[Wikipedia-l] Fucking Asshole

Tue Nov 12 03:35:52 UTC 2002

Ed Poor wrote:

>What would happen if a signed-in user started writing the following all over
>Wikipedia? How would we deal with it? (Purely a hypothetical case, I assure
>you ;-)

>"I hate everybody and everything. I will destroy Wikipedia, and you can't stop
>me. Your own stupid rules forbid it, BWAH HA HA HA!"

That's clearly vandalism, of a fairly ordinary sort,
so the user should be banned; there's no doubt there.
The only problem is that, due to a technical feature
(that you can't find out the user's IP number
without looking directly into the database),
most administrators don't have the power to ban the user.
(We all have the authority, however; we all may ban vandals.)

I suppose that the administrators might take a closer look
and realise that there were mitigating circumstances,
such as we have here, where the vandal is a trusted user
(in fact an administrator himself) that we know will clean his mess up,
and was simply trying to make a point, however "poor"ly (as he later admits).
With clear guidelines and policies about how banning works, however,
we might be in a situation where we're not allowed to make an exception.
*That*'s an important point.

-- Toby