
occasion to take care of, but it's not impossible.

Secondly, I think it might well cost more work for us than it saves. MOST
acts of vandalism are single occurences. Most that are not are caught only
after already more than one has been made. Thus, blocking after one act of
vandalism will result in many blockings to avoid one act of vandalism. And
to block someone means that you will have to do a blocking, and later someone
has to do an unblocking. I think that that might actually cost more time than
it saves to have to clean up the second to fifth act of the same vandal also
when you could have blocked him directly.

Andre Engels