[OSM-talk] Please ban Xxzme in wiki

[Harry Wood]

I have now written some justification for the ban, as I see it, on his talk page:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User_talk:Xxzme#Blocked_for_3_months

My plan was to draw together various threads on his talk page and then write something like this immediately before banning him. I was in the process of doing this, slowly. But Firefishy beat me to it and banned him, largely due to calls on this mailing list I guess.

I felt like some kind of evidence building was needed in this case, because (as I described at the link above) Xxzme has actually tempered his rudeness somewhat. The justification for the ban is not clearly pinned to one particular edit or outburst. It's more a case of sheer quantity of dubious edits he has been making. I would say that a user's talk page is a great place to draw together threads which build up the picture and help us to conclude that the user should be banned in a case like this. As it was, we had several different people spending a long time chasing around trying to reason with Xxzme and then clearing up after his mess. If more people linked to problems off this user's talk page, that might have been a smarter way to organise ourselves. I might have been more confident to ban him a few weeks earlier without needing to investigate so much myself.

Not that a wiki discussion would ever carry the gravitas of a mailing list discussion of course :-)

This is all very unusual. Actual wiki contributors (ignoring spammers) have only been banned in a handful of cases over the years. On the one hand this means it's worth spending a bit of time considering and justifying. On the other hand it's nice that we haven't had to get too heavy on process over the years. 

Harry


----- Original Message -----
From: Richard Fairhurst <richard at systemed.net>
To: talk at openstreetmap.org
Cc: 
Sent: Monday, 11 May 2015, 10:08
Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] Please ban Xxzme in wiki

Andy Mabbett wrote:
> In the absence of blatant vandalism or base abuse, I would 
> have expected, first, a recent, clear and unequivocal warning on 
> the user's talk page

No. Please remember that the primary means of discussion and consensus in
OSM is mailing lists, even when the subject is the wiki, and even though the
mailing lists suck. There is no precedent for obtaining consensus on
community decisions via wiki talk pages.

Talk pages might be how it's done in Wikipedia, but we're not Wikipedia.

Richard





--
View this message in context: http://gis.19327.n5.nabble.com/Please-ban-Xxzme-in-wiki-tp5843984p5844138.html
Sent from the General Discussion mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

_______________________________________________
talk mailing list
talk at openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk